Decorating the living room with floral cottons

Up until the nineteenth century, having textiles, and to a large extent multicolored textiles, was a sign of great luxury. Textiles were not only used for clothes, but also for interior decorations. The Industrial Revolution came about within the textile industry, with textile factories emerging like mushrooms, first in England and then in Belgium. A significant part of this industry was based on the machine weaving of cotton. This was grown and cultivated by enslaved workers and later by coolies (unskilled contract workers who performed heavy labor) in the United States and South America. In Europe, the cotton was subsequently spun and woven, and later in the nineteenth century machine-printed.

This industrialization of cotton weaving and cotton printing drastically democratized the prices of textiles and printed textiles for the economic middle class in Europe. With the knowledge developed to produce printed textiles on a large scale, an infinite amount of possibilities arose to reproduce the previously expensive woven silk fabrics or Indian chintzes in Europe. The democratization of prices meant that from then on, homes of the social and economic middle class could also literally be 'dressed up'. Piano rugs and curtains are a few of the examples mentioned on the advertising banner. The fact that printed textiles began to increasingly influence the interior of Dutch and European homes is visible, for example, in the depiction of a typical Dutch bedstead (fig. 1). Until the beginning of the twentieth century, these bedsteads were ubiquitous in Dutch farms and other middle-class homes.

The fact that printed cotton even became part of the decoration shows how natural it was to give color and life to an interior by means of these cotton fabrics manufactured in the Netherlands. The Dutch cotton printing companies did not only focus on the Dutch sales market. Their cotton prints were, for example, also used to imitate Indonesian batik motifs, and then export them to what is now Indonesia. These 'exotic' motifs also influenced the interior of various Dutch homes. Fig. 2 shows how the left wall of a Dutch living room is wallpapered or covered with a printed cloth, the motif of which is based on a batik motif. We will discuss this further on in this story.