Decorators have long relied on Toile de Jouy to bring charm and whimsy to rooms. The quintessentially 18th-century French textile, with its bucolic motifs — piping shepherds, coy milkmaids or ivy-strewn ruins — printed in soft blues or reds on a white cotton, was a favourite of Marie Antoinette’s.
That is the traditional version of Toile de Jouy. Now picture a different one, with drinkers on park benches, a gunpoint hold-up in the shadow of a Modernist tower block, or a rarely visited Charles Rennie Mackintosh church. This is the work of Glasgow textiles duo Timorous Beasties, whose grittier take on a Gallic perennial is the subject of a new show at the Musée de La Toile de Jouy, near Paris.
Toile-printed lampshades, fabrics, wallpapers, furniture and even mirrors invite you to inspect the details. Draw close and you might spot a pair of goths with coffin-shaped backpacks. Surely a first for Toile de Jouy?
“We like the idea of an upper-middle-class fabric being used to explore the darker underbelly of modern society. We’ve always had a dislike of the twee — and saccharine,” says Paul Simmons, who co-founded Timorous Beasties (the curious name lifted from a line of poetry by Sir Robert Burns) with fellow Glasgow School of Art student Alistair McAuley in 1990.
Their designs also grew out of a dissatisfaction with mass-market production. “At the time, manufacturing processes were so expensive that manufacturers relied on archival prints or slapdash new ones. I remember finding a swatch book of 1980s toiles: they were so badly drawn, with no connection to the originals,” says Simmons, chatting to me via Zoom from their large but “draughty” HQ, set in an old industrial building. “Because we’re influenced by things we don’t like we felt we could do better.”
Their first “Glasgow” toile, launched 20 years ago, captures the realities of the city’s urban poverty in unstinting detail — drug users, sex workers and rough sleepers — alongside new buildings such as Norman Foster’s Armadillo.
“We depicted the city we were living in — and experiencing then. We never intended it to be commercial,” says McAuley. But it was a surprise hit (although one couple decorating their offspring’s nursery sent it back when they realised the content was not entirely suitable) — and has just been relaunched. Other cites followed — Edinburgh, New York, London — with depictions of the urban minutiae, based on closely observed sketches. As Simmons puts it: “You can tell a lot about a city from its bins.”
Nature, too, in the world of the “Beasties” is never idealised. Cockroaches are enmeshed in spider’s webs; red-eyed birds have predatory beaks. “We’d never just draw a pretty leaf. Ours are always being munched on by caterpillars,” says Simmons. “It’s far more interesting to look at. It’s a Darwinian struggle out there. Nature is not always nice.”
It might be tempting to dismiss the designs as merely “subversive” — but that is to miss the point. Besides, “we’re in an industry where it’s easy to shock . . . Our designs are born out of a love of toile — and its history,” says Simmons.
Although most of us associate toile with bucolic, Arcadian themes — popularised by contemporary, mass-produced versions — earlier prints often told different, darker stories of contemporary events such as battles and invasions, or moralising tales of fallen women left destitute. “For a largely illiterate population, it was a sort of comic strip,” says Simmons. (The antique textiles dealer Katharine Pole has also found an abolitionist toile, dating from the 1830s, depicting the slave trade).
The techniques the duo uses also reference the past. Despite their prolific output (Timorous Beastie prints adorn the Supreme Court and Scotland’s Royal Conservatoire), craft is an important part of what they do. Simmons likes to joke that he learnt about the complexity of repeat patterns from designs by “the three Williams — Morris, Burges and de Morgan”. Their toiles are still produced in-house using old-fashioned silkscreens, for depth, with roller and digital printing done at British factories.
For the show, Simmons and McAuley also referenced toiles in the museum, which houses the archive of the Oberkampf factory. Christophe-Philippe Oberkampf, born in 1738, was a German who opened his factory in the hamlet of Jouy-en-Josas in 1759. It was next to a river, where the linens could be washed and bleached. His timing was spot on. Laws prohibiting the trade of printed cotton (to protect the silk and wool industries) had been lifted that year.
“Toile — for dresses and in interiors — was extremely fashionable among the aristocracy and upper classes,” says Charlotte Du Vivier Lebrun, the museum’s director. The proximity to Versailles also proved useful. Marie Antoinette bedecked a suite of private rooms (restored last year) with an extravagantly colourful pineapple print.
But Oberkampf moved with the times. “After the revolution he removed all references to Louis XVI,” says Du Vivier Lebrun. Napoleon, inspecting the factory in 1806 ,was so impressed that he awarded him the Légion d’honneur.
The earliest toiles were printed from woodblocks, a technique which originated in India for chintzes. Production stepped up in the late 18th century with the introduction of engraved copper plates that were flexible enough to be attached to cylindrical drums (the exacting process is depicted in a toile at the Metropolitan Museum in New York).
Jean-Baptiste Huet and Jean Pillement, leading artists of the day, were commissioned to produce designs. Interestingly, of the 30,000 pieces in the archive only 100 depict conventional Arcadian scenes. The rest — Napoleon setting foot in Egypt, scenes from Robinson Crusoe (Le Petit Robinson), intrepid balloonists adrift or voguish chinoiserie — met the demand for topical scenes.
Exploring the archive, Simmons and McAuley discovered prints based on Jean de La Fontaine’s Fables. Their version of the 17th-century bestseller has the beauty of the original but closer scrutiny reveals disquieting details. Seagulls hover poised to snatch chips from a bag. One man is so absorbed in a phone conversation that he does not realise he is being eaten — by a snail. A cautionary tale indeed.
‘Toile Tales’ is at the Musée de la Toile de Jouy until May 19; museedelatoiledejouy.fr
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