A Dissertation on the Dyeing Processes at the Royal Manufactory

A publishing project entitled « A Dissertation on the Dyeing Process » (from the 18th century) was launched at the end of 2007 and concerns the royal "manufactory" at Bize-Minervois. This building, also known as the Logis Colbert, founded in the heart of the old village and sited on the banks of the Cesse, nowadays contains holiday accommodation.

A Dissertation on the Dyeing Process : this is a document of the very rarest kind. It consists of a bilingual critique of the manuscript "Dissertation on the Dyeing Process". "A dissertation on the ingredients that one uses, where one finds them in their natural state - their qualities, their properties their prices and where to obtain them, the general method of dyeing to get colours of the right tint, instructions for boiling out the colours that have dyed badly and a manual of annotations, colouring processes in particular and observations on the same."

It consists of a collection of ingredients and processes used in dyeing woollen cloth, containing a large number of samples of fine dyed woollen cloth, written by an 18th century dyer from the Languedoc. It has been kept safe by the Granel de Solignac family at Montpellier, who have given their agreement to the release of this previously unpublished document.

It is anonymous and undated but there are indications in the text that allow us to place the time of its writing in the second half of the 18th century, by someone closely involved in the management of the Royal Manufactory at Bize-Minervois.

The manuscript ends on the page numbered 96 but, in the only known copy that remains, pages 13-32 are missing. There are cloth samples on 46 of the pages; the number of samples stuck to a single page ranges from just one up to nine different samples; the total number of samples is as high as 176.

This booklet of recipes is of exceptional historic interest: there exist in the world very few documents that set out both a series of recipes for dyes made of natural pigments - the only source of dyes until the second half of the nineteenth century - and, by way of illustration in the case of almost every recipe, a sample of cloth dyed using the process described.

Thus are brought together all the elements for identifying the ingredients and processes needed to obtain a very long list of colours and shades identified by colour names that are often poetic or graphic (doe's belly, carmelite, linen grey, rat-on-hazelnut, plum-on-truffle etc) They are in fact standardised trade names to which references are found from the Middle Ages onwards in technical literature, the wardrobe inventories of kings and noble lords both secular and ecclesiastical, epic poems etc. For the colourists/dyers these names corresponded to precise colours and shades but, without a reference document like the one under consideration, there was no way to identify them exactly.

From now on this will be possible because a colourimetric analysis of all the samples has been carried out and their values, expressed in the Ciclab system, will be published as an annexe to this critical edition of the manuscript.

This rarest of documents allows us to take full account of the high degree of technical development in dyeing at a time when modern chemistry and innovative technical research were emerging in the western Languedoc. This region of France was among the most economically active thanks to the strength of its textile industry concentrated on export throughout the Mediterranean region but also to Asia and South America. This document is interesting for another reason: it gives us previously unpublished material on the relative performances of French and English dye works. These were in keen competition in so far as the beauty and consistency of colours in woollen cloth were key elements for success in markets abroad. This document allows us to show thus what distinguished shades like "doeskin" and "gunpowder" produced in France from "English doeskin" and "English gunpowder".

Last Updated (Friday, 21 October 2011 10:54)