Vintage Silk Woven/Embroidered Framed Art - Stevengraph?

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Vintage Silk Woven/Embroidered Framed Art - Stevengraph? A charming woven silk piece of textile art depicting a cat & fowl … Read more Vintage Silk Woven/Embroidered Framed Art - Stevengraph? A charming woven silk piece of textile art depicting a cat & fowl (of some sort) fighting over food on a plate while a clever fowl (of some sort) sneaks the food out during the art . . . labelled "A bone of contention well removed.".

Framed w/ teal/green velvet backing. Frame measures 7" wide x 8.25" tall. The silk piece measures approximately 3.5" x 5"

Generically, "Stevengraphs" are intricate machine-woven silk textile art pieces. Per Harvard Magazine, "The story of these silk portraits begins in Coventry, a city in central England. By 1860, the weaving of ribbons had dominated Coventry’s economy for 150 years. But a free-trade agreement signed between England and France that year overturned protectionist silk regulations, and soon cheap ribbons from abroad decimated Coventry’s industry.

Nonetheless, Thomas Stevens was determined to keep his business afloat. With traditional ribbon-weaving no longer profitable, he experimented with an early form of automated weaving: the Jacquard loom. Guided by a design drawn on gridded paper, a loom operator punched holes in thousands of paper cards on a machine akin to a simplified piano. Those punched cards then guided the loom, telling it what type of stitch to make in which color. Modifying existing Jacquard looms allowed Stevens to incorporate up to 10 colors and create complex photorealistic weavings dubbed “Stevengraphs”. See less