Dress fabric

By the mid-eighteenth century, wood-block printing on cotton and linen textiles had developed to a high standard, even though the home market was affected by legislation protecting the silk and wool industries. The dyeing techniques used to produce the strong fast colours on imported Indian chintzes which had dazzled European customers in the seventeenth century had been mastered, and colour ranges were developed further with the introduction of 'pencilling' of indigo in the 1730s, and 'china blue' by the early 1740s. A commentator on the state of British textile arts in 1756 wrote : "chintz…can imitate the richest silk brocades, with a great variety of beautiful colours".

This length of block-printed cotton dress fabric is typical in its design and colouring of English production at the end of the 18th century.