In yesterday's post we mentioned Juneteenth – 19th June, a holiday commemorating the end of slavery in America – in connection with artworks that can inspire and prompt us to question history. Let's continue the thread, by looking back at the link between slavery, textiles and dyes.
We can start our exploration from the painting "Cotton Pickers" (1876) by Winslow Homer. His paintings were usually characterised by realism as the artist depicted the life of rural African Americans.
"Cotton Pickers" presents two female field laborers portrayed with respect, this is clear from the low vantage point from which the figures are depicted. The painting is also aspirational as the figure on the right gazes into the distance, almost hinting at the future. Homer was the first American who painted African Americans with sympathy and positivity: the two figures in this painting are not fatigued but they stand erect with strong bodies against the sky. The one looking in the distance wears a red shirt that makes us wonder if that garment was made with Turkey Red dye.
We have seen in a previous post how this colour was made from the root of the Rubia tinctorum ("dyer's madder") plant following a complex process that included several steps, from saturating the fabric in rancid olive oil and sheep dung to mordanting the cloth or yarn with alum, then dyeing the cloth in vats containing madder extract and bullock's blood and cleaning and brightening the cloth by boiling it in a solution of tin chloride. The dye was first employed in Holland and France and, arond the 1780s, arrived in Manchester and Glasgow.
Unfortunately, Turkey Red also had connections with the transatlantic slave trade: this bright shade was very resistant and slow to fade, it was therefore favoured for clothes and accessories in hotter climates such as the British colonies, as Rebecca Quinton, Research Manager at Glasgow Museums' collections, highlights in a research.
Initially only cotton yarn could be dyed using this process, which was then woven to create striped and checked gingham cloths, but in the early 1800s it became possible to dye woven cloth rather than just the yarn and make large handkerchiefs or bandannas usually worn tied around the head or neck (like the one illustrating this post in white plain weave cotton printed in Turkey Red).
Scottish businessman Henry Monteith started producing bandannas in 1802; by 1823 his company produced 224 every 10 minutes and this style of handkerchief was initially known as Monteiths.
Many early Turkey Red textiles were exported from Greenock and Port Glasgow to north America and the West Indies. Here they were worn by enslaved men, women and children, and we have evidence of this trend in the paintings portraying West Indian plantations and showing an idealized life that didn't really exist, by the Italian artist Agostino Brunias who travelled to Dominica in 1770.
Like many industries developing in and around Glasgow in the 1800s the money behind these Turkey Red companies came from the profits made from Scottish-run plantations in the Caribbean or from Glasgow-based merchants involved in the transatlantic trade of tobacco and sugar.
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