Marseille: The Cradle of White Corded Quilting

It seems incongruous to associate the fastidiously confected, snowy white, luxury textiles worked in BRODERIE DE MARSEILLE (corded needlework) with the raucous Mediterranean seaport from which this style of quilting takes its name. Yet the alliance is correct, for Marseilles is both the cradle of these exquisite confeetions and the point of their dispersal.---From the Introduction

Marseille: The Cradle of White Corded Quilting, which accompanies an exhibition on the same topic, traces the origins and the commercial development of needlework called broderie de Marseille. These supple, all-white corded and quilted furnishings---from bedcovers to quilted bodiees and capsgrew out of the thriving textile trade centered on France's Mediterranean port of Marseilles. During the seventeenth century, the region's interpretation of quilted needlework became so treasured that it seduced markets throughout Europe and its farflung colonies.

Broderie de Marseille is a form of three-dimensional textile sculpture using plain white cloth and white cotton cording, deftly manipulated with needle and thread to reveal patterns highlighted by the resulting play of light and shadow on the textile surface. Skillful execution of broderie de Marseille resulted in delicate, refined work that graced the homes and figures of aristocrats and launched an international passion for all-white corded needlework. The quilted works were filled with imagery expressing contemporary cultural values, such as folk legends (Tristan), heraldic devices and royal monograms (on bedcovers), and floral wreaths and fruits symbolizing good fortune and fertility (on wedding quilts). Contemporary versions, today often referred to commercially as "matelasse," are machine made and thus lack the intimate connections to the work represented by the confections of the original needleworkers---almost all of them presumably women.

The author of Marseille, Kathryn Berenson, has exhaustively researched this fascinating story through a broad range of historical records, including household inventories, letters, commercial documents, and literary references. As Berenson muses in the richly illustrated monograph, referring to the two thousand-year-old history of textile trade and production in Marseilles. "The Current revival makes one wonder if the extraordinary properties of light along the Mediterranean coast---brilliant sunshine refracted in the prism of an azure sea---encouraged such magnificent textile sculpture."

Kathryn Berenson is a world-renowned authority on French textiles and the author of Quilts of Provence: The Art and Craft of French Quiltmaking, the definitive book on the subject. In addition to writing this monograph, she served as guest curator of the accompanying exhibition. Marseille: White Corded Quilting, at the International Quilt Study Center & Museum, where she is an associate fellow. Berenson's research on French textile history has been published through museums in Italy, the United Kingdom, and France as well as in the United States. The author, a former print and broadcast journalist in the United States, lives in Paris, where she continues her study of historic textiles.

The International, Quilt Study Center & Museum at the University of Nebraska---Lincoln, founded in 1997, is dedicated to collecting, preserving, studying, exhibiting, and promoting the discovery of quilts and quiltmaking traditions from many cultures, countries, and times. The IQSC has one of the largest institutional collections of French quilts, spanning the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, including about sixty pieces acquired from the personal collection of Kathryn Berenson. Many works from this collection are illustrated in this monograph and the exhibition Marseille: White Corded Quilting, which marks the first major exhibition in the world to display a French needlework tradition that was adopted and adapted in Europe and its colonies.