This woven silk portrait of the inventor was based on a painting by Claude Bonnefond (1796–1860) commissioned by the city of Lyon in 1831. The Lyon manufacturer Didier, Petit et Cie ordered the silk version from weaver Michel-Marie Carquillat, a specialist in this kind of work. Producing the image required 24,000 punched cards. Each card had over 1,000 hole positions. "The delicate shading, crafted shadows and fine resolution of the Jacquard portrait challenged existing notions that machines were incapable of subtlety. Gradations of shading were surely a matter of artistic taste rather than the province of machinery, and the portrait blurred the clear lines between industrial production and the arts."
The Jacquard loom ties together two of Manchester's most important historic industries: textile manufacturing and computing. Read on to find out how it both revolutionised the production of patterned cloth and also inspired the development of early computing.
The ancient craft of weaving, originating in the Neolithic era, can be traced back almost 12,000 years. It began as a simple process where early humans intertwined branches and twigs to construct shelters that protected them from the weather. The primary tool, known as the loom, was initially a basic frame made from branches. The loom held warp yarns in place, which were stretched taut, while filling yarns were manually woven through them.
Punchcard Each thread is represented by a specific dot location on each card. Each hole controls the lifting of the hook which carries and guides the warp thread so that the weft will either lie above or below it. The lace's basic pattern (one repetition) is as long as the punchcard chain
Publisher Information: 1839.
Jacquard, Joseph Marie (1752-1834). Portrait in silk of Joseph-Marie Jacquard after an original oil portrait by Claude Bonnefond, manufactured by Didier, Petit et Cie; woven by Michel-Marie Carquillat (1803–1884) in Lyon, France, 1839. The image, including caption and Carquillat’s name, taking credit for the weaving, is 55 x 34 cm.; the full piece of silk including blank margins is 85 x 66 cm. The visible portion of the image in the frame is 72 x 54.5 cm., and the frame measures 104 x 84 cm. Minor wear from folding barely visible in the image, but with the image in clear, unfaded and fresh condition. The weaving was professionally treated by a textile conservator, whose conservator’s report and images of before and after are available. Minor flaws visible in the large outer margins of the silk, not affecting the image. In a large and attractive archival frame.
This famous image, of which only a very few examples are known, was woven by machine using 24,000 Jacquard cards, each of which had over 1000 hole positions. The process of mis en carte, or converting the image details to punched cards for the Jacquard mechanism, for this exceptionally large and detailed image, would have taken several workers many months, as the woven image convincingly portrays superfine elements such as a translucent curtain over glass window panes. Once all the “programming” was completed, the process of weaving the image with its 24,000 punched cards would have taken more than eight hours, assuming that the weaver was working at the usual Jacquard loom speed of about forty-eight picks per minute, or about 2800 per hour. More than once this woven image was mistaken for an engraved image. The image was produced only to order, most likely in a small number of examples. Recorded examples are those at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Science Museum, London, The Art Institute of Chicago, and the Computer History Museum, Mountain View, California, Musée de Tissus, Lyons.