Independence Toile Medium Tote — Custom Turquoise / Purple on Tinted Belgian Linen / Cotton
The source material for Independence Toile is one of the most celebrated textiles of the Early Republic. Around 1785, an unknown English printworks — working for the American export market, because patriotic toile had no commercial future in London — produced a copperplate-printed cotton known as "The Apotheosis of Benjamin Franklin and George Washington." The original is in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and Mount Vernon. Washington drives a leopard-drawn chariot accompanied by a figure of America in a feathered headdress, holding a shield inscribed "American Independence 1776." Franklin stands in his fur cap near the figure of Liberty, beneath a banner reading "Where Liberty Dwells There Is My Country." The design drew Washington's likeness from a 1781 Valentine Green engraving after John Trumbull, and Franklin's profile from a 1777 medallion by Jean-Baptiste Nini. It is not a portrait. It is mythology — the Founders rendered as classical heroes before the paint on the Republic was dry.
Quadrille's Independence Toile is a new screen inspired by that document — not a reproduction, but a reinterpretation, hand screen-printed on Belgian linen-cotton in a turquoise and purple colorway that the eighteenth-century copperplate engravers could not have imagined. The original was always red on cream, because that's what copperplate could do. Screen printing can do anything. In time for the 250th birthday of the USA, we have a limited supply of totes made from this custom fabric.
