Connecting Cultural Worlds: An Embroidery from India Celebrating Portugal’s Monarchy

On your next visit to the Gardner, stop at the small Second Floor Passage that links the Dutch Room to the Tapestry Room. Take time for your eyes to adjust to the protective low light and then focus on the wall-size blue and cream embroidered silk, almost nine feet high. The entire surface is densely embellished in minute cream-colored chain stitch, producing a profusion of plant life, real and imaginary animals, soldiers, musicians, hunters, references to Christian and Greco-Roman lore, and most importantly allusions to the restoration of Portuguese independence. In the same decades that Rembrandt, Van Dyck, and Rubens wielded brushes and oil paints, and the Flemish workshop of Jan Moy manipulated yarns on tapestry looms to realize the masterworks in the adjacent galleries, embroiderers in Bengal near present day Kolkata (formerly Calcutta) embellished the pale blue silk surface for aristocratic clients in Portugal.

Though made in Bengal, the embroidery, known by its designation in Portuguese as a colcha (literally ‘bedcover’), epitomizes the development of transcultural luxury goods that accelerated in the era of global oceanic trade. Colchas were the product of collaborations among Portuguese clients and merchants, and Bengali commercial agents and textile workshops. Together they elevated colchas from bedcovers to works of art, like tapestries, considered suitable to adorn the walls of palatial residences.

By the early 1500s Portuguese mariners and merchants had harnessed advances in ship building and navigational science becoming the first to traverse the oceans in search of profitable trade. To pursue the deepwater trade, European, including Spanish, Dutch, British, Danish, and French, merchants required safe trading stations in unfamiliar parts of the world. They achieved this through treaties with regional rulers and by military action, taking direct control of territories and their inhabitants, initiating the era of Western imperialism and the onset of modern globalization. By the mid 1500s the coast of India was dotted with Portuguese trading stations, including one in Bengal where colchas were purchased, Satgaon. At the time, luxury textiles were a small fraction of the textile trade. Most trade was in undyed plain weave cotton, destined to be made into shirts, inner garments, and daily-use items that benefited from cotton’s comfort and washability.

During the late 1500s and 1600s, colchas were among the most desirable luxury imports in Portugal. For at least a millennium, weavers, dyers, and embroiderers, situated near ports and overland entrepots in India, developed specialties in creating goods for geographically and culturally distant markets. Like other luxury textiles they made for export, colchas mixed European and Indian features. Embroiderers of the Gardner’s colcha were tasked with translating reinterpretations of European prints illustrating biblical stories, Greco-Roman mythology, and Portuguese history into thread and stitches on cloth. Many motifs, perplexingly strange to their eyes, could be interpreted by focusing attention on form and capturing the motifs with virtuoso ingenuity. To their Portuguese clientele, the results of their work were an appealing combination of familiar and exotic.

Among the art works assembled by Mrs. Gardner, the colcha was an outlier. At the time, even the well-known French dealer who brought the embroidery to her attention was not aware of its origin and misidentified the colcha as Spanish. While somewhat odd looking, the Christian and Classical motifs were probably legible to Europeans and Americans in Mrs. Gardner’s time, but the Portuguese historical references were likely obscure to most.

The colcha’s large rectangular central panel is dominated by a multistory building surrounded by eight oval cameos of kings. Dogged research by curator Pedro Moura Carvalho identified two prints from the early 1600s that likely served as sources for the imagery, one depicting a triumphal arch with the Portuguese royal coat of arms, the other a dynastic tree featuring the kings of Portugal standing on the branches.

Embroiderers repopulated the building with their own depictions of musicians, soldiers, and animals and reimagined the kings in oval cameos placed like upright fruits on branches that emanate from the central structure. Among the oval portraits, only the one at lower right is uncrowned. In 1640, Portugal’s victory over Spain restored its sovereignty. Some years after King João IV (r. 1640–1656) came to the throne, he dedicated the crown to the Virgin, terminating its use by rulers. The Gardner colcha was likely commissioned by an aristocrat or member of the royal family to celebrate the restoration of Portuguese rule.

The embroiderers’ materials and techniques were similarly mixtures of familiar and strange. The surface for the embroidery was blue silk and the backing undyed cotton. The production of such textiles was then dominated by Asia—India for cotton and indigo dye, and China originally for silk, though by this time India’s silk production was extensive. Plain-weave cotton cloth, though probably locally sourced, was available across a wide swath of India, but the blue silk was a regional specialty, woven with a warp of cream-colored tussar silk from semi-domesticated silkworms (Antheraea pernyi) and a weft of indigo-dyed cultivated silk (Bombyx mori). In the workshop, loom lengths of blue silk and off-white cotton were pieced together according to the dimensions ordered. The embroidery floss was also regional silk—either muga, a golden yellow fiber from cocoons of wild moths, or eri, either milky white or reddish, from a species of domesticated moths native to northeastern India.

While the motifs in the colcha are predominantly European in origin, the layout and materials share remarkable similarities with Bengal’s famous 19th and 20th century kantha embroideries, which like colchas, served as multipurpose domestic textiles. The foundation cloth for kanthas, like colchas, is usually white cotton stitched together from loom lengths—the Gardner colcha’s blue silk surface is something of a rarity. In kantha the embroidery threads are cotton, while in colchas the threads are predominantly wild silk, a choice dictated by the desire for luxury. Both colchas and kanthas typically feature large rectangular central panels surrounded by a series of borders, and prominent motifs oriented diagonally dominating the corners. Unlike colchas, kanthas were made, not by professional embroiderers, but by women for family use and are renowned for the imaginative artistry of their makers.

Unfortunately, no documentary evidence links colchas and kantha. Because colchas went out of fashion in the early 1700s there is a gap of nearly a century before the earliest dated kanthas. But the implications of their similarities are tantalizing.

We are left with queries that currently cannot be answered, but that emphasize how the allure of the Gardner colcha is more than its magnificence as a work of art. More than providing a refresher course on Christian and Classical symbology, European dynastic history, and 17th century dress, the colcha draws us in to contemplate the development of modern global connections pioneered by Portuguese navigators who reengineered global commerce and accelerated artistic exchanges between cultural worlds. These connections were necessarily managed by merchants, middlemen, workshop masters, and needleworkers who translated clients’ orders into local materials, grafting the desired design onto local formats to create a product that satisfied the aesthetic values of its makers and its intended users in Portugal.

We are prompted to wonder how the workshop master and embroiderers approached the task of translation. Might it be possible to discover if the resemblances in layout between kanthas and colchas are due to the influence of a much older tradition of creating homemade embroidered quilts, or the other way around—could the development of colchas have transformed local practices of domestic embroidery? Because chain stitch is prominent in colchas, and nearly absent in kanthas, could it be that Portuguese merchants brought embroiderers from their headquarters on the west coast of India where chain stitch is widespread? It is commonly presumed that professional embroiderers of colcha were men. But, given the strong connections between homemade kantha and commercial colcha, is it possible that women were significantly involved in their layout and as needleworkers? Even without answers, the questions themselves stimulate appreciation for complex processes that produced the Gardner colcha.

Learn More with the Recommended Reading

Pedro Moura Carvalho, Luxury for Export: Artistic Exchange between India and Portugal around 1600. Exh. cat. (Boston: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 2008).

Especially the entries by Carvalho and conservator Tess Freddette on the Gardner colcha.

Pika Ghosh, Making Kantha, Making Home (University of Washington Press, 2020).

John Irwin and Margaret Hall, Indian Embroideries (Calico Museum of Textiles, India, 1983).

Barbara Karl, Embroidered Histories: Indian Textiles for the Portuguese Market during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht Gmbh & Co, 2016).

Darielle Mason, ed. Kantha: The Embroidered Quilts of Bengal from the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Collection and the Stella Kramrisch Collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art (Yale University Press, 2010).

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