Floorcloths

Last updated: Jan 22, 2024

John Carwitham’s Various kinds of floor decorations in both plano and perspective (1739) has designs that could have been used on floorcloths.

Floorcloth-painters’ trade cards, with images of floor cloths

See also Of the Floor-Cloth Painter in The London Tradesman, 1747.

• Joseph Barnes (see also “Floor Cloths, Both Imported and Domestic” in Floor coverings in New England before 1850)
• The Hat & Floor Cloth Warehouse By James Cox
• Gatfield & Co.
• B. Philpott
• James Theebridge (also here)
• Thomas Tillinghast
• Joseph Weston
• John White

Eighteenth century treatises on painting

Not necessarily about floor cloths in particular, but these books provide instruction on how to paint and other useful techniques. The ability to imitate different sorts of surfaces would have been especially valuable; a 1760 Maryland advertisement for runaway convict servant John Winter describes him as “a very compleate House painter: he can imitate Marble or Mahogany very exactly, and can paint floor Cloths as neat as any imported from Britain.”

• Dictionarium Polygraphicum: Or, The Whole Body of Arts Regularly Digested (1735)
• The Handmaid to the Arts (1757)
• The Handmaid to the Arts (1758)
• The Laboratory; or, School of Arts (1799)

How to clean a floorcloth

• “Having well swept your floor-cloth, wipe it carefully with a flannel, and when all dust and spots are removed, rub it fist with a flannel slightly waxed, and then with a plain dry one. Or washing occasionally with milk, and dry rubbing may suffice without the use of the wax, and the floor-cloth will be less slippery.” (The Universal Cook and City and Country Housekeeper, 1806)
• “The sides of stairs or passages on which are carpets or floor-cloth should be washed with sponge instead of linen or flannel, and the edges will not be soiled. Different sponges should be kept for the above two uses; and these and the brushes should be well washed when done with, and kept in dry places.” (The New London Family Cook, 1808; A New System of Domestic Cookery, 1808)

Nineteenth century images and references

• Floorcloths & fragments from Historic New England, including 1991.1372, 1966.2141, 2003.27.1, 1972.103
• Portrait of the artist’s family by George Scharf, 1830
• Portraits attributed to Joseph H. Davis, 1830s: Mary Ann Cook, Lucy Vickery, John Stockbridge Vickery, The Hayes Family, The Barrett Sisters
• Portraits attributed to Erastus Salisbury Field, including Boy on stenciled carpet (1838), Child holding rattle (1838), Joseph Moore and his family (1839), Margaret Gilmore (1845)
• Floor cloth, and oil cloth covers in An Encyclopedia of Domestic Economy, 1852
• Floor cloth manufacture in Ure’s Dictionary of Arts, Manufacture, and Mines, 1861
• Four drawings showing the manufacture of floor cloth (Met 57.536.3)