c. 1783 Revolutionary War Era Copperplate-Printed Cotton Textile Titled, “L'Hommage de l'Amerique a la France” (America's Tribute to France), Designed by Jean-Baptiste Huet for the Manufacture Royale Oberkampf at Jouy-en-Josas, France, Choice Very Fine+.
This copperplate-printed cotton panel, measuring about 35 x 36 inches, presents the design known as L'Hommage de l'Amerique a la France (America's Tribute to France), created by Jean-Baptiste Huet for production at Christophe-Philippe Oberkampf's Manufactory Royale at Jouy-en-Josas, located outside Paris. This textile is dated to the years immediately following the end of the American Revolutionary War. The panel is printed in a single burgundy tone on a cream color cotton ground, a technique and palette characteristic of the fine quality engraved copperplate work for which the Jouy manufactory became internationally known to produce, currently folded.

The Art Institute of Chicago holds a piece of this fabric measuring 38 x40 inches of the same design.

The composition is an elaborate allegorical scene celebrating the wartime alliance between France and the new United States. At its center, a seated European figure bearing a fleur-de-lis shield, representing France, receives the approach of allegorical and a Bare-breasted Native American female Princess embodying “America” with other figures, while a winged figure of Fame hovers above on a cloud, sounding a trumpet to announce the alliance to the world. There is a Liberty Cap held on a pole and two 13-Star American Flags displayed. The central vignette is surrounded by a loosely connected landscape of sailing ships, colonial encampments, palm trees, Native American groups, and fortified European coastal towns, in the discursive, narrative manner typical of Huet's large-scale designs for Oberkampf.

"L'Hommage de l'Amerique a la France" (America's Tribute to France) was created by Jean-Baptiste Huet (1745-1811), the French painter and designer best known for pastoral and allegorical scenes in the Boucher/Watteau tradition, who was Oberkampf's most important outside collaborator for large-scale copperplate-printed furnishing fabrics. It's a companion piece to Huet's better-known "La Liberte Americaine," which the Musee de la Toile de Jouy describes as built around two medallions: one an allegory of Liberty (a profile head in a Phrygian cap, inscribed "LIBERTAS AMERICANA" over the date July 4, 1776), the other showing Minerva (representing Europe/France) defending Hercules (America) against a leopard (England), commemorating Yorktown and France's military support for the American cause. "L'Hommage" belongs to the same cycle of Huet designs marking the Franco-American alliance, alongside pieces like "The Apotheosis of Washington and Franklin." This panel presents with the crisp, detailed linework and warm, evenly toned ground consistent with the design as it is known from documented period examples.

Overall, a rarity of museum quality that is a choice example for framing and display.


The composition is an elaborate allegorical scene celebrating the wartime alliance between France and the new United States. At its center, a seated European figure bearing a fleur-de-lis shield, representing France, receives the approach of allegorical and Native American figures embodying America, while a winged figure of Fame hovers above on a cloud, sounding a trumpet to announce the alliance to the world.

The central vignette is surrounded by a loosely connected landscape of sailing ships, colonial encampments, palm trees, Native American groups, and fortified European coastal towns, in the discursive, narrative manner typical of Huet's large-scale designs for Oberkampf. The Art Institute of Chicago holds a piece of this fabric measuring 38 x40 inches of the same design.

Huet (1745-1811) was the Oberkampf manufactory's most celebrated outside designer, responsible for many of its best-known large-format pictorial toiles; Oberkampf's factory, founded in 1760 and granted the status of Manufacture Royale by Louis XVI in 1783, became so closely associated with this style of finely engraved, monochrome scenic cotton that the term toile de Jouy is still used today for the type, wherever produced.

A related example of this pattern is held in the permanent textile collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, among other museum and private holdings, indicating that multiple period lengths of the design survive.

Because L'Hommage de l'Amerique a la France remains one of Oberkampf's most frequently reproduced patterns, having been reprinted in the nineteenth century from surviving plates and reissued by later manufacturers up to the present day, a firm attribution to the original circa 1780s printing would require closer physical examination: the fineness and slight irregularity of the engraved line work, the weight and weave of the cotton, and any selvage marks or stamps are the usual points of comparison.

This panel presents with the crisp, detailed linework and warm, evenly toned ground consistent with the design as it is known from documented period examples.