A Taste for Seaweed: William Kilburn’s Late Eighteenth-Century Designs for Printed Cottons/ Ann Christie

William Kilburn (1745–1818) was an entrepreneur and designer in the English calico printing industry at the end of the eighteenth century. Born in Ireland, he moved to London and worked as a botanical illustrator before establishing a career in design for printed fabrics, and ultimately managing his own calico printing factory in Wallington, Surrey.
The Victoria and Albert Museum holds an album containing 223 of Kilburn’s watercolour designs on paper, a proportion of which are dated between 1788 and1792. Many are representations of native British plants, and demonstrate his skill as a botanical illustrator. Among the designs are several that include depictions of seaweeds and other marine organisms, both in naturalistic and more stylized forms.
Also in the Museum’s collection is a cotton gown from the end of the eighteenth century, block-printed in muted colours, which was acquired because of the textile’s possible attribution to Kilburn as a designer. This article establishes that the dress fabric was printed with one of the seaweed designs from the album, with the fine detail of the watercolour transformed through translation into the cruder lines of the wood block. The detail and complexity of the pattern entailed virtuosity both of naturalistic illustration and of the skills of the block-cutters.
This was a time of growing fashionability of the coast as a destination for health and pleasure, and of great scientific interest in the classification and biology of marine organisms. Kilburn’s choice of seaweed motifs for his high-quality cotton fabrics was a carefully judged and timely strategy to distinguish his work for a discerning market of consumers.