Printed textiles can be characterized by the technology used to print them (block, copperplate, or roller) or by the “style,” which in this case does not mean the characteristics of the design but rather the chemistry that is needed to print the colors. One style of textile printing that is not very well known is the “pigment style.” Traditionally taken to mean the later nineteenth-century practice of printing pigments with an albumen binder, an earlier method of printing pigments with an oil binder (oil paint) has recently been identified on textiles printed in America (Figs. 1, 4).1 This earlier method of printing [or “stamping”] patterns on textiles with wooden blocks coated with oil paint is easily confused with the technique of stenciling, that is, the application of paint (more often tempera than oil) through a stencil (Figs. 2, 3).
