Fish

The museum does not record what this sheet was for. Its dates, given only as somewhere between 1895 and 1910, fall in the years when Colenbrander was designing carpets for the factory in Deventer, and if it was meant for a carpet, it was only the first step. An article of 1903 in the Dutch art magazine Onze Kunst described what happened once a design left his studio. The wool was dyed and shared out in small trays among the women workers, who tied the tufts onto the warp threads following the pattern they had been given. Then the machines took over, pressing each row into place and finishing the carpet. The title is the Dutch word for fish, in the old spelling, the way Dutch was written before the spelling reforms of the 20th century.