Resist! Blue-Printing with Indigo and Gum Arabic
Jutta Wimmler
BCDSS Research Group Leader
Blue linen and cotton fabrics with white designs were extremely popular in the early modern period, especially in Central and Eastern Europe. They were produced with a special variety of block-printing called the resist technique. The dyeing materials needed for this technique came from the Caribbean and the Senegal/Mauritania region and were extracted by enslaved laborers.
Fig. 1: Mid-eighteenth-century printing block. Steinauer Blaudruck (photo: W. Möbius, 1954 © Deutsche Fotothek).
In many regions of the world, artisans developed so-called resist techniques for textile dyeing. One of the most famous examples is the Indonesian batik. Here, a pattern is applied to the textile with wax. The textile is then dyed. When the wax is later removed, the regions covered by it remain white, while the rest of the textile is colored. In seventeenth-century Europe, artisans developed a variety of this technique called resist printing – a type of textile printing. They applied a paste to a wooden block engraved with a pattern, printed the pattern onto a piece of cloth, dipped the cloth in a dye, and later removed the paste. The most famous and widespread example of this was the so-called blue-print that was especially popular in Central and Eastern Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Initially, artisans printed on linen – readily available in this region. When cotton became more available, they also began to print on cotton/linen mixes. Aside from the printing block and the fabric, artisans needed two things for a blue-print: indigo for the dye and gum arabic for the paste. Since the seventeenth century, indigo came primarily from the Caribbean islands, while gum arabic was mostly imported from Senegal and Mauritania. Enslaved laborers extracted both of these substances.
Fig. 2: Blue-printing with a traditional printing block. Dyeing shop H. Fischer, Neukirch/Lausitz (photo: G. Heinrich, 1940 © Deutsche Fotothek).
Fig. 3: Finished blue-printed textile. Steinauer Blaudruck (photo: W. Möbius, 1954 © Deutsche Fotothek).
Fig. 4 a + b: Historical printing block with printing from the inventory of the Folprecht-Pscheida blueprinting shop in Coswig/Saxony Model Nr. 122 (photos: H. Folprecht-Pscheida, 2024).
Further Reading
Bauer, P. M., 1984. Indigo: Die Kunst des Blaudrucks. Weitra: Bibliothek der Provinz, 1997.
Koch, J. H., 1984. Mit Model, Krapp und Indigo: Vom alten Handdruck auf Kattun und Leinwand. Hamburg: Christians.
Überrück, A., 2008. Die christlichen Motive des Blaudrucks: Spiegel der Volksfrömmigkeit in Deutschland vom Ende des 17. Jahrhunderts bis heute. Berlin: LIT.
Walravens, H. (ed.), 1993. Ein blaues Wunder: Blaudruck in Europa und Japan. Berlin: Akademie Verlag. Wimmler, Jutta, 2019. “From Senegal to Augsburg: Gum Arabic and the Central European Textile Industry in the Eighteenth Century.” Textile History 50 (1): 4–22.