Lot 1: Joseph-Marie Jacquard:

Joseph-Marie Jacquard: A rare woven silk portrait, completed on the Jacquard punched-card loom, the portrait of a known view of the inventor seated in his workshop, with a model of the Jacquard Loom and several punch-cards being marked for cutting, a window behind and hand tools hanging, various woven materials bundled on the floor behind his chair, seated in three-quarter length jacket, waistcoat and holding a pair of dividers on a punched card template, woven in black and white, with wide margin, loom start bars to edges of left and right-hand borders, Dápres le tableau do C. Bonnefond. , and Exeçutê par didier Petit et Co. immediately below image left and right respectively, A LA MEMOIRE DE J.M. JACQUARD , then Nê â Lyon le 7 Juillet 1752 Mort le 7 Aout 1834 ____ Tisse pur M. M. Carquillat , - 17in. (43.2cm) high, 13½in. (34.3cm) wide image size, including the border 33¼in. (84.4cm) high, 26 3/16in. (66.5cm) wide , (some water staining to border on right-hand corners, line staining on left-hand side)

Technical and Domestic Apparatus

VAT rate of 5% is payable on hammer price and at 17.5% on the buyer's premium.
James Essinger, in Jacquard's Web - How a Hand Loom Led to the Birth of the Information Age, 2004; (Revised edition, 2007), quotes from Charles Babbage Life of a Philosopher, 1864,
...The portrait of Jacquard was, in fact, a sheet of woven silk, framed and glazed, but looking so perfectly like an engraving, that it has been mistaken for such by two members of the Royal Academy...

Having moved to Dorset Street in 1828, Charles Babbage regularly invited family and distinguished guests of title to functions which showed-off the designs and prototypes of technological firsts. Throughout the 1830s, Babbage took particular delight in showing the many people present, and under the influence of an atmospheric array of candles, his model of the Difference Engine, a forerunner of today's computers, first conceived and part-built from 1822.
Later, having obtained a Jacquard portrait like this one, Babbage displayed it in his drawing-room and enjoyed his guests' erroneous conclusions that it was an engraving, when it was in fact a woven image.
Twenty-one years earlier, Jacquard had seen the benefits of a pre-determined programme for use in the weaving industry and by joining this with a near-infinite result machine, such as a loom, the seeds for the first working mechanical computer were sown.
Working in much the same way as the later Baird Televisor, each punched card represented a 'line' (in this case row) of information and when joined with many hundreds of others, told the loom where to put each thread on a pre-determined programme. It took many weeks to programme a series of blank cards to make a picture or pattern and up to a week to load all the thread, but with the portrait consisting of approximately 24,000 rows, the quality was as good, if not more so, than an engraving and with similar characteristics in line placement.
The obvious benefit of this system is when a programme, or loom design pattern is executed, one can then replicate the same image to the same quality time and time again. For a new technology, the powers of the Jacquard loom were considered endless and as Babbage pointed out at one of these Dorset Street meetings, "..it [Jacquard loom], will greatly assist in explaining the nature of my calculating machine..." At least with the loom, each action of calculation can be seen in freeze-frame and inspected in detail.

Unfortunately, just as the loom was heading for the heights of success, and after the horrors of the French Revolution, (in which Jacquard at one point took position in the front line), Jacquard's technology was not immediately embraced by silk weavers and others in weaving trades as it was yet another object taking over loom weaver's jobs.
Seeing this new device as a threat, they protested its use and as early as 1801, riots broke out in Lyons over changes to the traditional loom. Three years later when Jacquard's revised loom was introduced, the violence escalated. In addition to trying to destroy any Jacquard looms that were in use in Lyons, attempts were made on Jacquard's life and this may well explain why, in the portrait, the window pane in the background has a musketball-hole, conveniently positioned behind the model of the loom.

Although woven after Jacquard's death, this portrait still serves as one of the first computer-generated images ever produced and numbers of other survivors are thought to be in single figures. The main interest in this example lies in the border being still intact. Folds are observed where, until recently, the portrait was wrapped around a wood board before being placed in a glazed frame. Although this has resulted in the border being creased and the marks of damp caused by the back of the frame getting wet, the border has survived. The start/stop loom 'test card' strip is seen on both extreme sides and these are in good overall condition. There is also a light fold running downwards through the centre.
The thread sequence can be seen in some places as diagonal lines, where just the horizontal plane was used. This can be seen clearly as fine quality on the bottom right, whereas bottom left (the same distance), is quite course (see 'closer detail' illustration). Centre-left can be read as blocks of slightly different coloured white and black tones - the many spools of thread needed would change in hue from batch-to-batch.