Tafellaken van linnendamast met meidoorns 1900 - 1925

This is a linen damask tablecloth with maythorn motifs, made by Chris Lebeau. Lebeau lived through both World Wars. As a pacifist and an anarchist he refused to register with the German occupation forces in the Netherlands, and was imprisoned as a result. Returning to this tablecloth, we find domesticity and nature meeting at the table. The whiteness of the linen speaks to ideas of cleanliness and purity, while the maythorn pattern brings the outside in. But the personal, domestic sphere is not necessarily free from the reach of wider historical and social forces. We might wonder: who would have been able to afford such a luxury item at this time? How does the cloth serve as a site of gathering, sustenance, and perhaps even tension, for those who sat around it? Consider how this everyday object becomes a canvas onto which narratives of labor, consumption, and identity are woven.