Toile de Jouy: what does it mean?

The answer in a village not far from Versailles – interview with Richard Saja «Chinoiserie has a sense of wonder, even if tinged by some sadness. I start from this, to express the amazement it communicates to me»

Toile De Jouy: Meaning

Toile de Jouy literally means “cloth from Jouy-en-Josas,” a village near Versailles. This fabric dates back to 1770, when Christophe Philippe Oberkampf was the first to experiment with printing patterns onto it. Traditionally, different shades of reds and pinks were used, alternated with greens and blues, along with black, white, and grey nuances.

It is a fantasy stitched onto material, depicting travel and the early signs of orientalism that illustrate distant traditions. Love stories unfold within bucolic scenes. The toile de Jouy becomes the “toile of joy” when transformed by Richard Saja.

A conversation about the Toile De Jouy with Richard Saja, Embroidery Artist

His embroidered pieces take on bizarre dimensions. “Chinoiserie possesses a sense of wonder, even if tinged with sadness. I start from this to express the amazement it communicates to me.” A knight wearing a mask sports a Mohawk, courting a young lady adorned in a cobweb skirt, with the tip of her nose painted blue.

Richard Saja sabotages the pattern with his needle—both the fabric and the story. Its beauty mocks reality and questions our certainties. “Although it is already full of imagery, the toile is destined to disappear. It serves as a framework in which each element becomes unrecognizable due to the repetition of images. My work breaks this pattern.”

The interaction between print, color, and texture is limitless. By selectively enhancing its small areas, the historical use of the toile is reversed, distorting time. “The anonymity of the print is interrupted, creating a new context—like the pages of a black-and-white book begging for color.”

Why Embroidery and Not Painting?

“Necessity. I sold cushions and had to keep up with their production. It was a creative outlet. When I picked up a needle, I found a solution for my compulsive obsessions and the general unpleasantness I felt. Lacking talent as a painter, I discovered that needle and floss allowed me to achieve very similar results, and I had a gift for this instead.”

Perhaps it runs in the family. “Some distant relatives owned furniture shops in Italy; they were woodcarvers. One of their descendants, a dear spinster aunt I called ‘the Lady,’ worked as an assistant designer here in New York. I don’t know if it’s my nature, nurture, or neither, but I have been creative from an early age. It took time for me to find my artistic craft.”

And if you weren’t an artist? “As a child, I wanted to be a rock star or one of those lost children in Peter Pan—or the fox or the skunk.” And if you were? “Piero Fornasetti. I feel connected to his work. He has infused tangible humor into a field that takes itself far too seriously. I can only hope to come close to his carefree spirit and elegance.”

Historically Inaccurate Decorative Arts

The fabric presents pastoral landscapes, but Richard Saja over-embroiders them with another story and imaginary characters. There are the shadow man, the green man, the hairy man, fire heads, the universal mother, the lost children of Peter Pan, and the sleeping rabbit from Goodnight Moon. Embroidering figures covered in fur is a meditative experience—you can lose yourself in a Yeti or a Sasquatch.

These were his childhood obsessions—still today, Beauty and the Beast remains his favorite fairy tale. What was once solid arcadia has become a parallel universe, an upturned world. “Toile is a challenge. You have to invent something new each time. The original concept was to embroider Māori face tattoos onto the eighteenth-century figures.”

An art born from a temporal mix-up. “My company’s name doesn’t lie—Historically Inaccurate. I began embroidering in the late Nineties; before that, I worked in the advertising industry. I observed how people interpreted printed signs during trade fairs. Confusion became comprehension, enjoyably.”

How to Create an Embroidery Design

The creative process is almost improvised. He doesn’t have everything clear in his mind beforehand. Usually, around midday, he sits with an empty toile and lets the magic happen. His fingers are spontaneous, which is one reason he dislikes working on commission. He has no specific image in his head—”for that, it’s enough to hire an agile-fingered monkey.”

Embroidery and technology are contradictory. He has tried mechanical methods and smart fabrics, but ultimately made a conscious choice to do all his work by hand. “Technology imposes what is possible, while history dictates what is practical. Machine embroidery can never replicate human movements.” As a fan of traditional art, he relaunches old-style embroidery with a touch of irony, challenging the spectator to redefine its meaning.

“I like to think that when someone sees one of my pieces, they will delve into the history of toile de Jouy.” The threads interweave like a game of complements and contradictions, focused on the union of one with the other. In this way, embroidery digs into human interaction, introducing “the other” into an unfamiliar context. Each small decoration serves as a motif for acceptance, challenging the notion of difference—”The message is not pedantic, but it’s there.”

“My first large-scale project involved embroidering ‘Life on the Mississippi’ to be displayed on the walls of the Commanders Palace reception in New Orleans. A vignette in the pattern depicted a table in a wood surrounded by men and women raising their glasses in a toast. I transformed them into clowns with absurd wigs, using bright colors and red noses. The client asked me to remove the clown noses. For years, I wondered why the noses and not the wigs.”

Richard Saja

An artist working in Catskill, New York. After attending the University of the Arts in Philadelphia to study surface design, he devoted his studies to the great books of Western Civilization at St. John’s College in Santa Fe, NM, and received a BA in math and philosophy. After a brief stint as an art director on Madison Ave, all his interests coalesced into the founding of a small design firm, Historically Inaccurate Decorative Arts, in the early 2000s.

Angelica Carrara

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