Carmen almost certainly began as a woven silk. The design dates from nineteenth-century France and its structure, the scale of the scrollwork and the way the ornament turns and returns, points to one of the mills around Lyon, which supplied most of Europe with figured silk in that period. Named afterwards for Bizet's opera, it belongs to the same decade and much the same world.
The scrollwork is graceful rather than grand, which is unusual in a damask of this size; the drawing keeps moving instead of settling into the heavy symmetry the form usually produces. It is screen printed in a flecked metallic ink laid onto chalky, matte grounds, and that combination is what gives it its particular quality: the ground absorbs light, the fleck returns it, and the pattern seems to sit slightly above the surface as a woven figure would.
The roll is a generous 0.69 m wide with a 64 cm straight repeat, so fewer joins fall across a wall and the scroll can develop properly. It belongs in rooms of some formality, a drawing room, a dining room or a stair hall, and it works particularly well above a dado with plain paint below. Above a dado it gives a room formality without any heaviness.
