Toile de Jouy pattern generator

Little landscapes in one color on a pale ground. Choose how finely the hills and trees are engraved, whether flowering sprigs grow between the vignettes and whether the frames and flowers get a second color, and export a seamless toile pattern as SVG, PNG or CSS.

Open in the generator How it works

Navy toile vignettes with a tree on a hill, between flowering sprigs on a cream ground

Scenes printed in one color

Toile de Jouy means cloth from Jouy, a village near Versailles where a printing works made cotton fabrics from the 1760s. Its prints showed scenes of country life, ruins, myths and gardens, drawn like engravings in a single color, most often red, blue or sepia, on a pale ground. Printing from engraved copper plates allowed very fine lines and shading.

The fabric is still used for curtains, upholstery and wallpaper, and the style has since been adapted to all kinds of subjects.

How the generator builds them

Ornamatic draws oval vignettes in a double frame. Inside each one are rolling hills, a tree made of clustered round crowns and a few birds. Thin lines are cut out of the hills and the foliage, which gives the engraved look. Every vignette has its own landscape, drawn from a seed.

Between the vignettes grow slender flowering sprigs. The vignettes and sprigs are laid out in a half-drop repeat, and the cell repeats exactly. You can give the frames and flowers a second color.