Even at the beginning of the nineteenth century, absolutely fast dyes did not exist for printing on cotton.(1)  Although dyes used were perceived to be adequate for their day, they would not stand up to our twenty-first century standards of permanence.  Not until the 1956 introduction of reactive dyes were strong chemical bonds between the dye molecules and the cellulose molecules possible.  An intricate printed cotton such as the one seen here dyed in beige, red, pink, blue and green would not have been laundered casually, if at all.

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(1) Philip Ball, Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Color (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2001), 227.