Rendered in repeat pattern on linen, this design translates Sleigh’s intricate fantasy cartography into a decorative fabric suitable for curtains and hangings. While simplified, it retains key iconography of the 1917 map – the legendary Avalon, Arthur’s resting place, and the Grail Temple. In its textile form, Sleigh’s map becomes a tangible, tactile object of everyday enchantment, bridging the decorative arts and fantasy cartography.

Ex Carta

Bernard Sleigh’s Chintz Fabric Map of Fairy Land adapts the imagery of his celebrated Map of Fairyland for decorative textile design. Its pastel kingdoms and looping borders turn fairy-tale geography into a decorative pattern for the nursery and home.

This is a rare survival of Rosebank chintz fabric featuring a simplified version of Bernard Sleigh’s celebrated 

newly discovered and set forth (1917). This textile repeats the motif of the Isle of Avalon, with King Arthur’s Tomb and the mountain-top Temple of the Holy Grail. Issued from 1937, it represents the final commercial incarnation of Sleigh’s Fairyland imagery, and was accompanied on release by a printed leaflet,

The Fairyland fabric was part of a broader range of designs produced by Sleigh for Turnbull & Stockdale, including Oriental Fantasy (aimed at the South American market), Pleiades (exhibited at the 1938 Empire Exhibition in Glasgow), and patterns such as Galleons, Butterflies, Tropical Fish, The River, Kentish Scene, and Sea Foam – the latter famously used by Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret in their bedrooms at Buckingham Palace. These commissions were a significant source of income for Sleigh, who had retired from teaching in 1937.142

Displayed at national textile exhibitions under the Council for Art & Industry at Halifax (1940) and Aberdeen (1941), the fabrics were manufactured until the wartime restrictions of the early 1940s forced the closure of production at the Rosebank Works.