The History of Polyester Canvas: 1941 to Now

Polyester canvas is often treated as a modern experiment, something new and unproven next to cotton and linen. It is not. The polymer is older than acrylic paint, and it has been in commercial production for longer than most artists working today have been alive.

Here is the actual timeline, with sources.

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1941: two chemists in Accrington

Aromatic polyesters were discovered in 1941 by chemists working for the Calico Printers' Association in the UK. John Rex Whinfield and James Tennant Dickson built on earlier work by the American chemist Wallace Carothers, who had been investigating polymer chemistry at DuPont and whose research produced nylon.

Carothers had looked at polyesters and moved on. Whinfield and Dickson went back to them and produced polyethylene terephthalate, PET.

A note on a story you may have heard, including from us. This post used to claim polyester was a wartime material used for parachutes and ropes. That is wrong, and we have corrected it. Wartime parachutes were nylon, which was Carothers' work. PET was discovered in 1941 but was not in production during the war.

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1953: commercial production

Polyester fabrics have been commercially available since 1953, twelve years after the discovery. The delay is the interesting part, and it is a pattern that repeats through this whole story: knowing a material is good and being able to manufacture it well are two entirely different problems.

For context on how early that is: the first artist acrylic paint, Magna, was released in 1947. The first water-based acrylic gesso came in 1955. Polyester as an industrial fabric predates the acrylic gesso most artists prime with.

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1957: the problem that stopped everyone

A patent filed in 1957 identified the issue that would defeat attempt after attempt at a synthetic artist canvas. Synthetic fibres are smoother than cellulose ones. They give paint less to grip.

The industry calls it tooth, and it is polyester's genuine weakness. Not durability, not stability, not moisture. Adhesion.

Every serious attempt at polyester canvas over the following decades ran into it.

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The attempts, and what happened to them

These are documented in chapter 5 of The Conservation of Easel Paintings, and the companies are named in it.

• Winsor & Newton sold a viscose-primed canvas called Rayoc, developed to replace animal glue sizing and reduce the sensitivity of canvas to water. Manufacturing difficulty and cost led to its withdrawal.
• Daler-Rowney attempted an acrylic-primed polyester with Haywood Sailcloth manufacturers. The project was abandoned because certain media bled into the canvas.
• Fredrix Canvas, Inc. applies its own acrylic priming formulation to polyester canvas. The book's verdict is one carefully chosen phrase: it appears to meet some of the requirements.

Meanwhile polyester found other routes into art. It came into wider artistic use through the 1970s, and from the late 1990s the giclée and digital printing trade adopted polyester and polyester blends because they held ink well and did not move with humidity.

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2003: the museums test it

Capucine Korenberg, in the V&A's Science Section, put two polyester fabrics through accelerated ageing. Light exposure at around 9 klux for 69 days, calculated as equivalent to roughly 80 years on permanent museum display. Then heat ageing at 60°C for three months and 80°C for two more. Tensile strength did not change in any of it. Her conclusion was that polyester fabrics should be very stable in the museum environment.

A second correction. This post used to say that study found polyester degrades slower than cotton or linen and resists cracking and fading. It did not. No cotton or linen was tested, and the only property measured was tensile strength. The study is a statement about polyester's own stability. It is not a comparison, and we should not have presented it as one. You can read it yourself.

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2012: the field states its verdict

In the standard reference text on the subject, Christina Young closes her chapter on the history of fabric supports with this:

"In the early twenty-first century, polyester (PET form) exhibits the best combination of properties and provides the most promising starting point to improve the performance of artists' canvas even though it has yet to match linen or cotton kinaesthetically or aesthetically."

Christina Young, "History of Fabric Supports", chapter 5, in Stoner, J.H. & Rushfield, R. (eds.), The Conservation of Easel Paintings, Routledge, 2012.

Seventy-one years after the discovery, the field named PET as the best available material and admitted in the same breath that nobody had finished the job.

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2013: where we come in

We did not start out trying to solve any of this. We started by redesigning a badly built strainer for a photographic canvas-print franchise, in South Africa, in 2013.

The canvas came later, and it went to 100% Polyester PET in both warp and weft rather than a poly-cotton blend, for the reason the whole history above points at: polyester PET does not take up moisture, so it does not swell and let go of tension when the room changes.

The coating is the part that took years, because the coating is the part everybody else got stuck on. It was developed with an oil artist who makes his own paints from pigments he crushes himself, and tested by him to destruction.

Canvases we stretched in our own factory in 2013 are still tight today.

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The short version

• 1941 PET discovered by Whinfield and Dickson at the Calico Printers' Association, building on Carothers
• 1953 Commercially available
• 1957 A patent names the adhesion problem that would stop everyone
• 1970s onward Polyester moves into wider artistic use
• Late 1990s Adopted by the giclée and digital printing trade
• 2003 V&A ageing tests find no measurable loss of strength
• 2012 Named in the standard reference text as the most promising starting point
• 2013 ACF starts, from the strainer up

Eighty-five years is not an experiment. It is long enough to know.

Read next

• Why Polyester PET is the best artist canvas material. The full case, with sources.
• Does paint stick to polyester canvas? The 1957 problem, and how it gets solved.

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Or just paint on one

Two places to start. Both are 100% Polyester PET in warp and weft, pre-coated with our own gesso, on a strainer that holds its shape.

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Sources

• Korenberg, C. (2003) "How fast do polyester fabrics age in the museum environment?", V&A Conservation Journal, Issue 44, Victoria and Albert Museum. Source for the 1941 discovery and 1953 commercial availability dates. Link
• Young, C., "History of Fabric Supports", chapter 5, in Stoner, J.H. & Rushfield, R. (eds.), The Conservation of Easel Paintings, Routledge / Taylor & Francis, 2012.
• Jackson's Art, "A Modern Medium: A Brief History of Acrylic Paint". Source for the 1947 and 1955 acrylic dates. Link