These images are © Copyright 2024 by George Williams. Permission to reprint, republish, and create derivative works without royalty is hereby granted, provided CALLERLAB's notice appears.
These images are derivative works of CALLERLAB's definitions.
© Copyright 1994, 2000-2023 by CALLERLAB Inc., The International Association of Square Dance Callers. Permission to reprint, republish, and create derivative works without royalty is hereby granted, provided this notice appears. Publication on the Internet of derivative works without royalty is hereby granted provided this notice appears. Permission to quote parts or all of this document without royalty is hereby granted, provided this notice is included. Information contained herein shall not be changed nor revised in any derivation or publication.
I started making these with the idea of making teeshirts out of them. If you are interested in using them yourself to make your own shirts, see my teeshirt page. On this page the images are embedded svg and may be extracted by looking at the html source and copy and pasting from it. The teeshirt page has some of them in a more convenient png format.
The Grand Square is an ancient figure. The dance Hunsdon House (from John Playford's The Dancing Maſter, London, 1657) describes the figure (though it does not name it). A hundred years later in Gallini's A New Collection of Forty-four Cotillons (page 9, London, 1772), he also describes the figure, and names it Le Grand Quarré (French for "Grand Square"). In the 19th century it was a figure of the Quadrilles.
In all of these early uses the Grand Square was only 16 counts, but by the time Henry Ford (Benjamin Lovett) came to write his book on Square Dances, Good Morning (Dearborn, MI, 1925) it had acquired the modern reverse.