Threads of Life

by Clare Hunter

  In the latter half of the seventeenth century in England there was a short-lived burst of creative rebellion against the strictures of women’s functional needlework as clothing and furnishings in the sudden and short-lived insurrection of riotous stitchery. Called ‘embosted work’ (what we now call stump work), it was a curious form of sewn picture-making that seemed to erupt from the restraint of domestic sewing and satisfy a long-quelled craving for creative freedom. Using bright colours and deploying a wide variety of stitches and materials, such as wire, feathers, beads, ribbon, metal threads, seashells and leather, home embroiderers fashioned three-dimensional human figures, buildings, flowers, insects and animals with joyful negligence of the rules of perspective. Some imagery was wildly exotic, like birds with men’s heads and strangely shaped plants. Made as separate elements, the disparate figures, birds, trees, or whatever else took women’s fancy, were collaged and grouped to tell a story, or randomly bunched together to decorate a border. Some declared royalist allegiance to the deposed Charles I, acorns, butterflies (the symbol of reincarnation) and royal emblems secreted among the seemingly haphazard crowd of motifs. The eccentric concoctions of stump work had no functional use in themselves, but were applied to useful items like mirrors, boxes, trays and small caskets. While so much of what was then sewn has disintegrated or vanished, the survival of stump work is testament to its appeal. Many examples of it still exist; animated, robust, anarchic, indulgent and entertaining as evidence of women’s yearning for greater creative expression.

  It is thought that the ingredients of stump work, the exotic and seductive miscellany of materials, were pedalled door to door by itinerant travellers. This was just one opportunity seized by a growing needlecraft market. By the eighteenth century, women’s needlework might have lost its economic value as a product, but it was becoming hugely profitable as a process. Male manufacturers had a gendered target market and seized the opportunity to direct its tastes. They adopted the role of mentors and designers and flooded the market with paper patterns, kits, transfers, accessories, magazines, pamphlets and books to tell women not just what they should sew but how they should sew. Encouraging dependency was good for business. Women were disarmed of their creative confidence, their sewing skills corralled into uniformity, usually requiring the materials advertised by specialist suppliers. Independent design or, worse, experimentation were discouraged. Women now sewed what other women sewed: distinctiveness now more usually discernible in the quality of their stitching.

  Clearly, the belittling of sewing has been centuries in the making. In Britain, even now it is almost culturally ingrained. When I’ve been involved in a community textile project in a public place I have always been amazed by how cheerful it makes some men to stop by the table, survey the group of women embroidering some intricate appliqué in exquisite fabrics and joke ‘I’ve got some trousers that need taking up’, or ‘Can you sew a button on my jacket?’ Many men, particularly older ones, love this joke and take astonishing glee in reducing the obvious artistry in front of their eyes to a mundanity But their reaction cannot be dismissed as simple misogyny. Such attitudes are not necessarily about women, but about sewing. They stem from the centuries of class, gender, aesthetic and artistic separation that demoted sewing and deprived it of its value. And there is something else at play: the exclusion of men, the claim women themselves have made on sewing as a medium under the control of women’s culture. Women appropriated its tactile, sensory world for themselves and were complicit in evolving its feminine connotations. Educational institutions reinforced needlework’s feminine branding, making it an essential part of a girl’s school curriculum. Since the 1860 Education Act, only girls were taught how to sew in state schools.

  In the eighteenth century, however, a new phenomenon challenged the demotion of needlework and its exclusion from what had become the male preserve of visual arts. These were the needle painters who replicated famous paintings in embroidery. Needle painting was a form of embroidery that emulated the brushstrokes of a painter using shaded silk thread and long and short stitches worked alongside each other to create a realistic portrayal of their subjects. The most celebrated exponents were three Marys: Mary Knowles who used it for her portraits, Mary Delany who translated her botanical paintings in needlework and Mary Linwood who took on the challenge of replicating old masters with her own sewn versions. Their artistry flourished under the patronage of Queen Charlotte, who became the consort of George III in 1762 and, once queen, took it upon herself to champion women artists. She was not the only European monarch to do so. Marie Antoinette in France, Maria Carolina of Naples and Maria Theresa of Austria all supported women artists, commissioning them to paint their portraits, visiting their exhibitions, receiving them at court. At a time when female artists were bereft of the opportunities of their male peers, excluded from membership of the Royal Academy, unable, on grounds of propriety, to attend life drawing classes and discouraged from working from a studio outside of their home, the encouragement of Queen Charlotte provided valuable and visible endorsement with which to progress their careers.

  The Queen was particularly fond of embroidery. A needlewoman herself, she employed her own female court embroiderer, Mrs Phoebe Wright. In 1772 she tasked Mrs Wright with establishing the School of Female Embroiderers to create employment for respectable girls who had fallen on hard times and gave her £500 as an annual subscription. She commissioned the school to make bed hangings for her own state bed at Windsor Castle. Its density of flowers took six years to complete and is still on show at Hampton Court Palace.

  Although all three Marys enjoyed the attention of Queen Charlotte, it was Mary Delany who became the Queen’s close associate. She taught the royal children botany and sewed alongside them. The queen gave her a locket containing a lock of her hair as a token of intimacy and George III commissioned a portrait of her as a gift to Charlotte, which hung in the Queen’s bedchamber. When Mary Delany became elderly, the royal couple provided her with a summer house at Windsor and an annual allowance of £300 a year.

  Mary Delany’s father was Colonel Bernard Granville, who had been Lieutenant Governor of Hull and a Member of Parliament in Cornwall. His sister, Lady Stanley, had served as a Maid of Honour to Queen Mary. It was to Lady Stanley that Mary was sent as a young girl to be trained for a future of royal service. She therefore spent her early years in the social melee of London being versed in history, dancing, needlework and music. The composer Frederick Handel was one of her teachers. But the death of Queen Anne in 1714 and the ensuing political power shift from Jacobite to Whig ended Mary’s idyll and any hope of a position at court. The Granvilles had been supporters of the defeated Jacobite party. They were no longer welcome in royal circles and in 1715 Mary found herself transplanted to a remote village in Gloucestershire and social isolation. In 1718, at the age of seventeen, she was married against her will in an arrangement the family hoped would restore its political influence. She later said of her wedding day:

  I was married with great pomp. Never was woe drest out in gayer colours, and when I had been led to the altar, I wished from my soul, I had been led, as Iphigenia was, to be sacrificed. I was sacrificed. I lost, not life indeed, but I lost all that makes life desirable – joy and peace of mind.

  Her bridegroom, Alexander Pendarves, was a fat, unkempt, sixty-year old member of Parliament with a regrettable fondness for drink. Mary was destined for a life of perpetual unhappiness. In the second year of her marriage, her husband became unwell, immobilised by gout. She nursed him patiently, teeth chattering in the freeze of an unheated house, distanced from her family and the culture upon which she had thrived. To fill her hours, she immersed herself in needlework and botanical painting Her husband’s sudden death in 1724 brought liberation, but not the salve of wealth. Alexander Pendarves had omitted to alter his will on their marriage and Mary was left comfortable, but compared to her aristocratic peers, un-wealthy. She relied on the kindness of relatives and friends to keep
in the social swim, moving from place to place as a house guest. Luckily for Mary, one of her closest friends was the Duchess of Portland, one of the richest women in England, and she offered her a home amid the creative hubbub of her eclectic artistic and scientific friends.

  Their group was christened the Hive because of its siren appeal to the most celebrated writers, painters, scientists and botanists of the day. Here, Mary flourished. She became acquainted with the great plant collector and man of science Joseph Banks and visited his house in London to see his collection of plant specimens and seeds and pore over the illustrations he had made during his voyage with Captain Cook. She began to not just study plants but to propagate and grow exotic species which she replicated in different mediums, including needlework.

  In 1743, Mary remarried, finding a convivial and supportive companion in an Irish clergyman, Patrick Delaney, who had cultivated a beautiful garden at Glasnevin, just outside of Dublin. There they redesigned the eleven-acre garden to make it one of the most beautiful in Ireland. Her botanical paintings and their translation into embroidery were admired by those who saw them and won her the attention of Queen Charlotte.

  Little of her needlework has survived. There is a white coverlet made for her godson which is preserved in Ulster Museum. It has a central medallion of entwining leaves and trellised knot work interspersed with floral motifs, and its intricate embroidery is testimony to her skill with needle and thread. There are decorative aprons in heavy silk, one decorated with white and purple violets, another with auriculas and geraniums and neckerchiefs embossed with raised poppies or ornamented with Madonna lilies. We know from her own letters that she made church furnishings with ‘a border of oak leaves and all sorts of roses’, and that she covered the seats of the chairs in her Irish home with embroidered cloth: for winter use an assortment of flowers on a brilliant blue background; for summer husks and leaves on cream linen.

  In the age of the Enlightenment, where intellectual attention was on the real world, where valued knowledge came from actual experience and observation, Mary Delany’s botanical paintings and needlework were no idle pastime but a mindful exploration of nature. It was through her painting and her sewing that she disseminated her discoveries of plant forms using the skills she felt best equipped her to share their complexities.

  Her botanical paintings were set on a black background the better to accentuate the detailed tones of each flower and leaf and each curving stem. Her needlework similarly and meticulously described the minutiae of living plants. Hers was no sentimental floral art, but a scientific scrutiny and presentation of the detail of plant forms. She would sketch flowers from life, dissect them and note each element. And she transferred her passion and knowledge of them onto the clothes that she wore. Her most celebrated masterpiece was a court dress which she wore, it is thought, at the grand Birthday Ball of Frederick Prince of Wales in 1751. Its bodice has a central row of pinks, flanked by lily of the valley. Its hem is a riot of flowers. But it is the overskirt which is the real triumph, made in black silk, it has over 200 species of embroidered flowers scattered in naturalistic abandon: winter jasmine, sweat peas, love-in-a-mist, anemones, tulips, bluebells, forget-me-nots, all drawn from life, each stem and stamen, each twist of leaf, each curling petal replicated in an undulation of shaded silk threads.

  It is now thought that while she would have been its designer, and indeed an extant sketchbook testifies to that fact, she might not have been the exclusive author of the needlework. The nature of its techniques – the padding of flowers to give a three-dimensional effect – point to more professional hands. But what is irrefutable is that its genesis originated in her knowledge and appreciation of plant forms and her vision of how best to transpose them into embroidery.

  When Patrick died in 1768, Mary Delany moved back to England and, now over seventy, began what proved to be an extraordinary legacy: the creation of a detailed and precise botanical encyclopaedia in which each plant specimen was reconstructed in layers of fine coloured paper, some with hundreds of small pieces. Plant collectors, gardeners and amateur botanists sent her unusual specimens to ensure their unique properties would be preserved in her paper mosaics. She was overwhelmed with botanical donations. Queen Charlotte even arranged for her to be sent interesting plant specimens from her own garden at Kew. She eventually filled ten volumes of what is called Flora Delanica, a compendium of 1,000 paper flowers. She died at the age of eighty-eight and, in 1897, her Flora Delanica was donated to the British Museum by her great niece, where it can still be viewed by appointment. Two examples of her work are on permanent display in the museum’s Enlightenment Gallery.

  Another needle painter, Mary Knowles, was a Quaker, poet, abolitionist, feminist, garden designer, botanical enthusiast and the celebrated exponent of ‘perfection in needlework’. Hearing of her talent in 1771, Queen Charlotte asked her to undertake a stitched version of Johann Zoffany’s portrait of the king. When it was completed, it was reported to be to the ‘entire satisfaction’ of the royal couple. Not undertaken as a commission, the Queen nevertheless pressed £800 on Mary, not as a fee but as a gift – as a gift it carried more meaning, representing a greater cache of royal intimacy and personal admiration. The sewn portrait of the king was treasured, remaining on display at Kew Palace for over 200 years. It is still safeguarded as part of the Royal Collection.

  The most applauded of all the eighteenth-century needle artists, however, was undoubtedly Mary Linwood. Her father was a bankrupt wine merchant, her mother the founder of a private boarding school for girls in Leicester, which Mary took over after her mother’s death and ran for the next fifty years. Mary sewed her first embroidered picture when she was just thirteen. Seven years later she was gaining a reputation as the finest needle painter of her day. She reproduced a painter’s art through sewing, imitating their brush strokes in specially dyed gradated shades of wool, overlaid with a lustre of silk thread. She copied the popular masterpieces of her day, including works by Raphael, Rubens, Reynolds, Gainsborough and Stubbs, with a sensual materiality that entranced the public. Her sewing skills won her a medal from the Society for the Encouragement of Arts for her ‘excellent imitation of pictures in needlework.’ British nobility invited her to make sewn copies of the works of art they harboured in their stately homes. John Constable, the celebrated landscape painter, had as his first commission the painting of one of her backgrounds. Queen Charlotte invited her to Windsor Castle and Napoleon was so pleased with two embroidered portraits of himself that he conferred on her the honour of the Freedom of Paris as an acknowledgement of her talent. The King of Poland was an admirer. Empress Catherine the Great of Russia was so taken with the exquisiteness of Mary Linwood’s needlework that she offered her £40,000 for her entire collection, but Mary refused, saying she preferred her work to remain in Britain.

  And so it did, touring the country to great acclaim in the first ever exhibition to be lit by gaslight, which enabled visitors to see it by night as well as by day. Excluded, because of her gender and medium, from exhibiting at the Royal Academy, she mounted a permanent exhibition of her own work in London’s Leicester Square in 1809. With galleries draped in scarlet and gold and silver cloth, her pictures were installed as centrepieces to thrillingly theatrical scenes. Her Lady Jane Grey Visited by the Abbot and the Keeper of the Throne at Night was staged in a prison cell, only accessed through a purposefully dark passageway. To see her sewn rendition of Gainsborough’s Cottage Children, visitors had to peer through the window of a reconstructed country cottage, complete with chimney. Her catalogue boasted that she had been ‘honoured with the most encouraging Commendation from Her Majesty and the Princesses’. The exhibition became an annual sensation, attracting over 40,000 paying customers each year and rivalling Madame Tussaud’s as a visitor attraction. It remained on display for thirty-six years. The Ladies Monthly Review described it as a triumph of ‘ingenuity and indefatigable industry . . . the taste and judgement, the variety and graduation of
tints cannot possibly be exceeded in effort by the pencil’. Yet it was with pencil in hand that Mary Linwood chose to be depicted for her portrait, a portfolio tucked under her arm. She defiantly claimed the role of artist, not needlewoman, for posterity.

  By the end of her life, at the age of ninety, public and artistic taste had changed. The British Museum declined Mary Linwood’s proffered donation of her remaining embroidered works. The House of Lords rejected a similar offer. What remained of her collection was sold at Christie’s Auction House in 1846, with the collection of 100 pieces fetching a mere £300. Her most celebrated work, The Judgement of Cain, which had taken her ten years to complete, went under the hammer for just £64. She was buried in Leicester, the city of her childhood, in a tomb erected by her friends. It praised her talents for shedding ‘a lustre on her age, her country and her sex’.

  These three artists – Delany, Knowles and Linwood – are scarcely remembered today, and yet, certainly Knowles and Linwod were household names in their time, women who crossed the threshold of the exclusive world of male fine art to revitalise the artistic and commercial value of sewn art. They attracted royal patronage, exhibited widely, made money and reputations as artists. But their time in the sun was temporary, their fame ephemeral, their sewn masterpieces now all but forgotten. Charles Dickens penned a poignant elegy to the transient fame of Mary Linwood. Writing of a visit he made to see her by then neglected exquisite embroideries, he lamented: