Threads of Life

by Clare Hunter

  I myself was one of the last visitors to that awful storehouse of thy life’s work, where an anchorite old man and woman took my shilling with a solemn wonder, and conducting me to a gloomy sepulchre of needlework dropping to pieces with dust and age and shrouded in twilight at high noon, left me there, chilled, frightened and alone. And now, in ghostly letters on all the dead walls of this dead town, I read thy honoured name, and find thy Last Supper, worked in Berlin Wool, invites inspection as a powerful excitement!

  Dickens was misguided in associating Linwood’s needle painting with what had become a national obsession: a craze for Berlin wool work. The finesse of her careful artistry, her assiduous supervision of the delicate gradated dyeing of fine wools, had little in common with the mass manufacture of wool-worked kits that inveigled their way into the homes, hands and hearts of Victorian womanhood. They had first appeared at the start of the nineteenth century and became so popular that by 1840 there were 14,000 designs in circulation. Berlin wool work, like the embroideries of Knowles and Linwood, emulated famous paintings. But there the comparison ended. The kits were accompanied with a chart for stitchers to follow, a simplified, reductive version of its original masterpiece. The skill required was minimal, the technique diminished to just one or two kinds of stitches. Sewn on coarse cloth, by the late 1850s they offered the spectacularly harsh colour range of the newly invented sharp-bright synthetic wool threads. They featured sentimental subjects like weary puppies, wistful children, cornucopias of flowers that were eagerly seized upon by women of all classes, keen to claim artistic credentials and parade their ‘art’ in the cram of their over-adorned houses. Looking back on the heyday of Berlin wool work, the author Emily Leigh Lowes was scathing in her assessment of its dubious charms, declaring in her popular classic of 1908, Chats on Old Lace and Needlework:

  When one think of those years which English women have spent over those wickedly hideous Berlin wool-work pictures, working their bad drawings and vividly crude colour into those awful canvases, and imagining that they were earning undying fame as notable women for all the succeeding ages, death was too good for Mary Linwood.

  Of course, it wasn’t Mary Linwood’s fault. Berlin wool embroidery had none of the textural re-interpretation of the masterpieces of Gainsborough or Rubens offered by her needle painting. Instead, the kits reduced the artistic genius of old masters and contemporary artworks to pixelated pastiches of the originals. The fad for Berlin wool work was a symptom of how far the creative nerve of domestic needlewomen had been crushed; extinguished to the point when women were seduced by the manufacturers’ insinuation that it was more artistic to imitate the paintings of celebrated male artists in an excess of lurid stitches than to devise original embroidery of their own – embroidery which, through the centuries, had become devalued as merely ‘women’s work’.

  It was nineteenth century soldiers and tailors who, for a little while, restored needlework’s value as an artistic pursuit. And it was the Great Exhibition of 1851, the brainchild of Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s consort, which showcased their masterpieces of intarsia patchwork (an intricately inlaid appliqué technique where tiny pieces of fabric are sewn together edge to edge, in imperceptible stitches, like a form of marquetry).

  These men did not call themselves ‘embroiderers.’ Steven Stokes titled himself ‘inventor’. John Brayshaw, another exhibitor, dubbed himself ‘producer’ and John Munro ‘artist-tailor.’ They were intent on displaying how superior their needlecraft was compared to the domestic sewing of women. Tailors especially with their trade threatened by the increasing competition of seamstresses, were determined to evidence their creative and technological acumen by allying themselves to the commercial world of inventors and the male domain of artists.

  J. Johnstone, from Aidrie in Scotland, exhibited a patchwork composed of 2,000 pieces depicting 21 historical scenes which had taken him eighteen years to assemble. The invalided soldier S. Stokes’s counterpane, ten by forty feet, illustrated The Battle of Cairo in nearly 10,000 scraps of fabric, which he had stitched together while ‘in a lying position.’ The Paisley tailor John Munro spent years creating his ‘The Royal Clothograph’ a darkly-wrought work made from thousands of woollen offcuts and sewn with the names of hundreds of men of learning and genius. On it he embroidered his message to the working man in just seven words: ’Push, Piety, Patience, Perseverance, Punctuality, Penetrate’ and ‘Please.’

  These quilts served a dual purpose. Not only were they exemplars of male artistry and industry, they were made to support the current temperance movement which advocated sobriety amongst the working classes. It was a crusade endorsed by the British military who, in the aftermath of the Crimean War (1853–1856), between Russian and European armies, a war in which both sides suffered cataclysmic losses, was faced with escalating alcohol addiction amongst convalescing and serving soldiers. Needlework, unlikely as it seems, was fostered as an alternative to drink. Soldiers, tutored by military tailors, used the off cuts of uniforms to sew patriotic portraits of military leaders and military victories. Their quilts were made to inspire fellow soldiers to abandon drink and, to this end, they not only exhibited their work at the 1851 exhibition but at the Soldiers’ Industrial Exhibitions which were held throughout the country.

  Tailors were also supporters of the temperance movement. The Paisley tailor John Munro toured his quilt around Scotland and Ireland and at the Belfast Revival Temperance Association, he urged his audience to practise the seven words he had embroidered on his quilt. A local newspaper of 1860 reported that he: ‘. . . illustrated therefrom what patience and perseverance could be accomplished and urged upon the young men present to practise these virtues and in order to do so, they should become total abstainers’. A Scottish tailor from Biggar, Menzies Moffat, included scenes from Robert Burns’ poem Tam O’ Shanter on his Star Tablecover. He featured the witch-dancing nightmare Tam encountered on his drink-fuelled journey home from a night out on the tiles as a palpable lesson to men tempted by alcohol. Menzies’ intarsia patchwork also carried a political message. He was a Chartist, a campaigner for electoral reform, and, on the back of his Star Tablecover, he beaded the slogan: ‘The Reform Bill is the Tailor’s Will.’ He carried his quilt as a banner in the 1845 reform demonstrations.

  Menzies Moffat toured his Star Tablecloth and another of his creations the Royal Crimean Patchwork Tablecover around the country. The latter was a remarkable tour de force in needlework, with eighty-one figures pieced on its backcloth composed of tiny pieces arranged in precise geometric symmetry. His chosen characters included Napoleon, Rob Roy, William Wallace, Tom Thumb and Robin Hood: outlaws turned champions, battle commanders and popular heroes. It took him seven years to sew the 5,000 and more scraps of cloth together. A splendid typographical poster announced the display of his quilts in his home town of Biggar. It is a triumph of eclectic Victorian fonts.

  Menzies Moffat‘s claim of ‘Works of Art’ was endorsed elsewhere on his poster as he boasted that the exhibition ‘had been patronised by the nobility, gentry, clergy and a good many eminent painters’. It demonstrated his hope that his quilts would secure him a more elevated reputation than that of ‘tailor,’ garnering critical acclaim and bringing him a welcome financial return. Like the soldiers, many tailors toured and exhibited their intarsia patchworks, charging an entry fee for admission. John Brayshaw, a tailor from Lancaster, toured his quilt around the country, charging 6d for entry. When he attracted one thousand paying customers in Penrith he netted twenty-five pounds, a tidy sum in the days when the weekly wage for a working man was scarcely one pound.

  Many of the quilts displayed at the Great Exhibition of 1851 did not survive. Prince Albert’s Crystal Palace was flawed: leaks appeared, and water dripped down onto most of the masterpieces made by men, causing irreparable damage. But those that escaped, and others made later, give us a glimpse of a rare excursion by men of the nineteenth-century to promote patience, industry and sobriety and restore the
ir social values through needlework.

  14

  Art

  It was the staff and students of the Department of Needlework at Glasgow School of Art, who, at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, scooped embroidery from its undervalued past and set it firmly in the future as a stand-alone art form. They didn’t use their needlework to register status, to honour tradition or to send out a message. Instead they experimented with its potential as art. They explored its sensuality, the visual impact of its techniques and the possibilities of combining fabrics, colours and textures to create an unexpected harmony. One of the artists to emerge from that time was Margaret Macdonald. She was the most adventurous. She incorporated string, beads, cardboard, braid and leather into her embroideries and integrated them into artwork that was bold and unlike anything that had gone before.

  Margaret Macdonald enrolled as a student at the Glasgow School of Art in 1890 with her sister Frances. They had relocated from England where, given the maturity of their student work, it is likely they had already received some art tuition. They arrived in a Glasgow that was reaching the zenith of its industrial and manufacturing power. With its expanding coastal and international trade, the city was fast becoming one of the richest in the world, dubbed the ‘second city of the Empire’. Glasgow’s prosperity and aspiration was evident in the development of middle-class districts of distinction and discernment. Booming trade and burgeoning consumerism encouraged stylish department stores to open in the city centre and impressive new educational, manufacturing and recreational buildings to be constructed. Electric street lighting, an underground railway system and a pedestrian tunnel under Glasgow’s River Clyde were all underway. This was a city confident about its future.

  The relationship between Glasgow’s industrial, manufacturing, and artistic sectors was a close one. In a city lacking an aristocracy, it was the industrialists who were its cultural patrons. The Glasgow School of Art had been established in 1845, originally as a seed bed of technical design, innovation and quality to feed into the city’s commercial world. Its emerging skilled creators were being schooled to ensure that the city continued to foster a profitable advantage. In 1882 the school was given the largest government grant of any art school in Great Britain, a sum calculated on the number of prizes it had been awarded the previous year – more awards than anywhere else in Scotland.

  When the Macdonald sisters arrived, the school was under the enlightened and dynamic directorship of Fra Newbery. He was an enthusiastic socialist who was convinced of the agency of the arts as a tool of cultural, economic and social progress determined through collaboration between consumer, creator and manufacturer. In 1892, two years after the sisters arrived at the school, Newbery took advantage of a new source of grant-aid made available by the 1890 Government Act that redirected the tax on alcohol to invest in the technical and manual instruction of workers. He secured funding to establish a Technical Art Studio at the art school to provide students with a thorough induction not only in technical processes of a wide range of crafts, but also to the necessity of vision, innovation and experiment in design and production. He believed in a collective vision in which exterior and interior design were inter-dependent and, more radically, in which gender and genre were intermixed. The result was a vigorous new artistic expression that brought men and women together in experimental creative enterprise. What they eventually produced became known as the Glasgow Style, a form of decorative arts that represented the talents of a group of young designers and artists, men and women, from the West of Scotland. Though they were influenced by contemporary movements – European Art Nouveau and the Aesthetic Movement – they forged their own distinctive approach. Working in a wide range of materials, their style was epitomised by the contrast of strong verticals and sinuous curves, a stylisation of nature – birds, roses, leaves – into simple shapes and their referencing of Celtic motifs.

  Newbery, eschewing the separation of the sexes enforced by other art schools, proffered a challenge to the long-held discrimination against women’s involvement in fine art. At Glasgow School of Art, male and female students shared the same studio space, attended joint lectures and were encouraged to collaborate on projects. Women could also attend life-drawing classes, albeit separated from their male peers. It was a daring move, criticised by some. In Sir William Fettes Douglas’s prize-giving speech to the students of Edinburgh College of Arts in 1885, the self-taught painter, art connoisseur and eminent president of the Royal Scottish Academy was scathing of women’s entry to art colleges, declaring that they ‘rarely if ever applied themselves’ and ridiculing their presence, saying that ‘they go about dressed to look as much like men as possible and miserable, puny, little men they make . . . [and] their works are like them.’ Fra Newbery, however, was undaunted. He not only encouraged equal participation of women students, but also employed female teachers at the school, including former student Jessie Rowat, who became Jessie Newbery when they married in 1889.

  Contemporary male attitudes typified by those of Sir William Fettes Douglas prevailed in the male-dominated arts world of the late nineteenth century. Women were excluded from full-time attendance at art colleges (even the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, the heartbeat of contemporary art, did not open its doors to women as full-time students until 1897) and were confined to the limited arts curriculum their schools or private tutors deemed appropriate for their sex: pastels, watercolours, drawing and miniatures. Few worked in oils or on a large scale. Those women who did gain a modicum of access to advanced arts tuition – permitted from the 1850s onwards to attend art colleges’ day or evening classes – did so on the understanding that they were fostering a career in teaching or following their own amateur enthusiasm, and that they were in no way aspiring to a professional status. This was emphatically a male preserve. Women were barred from membership of art institutions, societies and clubs and excluded from the Royal Academy, the main platform in Britain from which to secure an artistic reputation. And women exerted no influence over the exhibiting, commissioning, collecting or critiquing of works of art. What was even more pernicious was that they had little opportunity to represent themselves publicly through art. In a male-controlled artistic culture, the image of women was interpreted through the lens of masculinity. Even the paintings of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood – the group of English painters founded in 1848 by William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who set out to challenge the stale academia of art with their new style of detailed realism, depicted women as victims of sexual transgression or of a love betrayed. Their women were largely solitary, isolated from the world, portrayed as martyrs to a tragic fate. There was little imagery in the art of the late nineteenth century that conveyed women’s actual experiences or emotions, that expressed female sexuality or interrogated the strictures of women’s domestic constraints. And most women, with limited social mobility and often chaperoned, were restricted as observers of the world they lived in, with few opportunities to witness the world independently, never mind interpret it through their art.

  The female artists of Glasgow School of Art were the first women in Scotland to encroach on its hitherto masculine artistic stronghold. Dubbed the ‘Glasgow Girls’ in the 1960s, (not with derogatory implications, but to place them on par with the Glasgow Boys, a collective of male painters who were their peers) these women were pioneers. They were educated, middle-class and independent. Women who had no financial need to storm the barricades of a defensive male art elite and no need to risk ridicule as women artists in a precarious, prejudiced world. But they were on a mission to demonstrate that their interpretations of crafts such as book-binding, metalwork, enamelling as well as needlework were as valid as artistic expressions as paint, as worthy of judgement alongside its male counterparts of sculpture and painting. These women established their own studios, exhibited internationally, submitted work for competitions, gave lectures, wrote articles, taught other women,
enlightened men and claimed their place in the art world. They won awards, critical acclaim, international recognition, admiration and artistic equality by putting on an indisputably professional show.

  In 1892 they set up the Glasgow Society of Women Artists, the first of its kind in Scotland. Lucy Raeburn (1869–1952) founded The Magazine which was published from 1893–1896 and became a platform for original writings and designs by students at Glasgow School of Art. Jessie M. King (1875–1949) designed for Liberty, illustrated over 70 books and exhibited widely in India, Germany, Italy and elsewhere. Margaret Gilmour (1860–1942) and De Courcy Lewthwaite Dewar (1878–1959) took on the male preserve of metalworking with Gilmour mounting her own display of beaten brass and copperwork at the Glasgow International Exhibition of 1901. Their achievements mirrored the progress of other women in other male-held fields such as science, medicine and education. Women on the cusp of the twentieth century were intent on broadening their professional and political horizons and with the suffragette movement gathering momentum, the endeavours of Glasgow’s aspiring women artists were lending support to a wider social change by using their art to make the talents and achievements of women more visible.

  Unlike the female artists of earlier times, such as the needle-painter Mary Linwood of the eighteenth century, the embroidery students of Glasgow School of Art were not interested in aping a male artistry. Instead, they were determined to have needlework accepted as a distinct art form, worthy of critical attention alongside painting and sculpture and removed from its limiting association with a constructed view of the ‘feminine’. Margaret Macdonald was one of those students intent on change. By 1902 the department was rewarded with government approval and the embroidery course at Glasgow School of Art was certificated with its own diploma. Needlework became the most important feature of the school’s Department of Applied Arts.