Threads of Life

by Clare Hunter

  There were precedents to the elevation of needlework to art needlework, but their aim had been restorative rather than truly innovatory. The Arts and Crafts movement of the mid-nineteenth century, led by the designer William Morris and the writer John Ruskin, was anti-machine. It championed needlework as a complaint against the mechanical reproduction of ancient hand crafts, the conditions of home workers and the brain numbing craze for Berlin wool work. They had the philanthropic vision of stemming the mass migration from the countryside of workers seeking new opportunities in the expanding industrial cities by revitalising the market for rural artisan skills. Morris pined for a return to the chivalric splendour of medieval crafts, when embroidery had status and commissionable value. His textile designs, did not mimic but deferred to the imagery of the past and found favour with the Gothic revivalist architecture of the day. His company Morris and Co., established in 1875, employed artists as designers. Yet, while he did learn to sew, it was the women of Morris’s family and employees at the Royal School of Needlework who stitched his designs. Despite being a noted campaigner for women’s suffrage, he maintained the gendered conception of men as designers and artists and women as executors of their vision.

  The philanthropic Royal School of Needlework had been established in 1882 to provide employment for impecunious gentlewomen. A reference from a clergyman was an entry requirement. Its aim was ambitious: ‘to restore ornamental needlework to the high place it once held among the decorative arts and advance the employment of women in those arts in which they are best able to excel.’ Students sewed for seven hours a day and were paid five shillings for the privilege. Individuality was frowned upon. Precision of stitchery and a schooled uniformity was its ideal: to each woman the same stitch, to each stitch the same method, to each method the same execution. Its aim was to ensure that if one stitcher left off and another took her place, it would be impossible to detect the change. Sewers had to faithfully copy what was placed before them. Such disciplined considerations won commissions, royal patronage and the involvement of the most celebrated male artists of the day, including William Morris, of course, but also Edward Burne-Jones, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Walter Crane. By 1883 the school had 200 employees.

  But it was not all plain sailing. Despite the eagle eye of its supervisor, Miss Higgins, who gamely tried to keep up standards, there were errors in ‘the taking of orders’, the ‘spoiling of materials’ and the ‘misdirecting of parcels’. Its early travails were surmounted, however, and the school proved so successful that it was soon emulated elsewhere. The Fisherton de la Mere Industries in Wiltshire created employment for disabled women and the Leek School of Embroidery in Staffordshire ran embroidery classes, exhibited its products, supplied London stores and designed its own kits. The Haslemere Peasant Industries established in Surrey combined the designs of artists with the skills of locally taught weavers and embroiderers to produce a range of high quality embroidered and woven textiles. Three similar schools were established in Scotland. Art needlework was born.

  In America, the forty-nine-year old Candace Wheeler, visiting the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition in 1876, was inspired by the work of the Royal School of Needlework. She used it as a model that she adapted to meet the needs of impoverished women in the United States, particularly those affected by the death or injury of their husbands or fathers during the Civil War. A feminist, Candace Wheeler thought that financial independence rather than political emancipation was the priority for women’s social progress. To this end, she founded the Society of Decorative Arts in New York in 1877 to offer women artists and artisans training in the applied arts, and create markets for their work. In 1878 she set up the New York Exchange for Women’s Work, a pioneering enterprise through which women could sell any of their home-produced products, needlework included. The following year she co-founded the interior design firm Tiffany & Wheeler with Louis Comfort Tiffany and became the first woman in America to have interior design as her profession. In 1883 she formed her own company, Associated Artists, run entirely by women. Wheeler transformed American taste by introducing uniquely American designs inspired by native plants and the nature of an American light. In 1892 she established a creative colony in the Catskill Mountains, which became a haven for single women artists and writers. Throughout her career her main purpose was to provide a platform for women’s talents and art though which women could realise not just professional worth, but also financial power.

  The Royal School of Needlework, meanwhile, went from strength to strength. In 1879 it expanded its operation and opened a school in Glasgow. But the Glasgow students proved wayward and dilettante. Miss Higgins, London’s doughty workshop supervisor, was despatched to muster discipline but even she could not enforce the required control. Princess Charlotte was persuaded to administer encouragement but her efforts proved equally ineffectual. The school closed in 1885, the same year Fra Newbery took up his post as the new Director of the Glasgow School of Art. Seven years later, under the leadership of his wife, Jessie Newbery, the School established its own embroidery department, the Department of Needlework, to foster a very different approach to the teaching of sewing than that promulgated by London’s Royal School of Needlework. It was a radical departure from anything that had gone before, encouraging an individualistic stamp and exploration of materials and their effect. It was Jessie Newbery who heralded a new consciousness of the sensual potential of surface stitchery, unloosed from tradition, not looking back like Morris, but forward. Embroidery would never be the same again.

  As its champion, Jessie Newbery embedded art needlework at the heart of the design curriculum of Glasgow’s School of Art, insisting that her female students be exposed to the same curriculum as men. Women investigated botanical forms through dissection and drawing. They attended life-drawing classes, sketching live models to become better acquainted with the structure and spatial presence of the human body. Nature as a subject was reduced to its most basic elements – the bend of a stem, the curl of a leaf, the curve of a spine or the incline of a head – and the relationship between each. What she was interested in was the possibility of balance between apparent opposites and between linear and circular forms.

  Newbery advocated a new, subtler colour palette in antithesis to the sharp colours of Berlin wools: pale lilacs, pinks, greys and greens backgrounded in cream or dark colours. The rose, the traditional symbol of femininity, was her main emblem, but not the rose in full bloom beloved by traditional embroiderers or its geometrically rendered abstraction found in Muslim embroidery. She simplified its petals in appliqué as connected segments of flattened curves with no attempt at naturalism, shading or ornamentation. Her rose, with its strong, clear structure, became a new contemporary interpretation of the bolder feminine. It became known as the Glasgow Rose.

  In their needlework, her students were encouraged to ensure that each element of their work had a role in its design. Hems were not just a neatening of frayed edges, but an integral part of the whole, folded back and stitched in contrasting colours or studded in glass beads. The stitching used to outline and anchor an appliquéd shape on its background was sewn in a contrasting colour or with braid to add definition and emphasise the shape itself. Beads, ribbons, paper and card were incorporated to introduce a variety of surfaces and weights, a variance of textures that Margaret Macdonald was to adopt so enthusiastically in her subsequent work. Image was married to text. Nothing was hidden from view; everything was arranged in relation to something else. This was not sewing as a philanthropic salve to middle-class women who had fallen on hard times, but the elevation of needlework as a textural art form, an assertion of its rightful place as a higher art.

  The Studio magazine, the influential illustrated magazine devoted to decorative art published from 1893 onwards, applauded their efforts:

  It is not funded on tradition and has no resemblance to any style that preceded it. The new embroidery is common in this respect to the oldest arts. It takes the everyday
things in life, and by the simple individualistic process, seeks to make them beautiful as well as useful.

  Jessie Newbery’s aim was to recalibrate the prevailing attitude to needlework and demonstrate that utility and beauty were not irreconcilable. She became a proselytiser of its agency, wanting it to be within everyone’s reach, to all classes and both genders. By using the most basic of fabrics, such as linen cotton, calico, flannel and hessian, she showed how affordable it was. By adopting simple designs and the easier technique of appliqué (where the use of shapes cut out of fabric, their outline sewn onto the backing cloth, saved stitchers the time and effort to embroider the whole of a motif) she made needlework more accessible. Always a zealous educator, in the 1890s she set up needlework and design courses that ran every Saturday, open to all at a small cost. Over 100 women attended. More classes were organised for workers in thread mills, in factories, for women in the co-operative guilds and for ‘commercial men engaged in textile and allied trades’. The latter course attracted manufacturers, calico printers and salesmen. There was also a course for teachers to work towards a Certificate in Art Needlework and Embroidery.

  Jessie Newbery was an active supporter of the suffragette cause and became involved in other initiatives to bolster the place of women in society and secure visibility for women’s art. She became a member of the Glasgow Society of Women Artists, which, by 1895, had sufficient funds to purchase its own headquarters becoming the first women artists’ residential club in the country. In 1910 she helped the Women’s Social and Political Union organise a Grand Bazaar of women’s craft: women’s art made by women and bought by women. In a world where consumerism was on the rise, the agency of women as consumers purchasing items to be displayed in their homes offered a new market and a much-needed platform for women’s art and crafts.

  It was not only through what she did that Jessie Newbery promoted the new artistry of needlework, but also through what she wore. She abandoned corsets in favour of a looser style of ‘artistic dress’, which allowed fabric to fall naturally rather than being manipulated into the tight, uncomfortable shapes that fashion dictated. She embellished her dresses with embroidered collars and belts and decorative hems. For my wedding I emulated her and, on a dress of dark forest-green velvet, I sewed a deep curve of cream silk around its neckline on which I appliquéd a crust of pale pink Glasgow roses lying among embroidered leaves. It was my way of claiming my city and my heritage: the heritage of the independent and imaginative Glasgow Girls whose mission was to create beauty and art through simple embroidery on cloth.

  Ann Macbeth, another embroidery student, became Jessie Newbery’s assistant in 1901. Together they made suffragette banners and co-produced a banner for the city that was emblazoned with its coat of arms. It won a silver medal at the First International Exhibition of Modern and Decorative Art in Turin in 1902. One of Ann Macbeth’s banners, originally made as a quilt, was embroidered with eighty signatures of suffragettes who had been incarcerated and force fed in Holloway Prison. It was carried aloft in the From Prison to Citizenship Rally of 1911. She herself went through the same ordeal, an experience which compromised her health thereafter. Like Jessie Newbery, she wore artistic dress decorated with deep appliquéd collars and, like her, she was an impassioned teacher. She developed a unique approach to needlework education and in 1911, with a fellow teacher Margaret Swanson, published Educational Needlework, a textbook for teaching needlework to children. It was as revolutionary as the embroidery emerging from Glasgow School of Art. With their mission to ‘take Needlecraft from its humble place as the Cinderella of manual arts and to show how it may become a means of general and even of higher education’ they declared that ‘the boy or girl who uses material and needle freely in independent design . . . ranks on a plane with the scientist who makes a hypothesis, with the artist who makes an experiment’. Macbeth and Swanson discarded the concept of needlework being a tool of discipline and duty and instead advocated a delight and ease with sewing. They based their educational theories on the physiological realities of the development of children’s eyesight and hand-to-eye co-ordination. Children, working with simple stitches in brightly coloured thread, were taught to fashion something both practical and decorative: a small bag, a pen wiper, a needle case. The emphasis was on incremental creativity: technical competence and design confidence, coaxed step by step through pleasurable small projects. The book heralded the end of samplers as the best method of needlework education. Macbeth and Swanson’s innovative sewing curriculum was adopted throughout the country and overseas and it became the mainstay of needlework education until the late 1950s.

  Of all the Glasgow Girls, it was Margaret Macdonald who was the most courageous and inventive in her needlework, and who had the most inquiring mind of them all. She was not the most prolific of the embroiderers to emerge from Glasgow School of Art, nor the most celebrated, but her work was the most experimental. I have a photograph of her pinned on my workshop wall. She is my chosen muse, my guide. As I have threaded my way through a professional life in textiles, it is to her I turn to tug on my sleeve and egg me on.

  Margaret and her sister Frances made their mark early at Glasgow School of Art, with a fellow student describing them as the ‘brilliant Macdonald sisters’. They embraced a wide variety of media, from poster art to bookbinding, metalwork, panels fashioned from gesso (a thick plaster medium generally used for priming paintings), watercolours and embroidery. Their water-colours dwelled on themes of women’s choices, constraint and relationships; emotion and experiences were abstracted to symbolic interpretation implied by the balance of colour and composition. In 1892 they met two male students who were attending night classes. Herbert MacNair was an apprentice with the Glasgow architect John Honeyman and Charles Rennie Mackintosh – the son of a police superintendent and the fourth of eleven children – was a draughtsman with the same firm. The quartet, encouraged by Fra Newbery, began to collaborate on projects. The strange, androgynous and elongated figures that featured in their work earned them the nickname ‘The Spook School’. Eventually they became known simply as ‘The Four’, carving out a reputation that was both non-conformist and, to many, eccentric.

  In 1896 the sisters set up their own studio in the city centre, although they continued to work with Herbert MacNair and Charles Rennie Mackintosh on specific projects. That same year, Charles painted a watercolour entitled Part Seen, Imagined Past. It is thought to be a full-length portrait of Margaret in profile, her thick hair swept in a dark drape around her head. Her body is undefined, wrapped in a tangle of rose briars that flower at their upper stems, and behind her head is a sphere of iridescent turquoise. In 1899 Frances and Herbert got married and moved to Liverpool, and Charles saw his design for a new art school become a reality. The following year, Margaret and Charles got married. But the four still worked together. They were invited to participate in the VIIIth Secession Exhibition in Vienna in 1900, an international exhibition organised by a group of Austrian painters, architects and sculptors who had formed a movement called the Vienna Secession as a rejection of the confines of art as dictated by academic and nationalistic tradition. The Austrian symbolist artist Gustav Klimt was its first President. The exhibition focussed on the Applied Arts and called for individual pieces of artistic craftsmanship. Margaret and Charles accepted the all-expenses-paid invitation to display their work, and although Frances and Herbert, now new parents, had to forgo the adventure of travel, they joined in its execution. Together they created The Scottish Room. Its white interior accentuated the timbre of the objects it contained fashioned in wood, metal, glass, fabric and gesso and in a collective ideal of simplicity and textured harmony. The Scottish Room caused a sensation and everything in it sold. While some critics found the stark interior unsettling, most were fulsome in their praise for a design that could ‘animate the inanimate’, appear both ‘personal and curious’ and achieve ‘a strange accord’. Margaret was admired for the ‘jewel-like embroidery’ of the
appliquéd curtains she exhibited. She and Charles were led through the streets of Vienna by admiring students in a cart strewn with flowers, and Margaret’s work had a strong influence on Gustav Klimt. It spurred him into an even more robust experimentation with pattern and texture, of the play of light on sheens of gold, an approach that rewarded him with fame and eventual fortune.

  As the MacNairs immersed themselves in impressing their innovative style on Liverpool, Margaret and Charles’ creativity became evermore closely intertwined. Following their triumph in Vienna, they were commissioned to design a music salon for Fritz Waerndorfer, a major Viennese arts patron, and as her contribution Margaret began work on a series of ambitious gesso panels called The Seven Princesses. Her use of gesso was unusual. Rather than employing its thick consistency as a base for paint, she manipulated it as a three-dimensional medium, piping it onto canvas to create raised linear sweeps and moulding it to fashion a crust of roses. Under her hands, her gesso panels became more like appliqué, heavily textured, studded with glass beads and inlaid with mother of pearl.

  In 1901 Margaret and Charles submitted a joint design for House for an Arts Lover to a competition organised by the German design magazine Zeitschrift Für Innendekoration, which invited entries only of ‘genuinely original modern designs’. It was conceived with The Four’s trademark white backdrop, its long side windows accentuated by a series of twelve identical fabric hangings, each containing a solitary female figure, her hair running the length of her body, her disembodied frame demarcated by linear vertical lines punctuated in small roundels. Their design didn’t win the competition, but it won the Mackintoshes plaudits and increased international interest.