The Mount School had produced more distinguished needlework in its earlier years. Isabel Richardson, a student in 1790, had embroidered 'a map of England upon white silk in which the shape of each county was defined with the exactness of outline equal to any work of an engraver. This was done in chenille, whilst the names of the counties and of the chief towns were worked in silk.' This was geography for girls, in silk: a version of Spilsbury.
Thou shalt not wash dishes, nor yet feed the swine;
But sit on a cushion and sew a fine seam,
And feed upon strawberries, sugar and cream.
That nursery rhyme was a promise for nice girls who married well.
My wreath wasn't a contender in this creative league, but I finished it. I am, or used to be, a completer. I still have it, and the chair onto the seat of which it is fitted. It is a little bald and worn now, like me, but it survives. Its crude roses and its strange blue ivy leaves and its little twirls of gold tendril bear witness to years of intermittent toil. The brown background is thinning, and it is uneven in colour and texture: I must have run out of wool, and bought odd batches. My father warned me about that kind of hazard, but not very seriously. He knew there were more things to worry about in life than skeins of unmatched wool.
Literature records bad embroidery and bad tapestry as well as good. Mary Russell Mitford makes fun of the uselessness of school samplers, describing in detail one with a plain pink border, a zigzag green border, a crimson wavy border, and a brown and more complicated zigzag border, all enclosing the alphabet
great and small, in every colour of the rainbow, followed by a row of figures flanked on one side by a flower, name unknown, tulip, poppy, lily – something orange and scarlet, or scarlet orange; on the other by the more famous rosebud; then divers sentences, religious and moral ... then, last and finest, the landscape in all its glory ... In the centre was a house of bright scarlet, with yellow windows, a green door, and a blue roof: on one side, a man with a dog; on the other, a woman with a cat – this is Lucy's information; I should never have guessed, except in colour, between the man and the woman, the dog and the cat; they were in form, height and size alike to a thread.
And in Arnold Bennett's The Old Wives' Tale, the young Constance Baines passes time with what is clearly a very unattractive piece of needlework, destined for a firescreen. When we meet her, in chapter i, 'The Square', she is at work on the mustardcoloured background of a bunch of roses, having finished the more interesting petals and leaves:
The whole design was in squares – the gradations of red and greens, the curves of the smallest buds – all was contrived in squares, with a result that mimicked a fragment of uncompromising Axminster carpet. Still, the fine texture of the wool, the regular and rapid grace of those fingers moving incessantly at back and front of the canvas, the gentle sound of the wool as it passed through the holes, and the intent, youthful earnestness of that lowered gaze, excused ... an activity which, on artistic grounds, could not possibly be justified.
Bennett appreciated the tableau of young Constance with her wools, just as Elizabeth Gaskell, in Sylvia's Lovers, celebrates the aesthetic and erotic advantages of spinning.
The pretty sound of the buzzing, whirring motion, the attitude of the spinner, foot and hand alike engaged in the business – the bunch of gay coloured ribbon that ties the bundle of flax on the rock – all make it into a picturesque piece of domestic business that may rival harp-playing any day for the amount of softness and grace which it calls out.
Gaskell invokes the round arm, the tapered hand and the little foot on the 'traddle' in its smartly buckled shoe. This spinster knew what she was doing. But I don't think that we, secluded as we were in our girls' boarding school, were aware of the seductive aspects of our craft activities. There was nobody to watch us.
We were, however, well aware of the disastrous implications of a one-off Whitsuntide sporting event, which was, unusually, attended by boys from our brother school. We girls, aged fifteen and sixteen, were made to do gymnastics in the school garden wearing aertex shirts and our regulation navy school knickers. Not even shorts, which would have been bad enough, but knickers. We couldn't believe it, we couldn't understand how our squeamish, ladylike staff could possibly have been so naive as to endorse such an exhibition. We knew it was a bad idea. How the boys gathered and gazed!
I have made dozens of cushions since that first pseudo-Jacobean wreath. The house is uselessly full of them. Most of them are simple geometric patterns, designed by me, though I have done a couple of Ben Nicholsons (transferred to canvas by my son Joe) and a Kaffe Fassett cauliflower. Flowers and wreaths don't come out so well, or not in the gross-point stitch sizes that I deploy. Christopher Fry had a magnificent firescreen showing the house and garden in Bristol where he had lived, beautifully worked by his wife Phyllis, and I thought of trying something along those lines, but it was too difficult for me. I never got beyond the sketch.
I didn't know who Kaffe Fassett was when I bought the cauliflower canvas. I bought it because it was so eccentric. I was stitching away at it on an aeroplane somewhere, I think on the way to the Gothenburg Book Fair, when the stewardess said to me, 'Oh, what a lovely Kaffe Fassett!' I pretended I'd known who he was all along, but for a long time after this incident I thought he was a Scandinavian woman, not a North American man.
You can't easily do embroidery on aeroplanes now. You can't take scissors or needles through security.
Auntie Phyl said to me once, reprovingly, watching my stitching, 'That needle's like a poker.' I was taken aback. I don't think it had then occurred to me that needles came in different sizes. To me, a needle was a needle. With my mother, it was nearly impossible to do anything right; with my aunt, it was quite hard to do anything wrong. But on this occasion, with my selection of a needle, I had managed it.
My father and the Duke of Windsor both did tapestry. They had little else in common. And the Duke of Windsor also did jigsaws. He and Wallis Simpson could be said to have fallen in love over, or at least in the vicinity of, a jigsaw. In January 1932 Wallis Simpson was invited by the prince with her second husband Ernest Simpson to a weekend at Fort Belvedere in Windsor Great Park, as she records in her memoirs, The Heart has its Reasons (1956). There she discovered the Prince of Wales (as he then was) surrounded by cairn terriers and at work on a tapestry in gros point. Queen Mary had taught him how to do it, he said, and it was destined to cover a backgammon table. (A tapestry-covered backgammon table is an anomalous concept, rather like a biscuit tin made to look like a leather-bound novel by Walter Scott, but that is what Mrs Simpson said he said.) In the evening, after a dinner of oysters and roast beef, some guests played cards, while others worked on 'an extremely complicated jigsaw puzzle of which the pieces lay scattered on a large table in front of the main window'. It sounds quite like Bryn but on a grander scale.
There is a photograph of the prince, by now King Edward VIII, at work, though not very hard at work, on a large jigsaw on the deck of Lady Yule's yacht, the Nahlin, defiantly and adulterously afloat in the Adriatic in the summer of 1936. It is not clear whether the puzzle itself portrays a bathing beauty, or whether a bathing beauty is painted on the table on which the puzzle pieces lie. We at Bryn wouldn't have approved of it either way. We didn't do bathing beauties (though Auntie Phyl did go on a cruise to Norway in the summer of 1951, in a second-class cabin of the M/S Venus of the Bergen Steamship Company). Wallis Simpson and Lady Diana Cooper were both of the royal party, but they do not appear in the photograph. We know that after the Abdication the Windsors went on doing jigsaws for the rest of their lives, commissioning handmade, personal, opus sectile jigsaws, many of them incorporating a little dog-shaped piece, a whimsy, for they loved their cairn terriers and their pugs, just as Auntie Phyl loved her Westies, and my father his Staffordshire bull terrier Anna.
Windsor was full of tapestry wool. Henry James's effeminate and wealthy friend the novelist Howard Sturgis lived in a 'chintzy, cosy Victorian
house' called Queen's Acre (or Qu'acre) on the edge of Windsor Great Park, where he was perpetually engaged in needlepoint. He would stitch and embroider over cups of tea and cakes and gossip. His literary friends tolerated this, though some of them thought he was too much under the cosy spell of Berlin wool and his lazy dog Misery. I don't know when or why my father took up needlepoint. It certainly wasn't through idleness, as he worked too hard all his life. It was probably to ward off melancholy, to which, like Dr Johnson, he was prey. When he was dying of mesothelioma in the Slotervaart Hospital in Amsterdam, I bought him a canvas of Bargello work, thinking it might help him to pass the time. He didn't start it for days, but then he began to work it, slowly, sadly, patiently.
My father used to complain that Bargello, unlike gros point or petit point, used up too much wool too quickly. It was enjoyable to do, but it was expensive and wasteful. It didn't kill time slowly enough. But even so, he didn't have time to complete this design. He didn't finish it, as Auntie Phyl didn't finish the last Porlock jigsaw. I finished it for him. I have it still.
XLIII
Bargello or Florentine work is geometric. Its stitches are like tesserae, and they work in steps. They do not attempt to reproduce curves. Kaffe Fassett has done geometry, but he has also done more ambitious representational designs, like my cauliflower. Why would one want to reproduce a cauliflower in wool? Or to crochet (as the wife of one of my friends has done) a Full British Breakfast? Or to imitate a marble bust in mosaic grisaille? Or to embroider a portrait of Napoleon? Or to make a biscuit tin look like a straw basket or a bird's nest or a book?
The desire to reproduce one medium in terms of another, or to imitate natural objects in unnatural substances, is a curious, widespread and deep-rooted human need. It may or may not be at the mysterious root of art. The very difficulties of translation are a challenge. Workers in pietra dura, mosaicists, micromosaicists and jigsaw-puzzle manufacturers have noted that some subjects reproduce much better than others, and are particularly popular with the commissioning and purchasing public. Jigsaw connoisseurs, when cross-questioned, often confess to a liking not for cottage gardens with hollyhocks (popular though these remain) but for brickwork and architecture. Dutch Old Masters and English cathedrals feature high on their lists. Ships with a lot of rigging seem to offer allied attractions.
The great craftsmen knew both sides of this challenge – the satisfaction of a good reproduction; the difficulty of an unlikely subject. French master goldsmith Louis Siries, the eighteenth-century director of the Grand Ducal Workshops of Florence (the Opificio delle Pietre Dure), proposed various subjects to Ferdinand III of Lorraine to adorn the vastnesses of the Palazzo Pitti, including a cycle of hardstone pictures representing 'ancient buildings', because, he said, 'architecture is the subject that can be represented most perfectly'. The happiest result of this suggestion was a fine stone picture of the Tomb of Cecilia Metella, worked in pietra dura, marble, alabaster and gilt bronze, showing the antique tomb, some peasants, two cows and a goat. It was completed in 1795, travelled around a little after the French invasion of Italy, was presented to Pope Pius IX by Leopoldo II in 1857 and is now in the Gilbert Collection, along with several other, less fortunate hardstone pictures.
Reproduction and copying can be dangerous. They may be regarded as appropriation or theft. Goethe, on his Italian Journey, fell into difficulties with the authorities at Malcesina for trying to sketch the old tower as a memento of his visit. He gathered what he took at first to be an admiring crowd, but one of the spectators suddenly stepped forward and tore up the drawing on his pad. Soon the podestà arrived on the scene, accusing Goethe of breaching military security by making a record of their fortress. He protested that it was not a fortress but a ruin, which drew the response: 'If it were only a ruin, why was it worth noticing?' Goethe was obliged to describe the picturesque beauty of the scene with exaggerated rapture, praising even 'the ivy which had luxuriantly covered the rocks and walls for so many centuries'. Eventually he persuaded the authorities of his innocence, but was left with the reflection, as so many of us have been, that 'man is indeed a strange creature, who, in order to enjoy something which he could perfectly well have enjoyed in peace and comfort and pleasant company, gets himself into trouble and danger because of an absurd desire to appropriate the world and everything it contains in a manner peculiar to himself.'
Mosaic artists have not confined themselves to the geometric and the architectural, to brickwork and ruins, where they have most chance of success. They have also, from antiquity, struggled to imitate and appropriate the organic, and have produced some extraordinarily naturalistic effects, effects far more remarkable and aesthetically pleasing even than a wool cauliflower. The stag hunt at Pella has an animal vitality that bounds through the little, hard, dry, gradated stones that compose it. Perhaps the most celebrated of antique Roman mosaics, known as The Doves of Pliny or the Capitoline Doves, shows four closely observed doves perching on the lip of and drinking from a round bowl. The realism and artistry of this work created a sensation in 1737 when it was discovered at Hadrian's Villa during the excavations led by Cardinal Furietti. Furietti thought it was the work by Sosus of Pergamon mentioned by Pliny in his Naturalis Historia but some scholars believe it to be a copy of the work of Sosus made for Hadrian. Pliny had praised the craftsmanship of the shadow cast by one of the doves upon the water in the drinking bowl. Polymath Pliny, like Goethe, loved stones and minerals.
Copy or original, Pliny's doves from Hadrian's Villa have been copied in many formats – in mosaic, micromosaic and pietra dura. I am sure they must have been made into a jigsaw, though I haven't located one yet. The Gilbert Collection in Somerset House contains a fine table top based on this famous dove design, made of porphyry, antique black marble, onyx, branches of coral, and Aquitanian black and white marble.
Doves were popular motifs, but many other birds and fish and animals appear in Greek and Roman mosaics, so realistically portrayed that they can be securely identified. Scholar Antero Tammisto in his weighty illustrated volume Birds in Mosaics identifies (albeit with varying degrees of certainty) kingfishers, mallards, teal, geese, partridges, cranes, herons, parrots, peafowl, owls, eagles, pigeons, bee-eaters, quail, swans, storks, cormorants and many other fowl. Cocks fight, a plump mythological boy holds a struggling pigeon, a kingfisher perches ready to dive, long-tailed parakeets share the rim of an ornate vessel with a dove, Egyptian geese spread their wings in the spandrels of a mosaic floor, and an astonishingly realistic partridge tweaks a trinket from a beaded casket. (The bird and the casket are a much-favoured Roman subject.) Antero praises Pliny's doves in these terms: 'This is closest to painting because of the very fine opus vermiculatum made with the finest tesserae.' The plumage of the birds, he notes, is executed with stripes resembling brush strokes, and the zip-like setting of the tesserae has 'no equal among the Hellenistic and Romano-Campanian mosaic, not even from Pergamon'.
Mosaic imitates brush work, and the brush imitates nature. Mosaic imitates marble, and hardstones imitate flowers and fruits. Mimesis, mimicry.
The sea creatures in antique mosaics are as remarkable as the birds. Artists delighted in crowding in many different species of shells and squids, eels and rays, skates and jellyfish, mackerel and lobsters, prawns and cuttlefish, sometimes against an abstract background, sometimes displayed as at a dinner or in baskets at a market. These scenes delighted Goethe in Naples. A traveller from northern landlocked Weimar, he rejoiced in the spectacle of the wonders of the deep, alive and gasping in the fishermen's catch on the shore, or captured in eternal stone in Pompeian mosaics. The jacket of the Penguin Classic selection from Pliny's Natural History displays a reproduction of a fine array of mosaic marine monsters, surrounding a magnificently tentacled giant squid worthy of Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.
Sosus, the creator of Pliny's doves, was also famed for the pleasing and curious motif of 'the unswept floor' (asaratos oikos), a type of floor mosaic that app
ears to portray a floor scattered with the debris of a meal: a device that gives a vivid sense of time suspended, a meal just abandoned, a party newly ended. Scholars have looked for allegorical meanings in the 'unswept floor', suggesting a funerary significance, or a statement of overflowing abundance. Of these, the latter seems more plausible, but it is surely not difficult to explain the attraction of this inspired double use of trompe l'oeil. It is witty, it is pretty, it gives delight, and it suggests good company.
I have yet to find a jigsaw of a mosaic, though I am sure I shall soon. (Jigsaws of stained glass are popular; Clara Farmer, editor, and one of the first to approve an early version of this project, once devoted wet holiday time to the windows of Chartres cathedral.) Historian Tom Holland tells me that while pursuing his research in Naples he acquired a jigsaw of the celebrated Alexander mosaic from Pompeii. It proved interesting but difficult to assemble, because of the double set of fault lines. The blank spaces were easier, he says, than the pictorial sections. I looked for it when I was recently in the region, but failed to find it, although I saw the real thing on display in the National Museum in Naples, and a copy of it in its original location in Pompeii. It shows the battle of Issus where Alexander defeated Xerxes III and the Persian army, and the little pink ribbons that tie Alexander's breastplate must have been fun to do. I wonder whether the mosaicists saved them till the end, as I saved the little scarlet square in one of my Ben Nicholson tapestries, or whether they did the interesting bits first, like Arnold Bennett's Constance Baines in Bursley. And I wonder whether it is possible that the design of this great work was, as has been plausibly suggested, taken from a painting executed by a woman. We know that Helen, daughter of Timon of Egypt, painted the battle of Issus. Maybe she was responsible for those little pink ribbons.
The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History With Jigsaws Page 27