DECORATIVE ART
When French needlework had had its day, and the evanescent life of
Berlin woolwork had passed, for a period of half a century needlework
ceased to flourish in America. Indeed, the art seemed to have died out
root and branch, and only necessary and utilitarian needlework was
practiced. It seems strange, after all the wonderful triumphs of the
needle in earlier years, that for the succeeding half or three-quarters
of a century needlework as an art should actually have ceased to be. It
had died, branch and stem and root, vanished as if it had never been.
During at least half a century we were a people without decorative
needlework art in any form. The eyes and thoughts of women were turned
in other directions.
Of course there is always a reason for a change in public taste,
something in the development of the time leads and governs every trend
of popular thought. It may be the attraction of new inventions, or the
perfection of new processes, or even, and this is not uncommon, the
charm and fascination of some rare personality, whose ruling is absolute
in its own immediate vicinity, and whose example spreads like circles in
water far and far beyond the immediate personal influence. We cannot
trace this apparent dearth of the art to one particular cause, we only
know that in America the practice and study of music succeeded to its
place in almost every household. The needle, that honored implement of
woman, bade fair to be a thing almost of tradition, something which
would be in time relegated to museums and collections, to be studied
historically, as we study the implements of the Stone Age, and other
prehistoric periods.
I remember an amusing story told by a Baltimore friend, not given to the
manufacture of instances, that during those years of dearth soon after
the Civil War she was visiting a lovely southern family who had lived
through the days of privation. One day there arose a great cry and
disturbance in the house, which turned out to be a quest for _the_
needle, where was _the_ needle. Nobody could find it, although it could
be proved that at a certain date it had been quilted into its accustomed
place on the edge of the drawing-room curtain of the east window.
Finally it was found on the wrong curtain, minus the point, and this
disability gave rise to a discussion. Should it be taken to town, and
have the point renewed by the watchmaker? This decision was discouraged
by the daughter of the house, who related that the last time she had
taken it for the same purpose, the watchmaker had said to her, "Miss
Cassy, I have put a point on that needle three times, and I would
seriously advise you to buy a new one."
It was only in America that the needle had ceased to be an active
implement. In England it had never been so constantly or feverishly
employed. For the second time in its long history, its work became
purely personal. The same necessity which impressed itself upon the poor
little mother of mankind, when she sought among the fig leaves for
wherewithal to clothe herself, was upon the domestic woman, who sewed
cloth into skirts instead of vegetable fiber into aprons.
[Illustration: _Left_--EMBROIDERED MITS
_Right_--WHITE COTTON VEST embroidered in colors. Eighteenth-nineteenth
century American.
_Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art_]
[Illustration: WHITE MULL embroidered in colors. Eighteenth-nineteenth
century American.
_Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art_]
[Illustration: EMBROIDERED VALANCE, part of set and spread for high-post
bedstead, 1788. Worked in crewels on India cotton, by Mrs. Gideon
Granger, Canandaigua, New York.]
It is curious to contrast the effect of this loss of embroidery in
the two countries, England and America. Doubtless there were other
reasons than the lost popularity of needlework as an art, that in
England it should have resulted in the life or death practice of
necessary needlework, and in America, that the facile fingers of woman
simply turned to the ivory keys of the piano for occupation. But the
fact remains that starvation threatened the woman of one country, while
in the other they were practicing scales. In England it was a period of
stress and strain, of veritable "work for a living," the period of "The
Song of the Shirt." Happily, in this blessed land, where hunger was
unknown, we were not conscious of its terrors, and perhaps hardly knew
why the "cambric needle" and the darning needle were the only ones in
the market. Embroidery needles had "gone out." Then came the relief of
the sewing machine, born in America, where it was scarcely needed, but
speedily flying across the ocean to its life-saving work in England,
where the tragedy of the poor seamstress was on the stage of life. Like
many another form of relief, it was not entirely adequate to the
situation. Its first effect was to create a need of remunerative work.
The sewing machine took upon itself the toil of the seamstress, but it
left the seamstress idle and hungry. This was a new and even darker
situation than the last, but Englishwomen came to the rescue with a
resuscitated form of needlework and embroidery tiptoed upon the empty
stage, new garments covering her ancient form, and was welcomed with
universal acclaim.
Most cultivated and fortunate Englishwomen had a certain knowledge of
art and were eager to put all of their uncoined effort at the service of
that body of unhappy women, who, without money, had the culture which
goes with the use and possession of money. These unfortunate sisters,
who were rather malodorously called decayed gentlewomen, became eager
and petted pupils of a new and popular organization called the South
Kensington School. Its peculiar claims upon English society gave it from
the first the help of the most advanced and intelligent artistic
assistance. The result of this was not only a resuscitation of old
methods of embroidery, but the great gain to the school, or society, of
design and criticism of such men as Burne-Jones, Walter Crane, and
William Morris.
It was with this vogue that it appeared in America, and attracted the
attention of those who were afterward to be interested in the formation
of a society which was founded for almost identical purposes. Not indeed
to prevent starvation of body, but to comfort the souls of women who
pined for independence, who did not care to indulge in luxuries which
fathers and brothers and husbands found it hard to supply. So, from what
was perhaps a social and mental, rather than a physical, want, grew the
great remedy of a resuscitation of one of the valuable arts of the
world, a woman's art, hers by right of inheritance as well as peculiar
fitness.
With true business enterprise, the new English Society prepared an
important exhibit for our memorial fair, the Centennial, held in
Philadelphia to mark the one-hundredth anniversary of national
independence. This exhibit of Kensington Embroidery all unwittingly
sowed the seed not only of great results, but in decorative art worked
in many other directions. The exhibits of art needlework from the New
Kensington School of Art in London, their beauty, novelty and easy
adaptiveness, exactly fitted it to experiment by all the dreaming
forces of the American woman. They were good needlewomen by inheritance
and sensitive to art influences by nature, and the initiative capacity
which belongs to power and feeling enabled them at once to seize upon
this mode of expression and make it their own. It was the means of
inaugurating another era of true decorative needlework, perfectly
adapted to the capacity of all women, and destined to be developed on
lines peculiarly national in character. The effect of this exhibit was
not exactly what was expected in the sale of its works, and long
afterward, when discussing this apparent failure, in the face of an
immediate adoption in America of the Society's methods and productions,
I explained it to myself and an English friend, by the national
difference in the race feeling for art, and especially for color.
[Illustration: DETAIL of linen coverlet worked in colored wool.
_Courtesy of Brooklyn Museum_]
[Illustration: LINEN COVERLET embroidered in Kensington stitch with
colored wool.
_Courtesy of Brooklyn Museum_]
It seems to me, after the observation and intimacy of years with the
growing art of decoration in this country, that the color gift is a race
gift with us. English art-work is nearly always characterized by subdued
and modified harmony, while that of America has vivid and striking notes
which play upon a higher key, and still melt as softly into each
other as the perfect modulations of the best English art. I was very
conscious of this during the year of my directorship of the Woman's
Building and exhibits in the World's Columbian Fair at Chicago, that
place of wonderful comparisons of the art-work of the world. I could
nearly always recognize work of American origin by its singing
color-quality, as different from the sharp semibarbaric notes of
Oriental art as from the minor cadences of English decorative work. But
to return to the effect of the English exhibit at the Philadelphia
Centennial: it was followed by the immediate formation of the Society of
Decorative Art in New York City, which became the parent of like
societies in every considerable city or town in the United States. By
its good fortune in having a president who belonged by right of birth,
and certainly of ability and achievement, to the best of New York
society, the movement enlisted the sympathy and interest of the
influential class of New York women, while there was waiting in the
shadow a troop of able women who were shut out from the costly gayeties
of society by comparative poverty, but connected with it by friendships
and associations, often, indeed, by ties of blood.
Embroidery became once more the most facile and successful of pursuits.
Graduates from the Kensington School were employed as teachers in nearly
all of the different societies, and in this way every city became the
center of this new-old form of embroidery, for what is called
"Kensington Embroidery" is in fact a far-away repetition of old triumphs
of the British needle. I use the word "British" advisedly, for it was
when England was known as Britain among the nations that her embroidery
was a thing of almost priceless value. In modern English embroidery, the
days of Queen Anne have been the limit of backward imitation; and, in
fact, ancient English embroidery was a process of long and assiduous
labor, as well as of knowledge and inspiration. Our hurried modern
conditions would not encourage the repetition of the hand-breadth
pictures in embroidery of the earliest specimens, where countless
numbers of stitches were lavished upon a single production. The
embroidered picture of The Garden of Eden described in chapter four is a
specimen of the minute representation. These specimens are, to the art
of needlework, what the Dutch school of painting is to the great mural
canvases of the present day.
The development of the nineteenth century in America was only at first
an exact reflection of English methods. The first thing which marked the
influence of national character and taste was, that English models and
designs almost immediately disappeared, only a few such, consisting of
those which had been given to the art by masters of design like Morris
and Marcus Ward, were retained, and American needlewomen boldly took to
the representation of vivid and graceful groups of natural flowers,
following the lead of Moravian practice and of flower painting, rather
than that of decorative design.
As a natural result, crewels were soon discarded in favor of silks, and
natural extravagance, or national influence, led to the use of costly
materials instead of the linens of English choice and preference. So the
old flower embroidery of Bethlehem had a second birth. American girl
art-students soon found their opportunity in the creation of applied
design, and before embroidery had ceased to be a matter of
representation of flowers in colored silks, the flowers grew into
restrained and appropriate borders, or proper and correct space
decoration, and the day of women designers for manufacturers had come.
The circulars of the first Society of Decorative Art were not only
comprehensive, but were ambitious. Its objects were set forth as
follows:
1. To encourage profitable industries among women who possess
artistic talent, and to furnish a standard of excellence and a
market for their work.
2. To accumulate and distribute information concerning the various
art industries which have been found remunerative in other
countries, and to form classes in Art Needlework.
3. To establish rooms for the exhibition and sale of Sculptures,
Paintings, Wood Carvings, Paintings upon Slate, Porcelain and
Pottery, Lacework, Art and Ecclesiastical Needlework, Tapestries
and Hangings, and, in short, decorative work of any description,
done by women, and of sufficient excellence to meet the recently
stimulated demand for such work.
4. To form Auxiliary Committees in other cities and towns of the
United States, which committees shall receive and pronounce upon
work produced in, or in the vicinity of, such places, and which, if
approved by them, may be consigned to the salesrooms in New York.
5. To make connections with potteries, by which desirable forms for
decoration, or original designs for special orders, may be
procured, and with manufacturers and importers of the various
materials used in art work, by which artists may profit.
6. To endeavor to obtain orders from dealers in China, Cabinet
Work, or articles belonging to Household Art throughout the United
States.
7. To induce each worker thoroughly to master the details of one
variety of decoration, and endeavor to make for her work a
reputation of commercial value.
The Society meets an actual want in the community by furnishing a
place where orders can be given directly to the artist for any kind
of art or decorative work on exhibition.
It is believed that, by the encouragement of this Society, the
large amount of work done by those who do not make it a profession
will be brought to the notice of buyers outside a limited circle of
friends. The aggregate of this work is large, and when directed
into remunerative channels will prove a very important department
of industry.
The necessary expenses of the Society for the first, and possibly
the second, year will be defrayed by a membership fee of Five
Dollars, as well as by donations; but after that time it is
expected that all expenses will be met by commissions upon the sale
of articles consigned to it.
The contributions of all women artists of acknowledged ability are
earnestly requested. By their co-operation it is intended that a
high standard of excellence shall be established in what is offered
to the public, and, by seeing truly artistic decorative work, it is
hoped many women who have found the painting of pictures
unremunerative may turn their efforts in more practical directions.
All work approved by the Committee of Examination will be
attractively exhibited without expense to the artist, but in case
of sale a commission of 10 per cent will be charged upon the price
received.
There was good teaching from the first, but very independent judgment,
and it was not long before the more liberal and less chastened American
mind followed national impulses. Why, said the practical American, shall
we spend time and effort in doing things which are not adequate in final
effect to the labor and cost we bestow upon them, and which do not
really accord with costly surroundings, and, in addition to these
detriments, can and probably will be eaten by moths when all is done?
The result of this interrogative reasoning was an immediate resort to
satins and silks and flosses, wherewith larger and more important things
than tidies were created--lambrequins, hangings, bedspreads, screens,
and many other furnishings, all wrought in exquisite flosses, and more
or less beautiful in color.
The institution of this Society of Decorative Art was in every respect a
timely and popular movement. It followed the example of the English
Society in making needlework the chief object of instruction. Our
artists became interested in the matter of design, as the English
artists had been, and under their influence the scope of embroidery was
much enlarged. I remember the first contribution which indicated
original talent was a piece of needlework by Mrs. W. S. Hoyt of Pelham,
which was peculiarly ingenious, making a curious link between the
cross-stitch tapestries of the German school and the woven tapestries of
France. This needlework was done upon a fabric which imitated the corded
texture of tapestries, and was stamped in a design which carried the
color and idea of a tapestry background. Upon this surface Mrs. Hoyt had
drawn a group of figures in mediæval costumes, afterward working them in
single cross-stitch over the ribs produced by the filling threads of the
fabric. The figures and costumes were done in faded tints which
harmonized with the background, the stitches keeping the general effect
of surface in the fabric. It will be seen that the result was extremely
like that of a tapestry of the fifteenth century. This was followed by
an exhibit of various landscape pictures of Mrs. Holmes of Boston, a
daughter-in-law of the poet and writer. Mrs. Holmes had chosen silks and
bits of weavings for her medium, using them as a painter uses colors
upon his palette. A stretch of pale blue silk, with outlined hills lying
against it, made for her a sky and background, while a middle distance
of flossy white stitches, advancing into well-defined daisies, brought
the foreground to one's very feet. Flower-laden apple branches against
the sky were lightly sketched in embroidery stitches, like the daisies.
It was a delicious bit of color and so well managed as to be as
efficient a wall decoration as a water color picture.
In what may be called pictorial art in textiles Mrs. Holmes was not
alone, although her work probably incited to the same sort of
experiment. Miss Weld of Boston sent a picture made up in the same way,
of a background of material which lent itself to the representation of a
field of swampy ground where the spotted leaves of the adder's tongue,
the yellow water-lily, with its compact balls, and the flaming cardinal
flower are growing, while swamp grasses are nodding above. This was as
good in its way as any sketch of them could be, and affected one with
the _sentiment_ of the scene, as it is the mission of art to do. Miss
Weld, Miss Carolina Townshend of Albany, Mrs. William Hoyt of Pelham and
Mrs. Dewey of New York, each contributed very largely to the formation
of characteristic and progressive needlework art in America. There were
other individuals whose work was inciting many, who have also, perhaps
unknown to themselves, helped in this progress. Indeed, I remember many
pieces of embroidery, loaned for the Bartholdi Exhibition of 1883, which
would have done credit to any period of the art, and each piece
undoubtedly had its influence.
The work of schools or societies had been much less marked by original
development. During the ten years of their existence the four largest
societies, those of New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Chicago, have
been under the direction of English teachers, and have followed more or
less closely the excellencies of the English School. Even in Boston,
where, owing to the decided cultivation of art and the early
introduction of drawing in the public schools, one would have looked
for a rather characteristic development, English designs and English
methods have been somewhat closely followed.
In attempting to account for this fact one must remember that it is
against the nature of associated authority to follow individual or
original suggestions. There must be a broad and well-trodden path for
committees to walk together in, and the track of the Kensington School
is broad and authoritative enough for such following. The example and
incitement of the various societies were the seed of much good and
progressive art in America. In saying this I do not by any means confine
the credit of the growth or development of needlework to this society
alone, for there have been other influences at work. What I mean to say
is this, that the other kindred societies, like the Woman's Exchange,
the Needlework Societies, the Household Art Societies, and the
Blue-and-White Industries started from this one root, and are as much
indebted to the original society as things must always be to the central
thought which inspired them. Compared with English work of the same
period, they were distinguished by a certain spontaneity of motive
and a luxuriance of effect, which has made these specimens more valuable
to present possessors, and will make them far more precious as
heirlooms. This sudden efflorescence of the art was, however, almost in
the hands of amateurs, except for the occasional effort by some of the
advanced contributors of the New York and Boston societies.
[Illustration: QUILTED COVERLET worked entirely by hand.
_Courtesy of Brooklyn Museum_]
[Illustration: DETAIL of above coverlet.
_Courtesy of Brooklyn Museum_]
The commercial development of embroidery in this country has been in the
direction of embroidery upon linen, and in this line each and every
society of decorative art has been a center of valuable teaching. At the
Columbian Exposition, to which all prominent societies contributed, the
perfection of design, color and method, the general level of excellence,
was on the highest possible plane. In its line nothing could be better,
and it was encouraging to see that it was _not_ amateur work, _not_ a
thing to be taken up and laid down according to moods and circumstances,
but an educated profession or occupation for women, the acquirement of a
knowledge which might develop indefinitely.
Of course the trend of the decorative needlework was almost entirely in
the direction of stitchery pure and simple, devoted to table linen and
luxurious household uses, and this grew to a point of absolute
perfection. Table-centers and doilies embroidered in colors on pure
white linen reached a point of beauty which was amazing. When I saw, at
the World's Columbian Exposition, the napery of the world, wrought by
all races of women, I was delighted to see that the line of linen
embroidery which was the direction of the common effort did not in the
least surpass the work sent by the Decorative Art societies of most of
our American cities.