Embroidery and Lace is one of the most fascinating books that has
appeared on this delightful subject. M. Lefebure is one of the
administrators of the Musee des Arts Decoratifs at Paris, besides being a
lace manufacturer; and his work has not merely an important historical
value, but as a handbook of technical instruction it will be found of the
greatest service by all needle-women. Indeed, as the translator himself
points out, M. Lefebure's book suggests the question whether it is not
rather by the needle and the bobbin, than by the brush, the graver or the
chisel, that the influence of woman should assert itself in the arts. In
Europe, at any rate, woman is sovereign in the domain of art-needle-work,
and few men would care to dispute with her the right of using those
delicate implements so intimately associated with the dexterity of her
nimble and slender fingers; nor is there any reason why the productions
of embroidery should not, as Mr. Alan Cole suggests, be placed on the
same level with those of painting, engraving and sculpture, though there
must always be a great difference between those purely decorative arts
that glorify their own material and the more imaginative arts in which
the material is, as it were, annihilated, and absorbed into the creation
of a new form. In the beautifying of modern houses it certainly must be
admitted--indeed, it should be more generally recognised than it is--that
rich embroidery on hangings and curtains, portieres, couches and the
like, produces a far more decorative and far more artistic effect than
can be gained from our somewhat wearisome English practice of covering
the walls with pictures and engravings; and the almost complete
disappearance of embroidery from dress has robbed modern costume of one
of the chief elements of grace and fancy.
That, however, a great improvement has taken place in English embroidery
during the last ten or fifteen years cannot, I think, be denied. It is
shown, not merely in the work of individual artists, such as Mrs.
Holiday, Miss May Morris and others, but also in the admirable
productions of the South Kensington School of Embroidery (the
best--indeed, the only really good--school that South Kensington has
produced). It is pleasant to note, on turning over the leaves of M.
Lefebure's book, that in this we are merely carrying out certain old
traditions of Early English art. In the seventh century, St. Ethelreda,
first abbess of the Monastery of Ely, made an offering to St. Cuthbert of
a sacred ornament she had worked with gold and precious stones, and the
cope and maniple of St. Cuthbert, which are preserved at Durham, are
considered to be specimens of opus Anglicanum. In the year 800, the
Bishop of Durham allotted the income of a farm of two hundred acres for
life to an embroideress named Eanswitha, in consideration of her keeping
in repair the vestments of the clergy in his diocese. The battle
standard of King Alfred was embroidered by Danish princesses; and the
Anglo-Saxon Gudric gave Alcuid a piece of land, on condition that she
instructed his daughter in needle-work. Queen Mathilda bequeathed to the
Abbey of the Holy Trinity at Caen a tunic embroidered at Winchester by
the wife of one Alderet; and when William presented himself to the
English nobles, after the Battle of Hastings, he wore a mantle covered
with Anglo-Saxon embroideries, which is probably, M. Lefebure suggests,
the same as that mentioned in the inventory of the Bayeux Cathedral,
where, after the entry relating to the broderie a telle (representing the
conquest of England), two mantles are described--one of King William,
'all of gold, powdered with crosses and blossoms of gold, and edged along
the lower border with an orphrey of figures.' The most splendid example
of the opus Anglicanum now in existence is, of course, the Syon cope at
the South Kensington Museum; but English work seems to have been
celebrated all over the Continent. Pope Innocent IV. so admired the
splendid vestments worn by the English clergy in 1246, that he ordered
similar articles from Cistercian monasteries in England. St. Dunstan,
the artistic English monk, was known as a designer for embroideries; and
the stole of St. Thomas a Becket is still preserved in the cathedral at
Sens, and shows us the interlaced scroll-forms used by Anglo-Saxon MS.
illuminators.
How far this modern artistic revival of rich and delicate embroidery will
bear fruit depends, of course, almost entirely on the energy and study
that women are ready to devote to it; but I think that it must be
admitted that all our decorative arts in Europe at present have, at
least, this element of strength--that they are in immediate relationship
with the decorative arts of Asia. Wherever we find in European history a
revival of decorative art, it has, I fancy, nearly always been due to
Oriental influence and contact with Oriental nations. Our own keenly
intellectual art has more than once been ready to sacrifice real
decorative beauty either to imitative presentation or to ideal motive. It
has taken upon itself the burden of expression, and has sought to
interpret the secrets of thought and passion. In its marvellous truth of
presentation it has found its strength, and yet its weakness is there
also. It is never with impunity that an art seeks to mirror life. If
Truth has her revenge upon those who do not follow her, she is often
pitiless to her worshippers. In Byzantium the two arts met--Greek art,
with its intellectual sense of form, and its quick sympathy with
humanity; Oriental art, with its gorgeous materialism, its frank
rejection of imitation, its wonderful secrets of craft and colour, its
splendid textures, its rare metals and jewels, its marvellous and
priceless traditions. They had, indeed, met before, but in Byzantium
they were married; and the sacred tree of the Persians, the palm of
Zoroaster, was embroidered on the hem of the garments of the Western
world. Even the Iconoclasts, the Philistines of theological history,
who, in one of those strange outbursts of rage against Beauty that seem
to occur only amongst European nations, rose up against the wonder and
magnificence of the new art, served merely to distribute its secrets more
widely; and in the Liber Pontificalis, written in 687 by Athanasius, the
librarian, we read of an influx into Rome of gorgeous embroideries, the
work of men who had arrived from Constantinople and from Greece. The
triumph of the Mussulman gave the decorative art of Europe a new
departure--that very principle of their religion that forbade the actual
representation of any object in nature being of the greatest artistic
service to them, though it was not, of course, strictly carried out. The
Saracens introduced into Sicily the art of weaving silken and golden
fabrics; and from Sicily the manufacture of fine stuffs spread to the
North of Italy, and became localised in Genoa, Florence, Venice, and
other towns. A still greater art-movement took place in Spain under the
Moors and Saracens, who brought over workmen from Persia to make
beautiful things for them. M. Lefebure tells us of Persian embroidery
penetrating as far as Andalusia; and Almeria, like Palermo, had its Hotel
des Tiraz, which rivalled the Hotel des Tiraz at Bagdad, tiraz being the
generic name for ornamental tissues and costumes made with them. Spangles
(those pretty little discs of gold, silver, or polished steel, used in
certain embroidery for dainty glinting effects) were a Saracenic
invention; and Arabic letters often took the place of letters in the
Roman characters for use in inscriptions upon embroidered robes and
Middle Age tapestries, their decorative value being so much greater. The
book of crafts by Etienne Boileau, provost of the merchants in 1258-1268,
contains a curious enumeration of the different craft-guilds of Paris,
among which we find 'the tapiciers, or makers of the tapis sarrasinois
(or Saracen cloths), who say that their craft is for the service only of
churches, or great men like kings and counts'; and, indeed, even in our
own day, nearly all our words descriptive of decorative textures and
decorative methods point to an Oriental origin. What the inroads of the
Mohammedans did for Sicily and Spain, the return of the Crusaders did for
the other countries of Europe. The nobles who left for Palestine clad in
armour, came back in the rich stuffs of the East; and their costumes,
pouches (aumonieres sarra-sinoises), and caparisons excited the
admiration of the needle-workers of the West. Matthew Paris says that at
the sacking of Antioch, in 1098, gold, silver and priceless costumes were
so equally distributed among the Crusaders, that many who the night
before were famishing and imploring relief, suddenly found themselves
overwhelmed with wealth; and Robert de Clair tells us of the wonderful
fetes that followed the capture of Constantinople. The thirteenth
century, as M. Lefebure points out, was conspicuous for an increased
demand in the West for embroidery. Many Crusaders made offerings to
churches of plunder from Palestine; and St. Louis, on his return from the
first Crusade, offered thanks at St. Denis to God for mercies bestowed on
him during his six years' absence and travel, and presented some richly-
embroidered stuffs to be used on great occasions as coverings to the
reliquaries containing the relics of holy martyrs. European embroidery,
having thus become possessed of new materials and wonderful methods,
developed on its own intellectual and imitative lines, inclining, as it
went on, to the purely pictorial, and seeking to rival painting, and to
produce landscapes and figure-subjects with elaborate perspective and
subtle aerial effects. A fresh Oriental influence, however, came through
the Dutch and the Portuguese, and the famous Compagnie des Grandes Indes;
and M. Lefebure gives an illustration of a door-hanging now in the Cluny
Museum, where we find the French fleurs-de-lys intermixed with Indian
ornament. The hangings of Madame de Maintenon's room at Fontainebleau,
which were embroidered at St. Cyr, represent Chinese scenery upon a
jonquil-yellow ground.
Clothes were sent out ready cut to the East to be embroidered, and many
of the delightful coats of the period of Louis XV. and Louis XVI. owe
their dainty decoration to the needles of Chinese artists. In our own
day the influence of the East is strongly marked. Persia has sent us her
carpets for patterns, and Cashmere her lovely shawls, and India her
dainty muslins finely worked with gold thread palmates, and stitched over
with iridescent beetles' wings. We are beginning now to dye by Oriental
methods, and the silk robes of China and Japan have taught us new wonders
of colour-combination, and new subtleties of delicate design. Whether we
have yet learned to make a wise use of what we have acquired is less
certain. If books produce an effect, this book of M. Lefebure should
certainly make us study with still deeper interest the whole question of
embroidery, and by those who already work with their needles it will be
found full of most fertile suggestion and most admirable advice.
Even to read of the marvellous works of embroidery that were fashioned in
bygone ages is pleasant. Time has kept a few fragments of Greek
embroidery of the fourth century B.C. for us. One is figured in M.
Lefebure's book--a chain-stitch embroidery of yellow flax upon a mulberry-
coloured worsted material, with graceful spirals and palmetto-patterns:
and another, a tapestried cloth powdered with ducks, was reproduced in
the Woman's World some months ago for an article by Mr. Alan Cole. {334a}
Now and then we find in the tomb of some dead Egyptian a piece of
delicate work. In the treasury at Ratisbon is preserved a specimen of
Byzantine embroidery on which the Emperor Constantine is depicted riding
on a white palfrey, and receiving homage from the East and West. Metz
has a red silk cope wrought with great eagles, the gift of Charlemagne,
and Bayeux the needle-wrought epic of Queen Matilda. But where is the
great crocus-coloured robe, wrought for Athena, on which the gods fought
against the giants? Where is the huge velarium that Nero stretched
across the Colosseum at Rome, on which was represented the starry sky,
and Apollo driving a chariot drawn by steeds? How one would like to see
the curious table-napkins wrought for Heliogabalus, on which were
displayed all the dainties and viands that could be wanted for a feast;
or the mortuary-cloth of King Chilperic, with its three hundred golden
bees; or the fantastic robes that excited the indignation of the Bishop
of Pontus, and were embroidered with 'lions, panthers, bears, dogs,
forests, rocks, hunters--all, in fact, that painters can copy from
nature.' Charles of Orleans had a coat, on the sleeves of which were
embroidered the verses of a song beginning 'Madame, je suis tout joyeux,'
the musical accompaniment of the words being wrought in gold thread, and
each note, of square shape in those days, formed with four pearls. {334b}
The room prepared in the palace at Rheims for the use of Queen Joan of
Burgundy was decorated with 'thirteen hundred and twenty-one papegauts
(parrots) made in broidery and blazoned with the King's arms, and five
hundred and sixty-one butterflies, whose wings were similarly ornamented
with the Queen's arms--the whole worked in fine gold.' Catherine de
Medicis had a mourning-bed made for her 'of black velvet embroidered with
pearls and powdered with crescents and suns.' Its curtains were of
damask, 'with leafy wreaths and garlands figured upon a gold and silver
ground, and fringed along the edges with broideries of pearls,' and it
stood in a room hung with rows of the Queen's devices in cut black velvet
on cloth of silver. Louis XIV. had gold-embroidered caryatides fifteen
feet high in his apartment. The state-bed of Sobieski, King of Poland,
was made of Smyrna gold brocade embroidered in turquoises and pearls,
with verses from the Koran; its supports were of silver-gilt, beautifully
chased and profusely set with enamelled and jewelled medallions. He had
taken it from the Turkish camp before Vienna, and the standard of Mahomet
had stood under it. The Duchess de la Ferte wore a dress of
reddish-brown velvet, the skirt of which, adjusted in graceful folds, was
held up by big butterflies made of Dresden china; the front was a tablier
of cloth of silver, upon which was embroidered an orchestra of musicians
arranged in a pyramidal group, consisting of a series of six ranks of
performers, with beautiful instruments wrought in raised needle-work.
'Into the night go one and all,' as Mr. Henley sings in his charming
Ballade of Dead Actors.
Many of the facts related by M. Lefebure about the embroiderers' guilds
are also extremely interesting. Etienne Boileau, in his book of crafts,
to which I have already alluded, tells us that a member of the guild was
prohibited from using gold of less value than 'eight sous (about 6s.) the
skein; he was bound to use the best silk, and never to mix thread with
silk, because that made the work false and bad.' The test or trial piece
prescribed for a worker who was the son of a master-embroiderer was 'a
single figure, a sixth of the natural size, to be shaded in gold'; whilst
one not the son of a master was required to produce 'a complete incident
with many figures.' The book of crafts also mentions 'cutters-out and
stencillers and illuminators' amongst those employed in the industry of
embroidery. In 1551 the Parisian Corporation of Embroiderers issued a
notice that 'for the future, the colouring in representations of nude
figures and faces should be done in three or four gradations of carnation-
dyed silk, and not, as formerly, in white silks.' During the fifteenth
century every household of any position retained the services of an
embroiderer by the year. The preparation of colours also, whether for
painting or for dyeing threads and textile fabrics, was a matter which,
M. Lefebure points out, received close attention from the artists of the
Middle Ages. Many undertook long journeys to obtain the more famous
recipes, which they filed, subsequently adding to and correcting them as
experience dictated. Nor were great artists above making and supplying
designs for embroidery. Raphael made designs for Francis I., and Boucher
for Louis XV.; and in the Ambras collection at Vienna is a superb set of
sacerdotal robes from designs by the brothers Van Eyck and their pupils.
Early in the sixteenth century books of embroidery designs were produced,
and their success was so great that in a few years French, German,
Italian, Flemish, and English publishers spread broadcast books of design
made by their best engravers. In the same century, in order to give the
designers opportunity of studying directly from nature, Jean Robin opened
a garden with conservatories, in which he cultivated strange varieties of
plants then but little known in our latitudes. The rich brocades and
brocadelles of the time are characterised by the introduction of large
flowery patterns, with pomegranates and other fruits with fine foliage.
The second part of M. Lefebure's book is devoted to the history of lace,
and though some may not find it quite as interesting as the earlier
portion it will more than repay perusal; and those who still work in this
delicate and fanciful art will find many valuable suggestions in it, as
well as a large number of exceedingly beautiful designs. Compared to
embroidery, lace seems comparatively modern. M. Lefebure and Mr. Alan
Cole tell us that there is no reliable or documentary evidence to prove
the existence of lace before the fifteenth century. Of course in the
East, light tissues, such as gauzes, muslins, and nets, were made at very
early times, and were used as veils and scarfs after the manner of
subsequent laces, and women enriched them with some sort of embroidery,
or varied the openness of them by here and there drawing out threads. The
threads of fringes seem also to have been plaited and knotted together,
and the borders of one of the many fashions of Roman toga were of open
reticulated weaving. The Egyptian Museum at the Louvre has a curious
network embellished with glass beads; and the monk Reginald, who took
part in opening the tomb of St. Cuthbert at Durham in the twelfth
century, writes that the Saint's shroud had a fringe of linen threads an
inch long, surmounted by a border, 'worked upon the threads,' with
representations of birds and pairs of beasts, there being between each
such pair a branching tree, a survival of the palm of Zoroaster, to which
I have before alluded. Our authors, however, do not in these examples
recognise lace, the production of which involves more refined and
artistic methods, and postulates a combination of skill and varied
execution carried to a higher degree of perfection. Lace, as we know it,
seems to have had its origin in the habit of embroidering linen. White
embroidery on linen has, M. Lefebure remarks, a cold and monotonous
aspect; that with coloured threads is brighter and gayer in effect, but
is apt to fade in frequent washing; but white embroidery relieved by open
spaces in, or shapes cut from, the linen ground, is possessed of an
entirely new charm; and from a sense of this the birth may be traced of
an art in the result of which happy contrasts are effected between
ornamental details of close texture and others of open-work.
Soon, also, was suggested the idea that, instead of laboriously
withdrawing threads from stout linen, it would be more convenient to
introduce a needle-made pattern into an open network ground, which was
called a lacis. Of this kind of embroidery many specimens are extant.
The Cluny Museum possesses a linen cap said to have belonged to Charles
V.; and an alb of linen drawn-thread work, supposed to have been made by
Anne of Bohemia (1527), is preserved in the cathedral at Prague.
Catherine de Medicis had a bed draped with squares of reseuil, or lacis,
and it is recorded that 'the girls and servants of her household consumed
much time in making squares of reseuil.' The interesting pattern-books
for open-ground embroidery, of which the first was published in 1527 by
Pierre Quinty, of Cologne, supply us with the means of tracing the stages
in the transition from white thread embroidery to needle-point lace. We
meet in them with a style of needle-work which differs from embroidery in
not being wrought upon a stuff foundation. It is, in fact, true lace,
done, as it were, 'in the air,' both ground and pattern being entirely
produced by the lace-maker.
The elaborate use of lace in costume was, of course, largely stimulated
by the fashion of wearing ruffs, and their companion cuffs or sleeves.
Catherine de Medicis induced one Frederic Vinciolo to come from Italy and
make ruffs and gadrooned collars, the fashion of which she started in
France; and Henry III. was so punctilious over his ruffs that he would
iron and goffer his cuffs and collars himself rather than see their
pleats limp and out of shape. The pattern-books also gave a great
impulse to the art. M. Lefebure mentions German books with patterns of
eagles, heraldic emblems, hunting scenes, and plants and leaves belonging
to Northern vegetation; and Italian books, in which the motifs consist of
oleander blossoms, and elegant wreaths and scrolls, landscapes with
mythological scenes, and hunting episodes, less realistic than the
Northern ones, in which appear fauns, and nymphs or amorini shooting
arrows. With regard to these patterns, M. Lefebure notices a curious
fact. The oldest painting in which lace is depicted is that of a lady,
by Carpaccio, who died about 1523. The cuffs of the lady are edged with
a narrow lace, the pattern of which reappears in Vecellio's Corona, a
book not published until 1591. This particular pattern was, therefore,
in use at least eighty years before it got into circulation with other
published patterns.
It was not, however, till the seventeenth century that lace acquired a
really independent character and individuality, and M. Duplessis states
that the production of the more noteworthy of early laces owes more to
the influence of men than to that of women. The reign of Louis XIV.
witnessed the production of the most stately needle-point laces, the
transformation of Venetian point, and the growth of Points d'Alencon,
d'Argentan, de Bruxelles and d'Angleterre.
The king, aided by Colbert, determined to make France the centre, if
possible, for lace manufacture, sending for this purpose both to Venice
and to Flanders for workers. The studio of the Gobelins supplied
designs. The dandies had their huge rabatos or bands falling from
beneath the chin over the breast, and great prelates, like Bossuet and
Fenelon, wore their wonderful albs and rochets. It is related of a
collar made at Venice for Louis XIV. that the lace-workers, being unable
to find sufficiently fine horse-hair, employed some of their own hairs
instead, in order to secure that marvellous delicacy of work which they
aimed at producing.
In the eighteenth century, Venice, finding that laces of lighter texture
were sought after, set herself to make rose-point; and at the Court of
Louis XV. the choice of lace was regulated by still more elaborate
etiquette. The Revolution, however, ruined many of the manufactures.
Alencon survived, and Napoleon encouraged it, and endeavoured to renew
the old rules about the necessity of wearing point-lace at Court
receptions. A wonderful piece of lace, powdered over with devices of
bees, and costing 40,000 francs, was ordered. It was begun for the
Empress Josephine, but in the course of its making her escutcheons were
replaced by those of Marie Louise.
M. Lefebure concludes his interesting history by stating very clearly his
attitude towards machine-made lace. 'It would be an obvious loss to
art,' he says, 'should the making of lace by hand become extinct, for
machinery, as skilfully devised as possible, cannot do what the hand
does.' It can give us 'the results of processes, not the creations of
artistic handicraft.' Art is absent 'where formal calculation pretends
to supersede emotion'; it is absent 'where no trace can be detected of
intelligence guiding handicraft, whose hesitancies even possess peculiar
charm . . . cheapness is never commendable in respect of things which are
not absolute necessities; it lowers artistic standard.' These are
admirable remarks, and with them we take leave of this fascinating book,
with its delightful illustrations, its charming anecdotes, its excellent
advice. Mr. Alan Cole deserves the thanks of all who are interested in
art for bringing this book before the public in so attractive and so
inexpensive a form.
Embroidery and Lace: Their Manufacture and History from the Remotest
Antiquity to the Present Day. Translated and enlarged by Alan S. Cole
from the French of Ernest Lefebure. (Grevel and Co.)
THE POETS' CORNER--VIII
(Pall Mall Gazette, November 16, 1888.)