Angels and elephants: Rosemary Crill examines two remarkable embroidered Indian textiles at Hardwick Hall, Derbyshire, a Gujarati floorspread, probably dating from the early eighteenth century, and a rare Bengali quilt that may have been made in the late sixteenth century

Apollo, Nov, 2004 by Rosemary Crill

The use of bands and rings of bright colours is also frequent in the so-called Ashburnham group of Indian trade embroideries, which are usually, and plausibly, dated to the end of the seventeenth century (Fig. 5). (6) The Ashburnham hangings are of a completely different format to the Hardwick floorspread, being based primarily on English crewel work bed hangings with more freely scrolling tree designs than is found in Mughal floorspreads. The characteristic appearance of Gujarati chain-stitch embroidery, whether done with a hook or a needle, however, is common to both formats. A visual link with the Ashburnham group, such as the use of concentric rings of colour, might tempt us to assign a late seventeenth-century date to the Hardwick piece, but we should be mindful of the long chronological span of the trade in Gujarati embroidery.

[FIGURE 5 OMITTED]

Irwin was surely right in thinking that references such as that in the records of a London sale in 1614 to 'a carpet or quilt embroidered upon calico with sundry silks' probably refer to multi-coloured embroideries from Gujarat. (7)

Great quantities of embroideries were exported from Surat--the great Company port of Western India--in the seventeenth century. But we know that they were prized even before the foundation of the East India Company in 1600. We have evidence for this from travellers such as the Portuguese Duarte Barbosa, as early as 1518. (8) In 1588 the Dutchman Linschoten described the fine bedspreads of Cambay as 'stitched with silk of all colours'. (9) As late as 1725, at the end of the trade tradition, Alexander Hamilton reported that the people of Cambay 'embroider the best of any people in India, and perhaps in the world', noting that 'their fine quilts were formerly carried to Europe'. (10) Historical sources, then, are not very helpful in narrowing down the dates of the Hardwick piece--it fits into a type of Gujarati embroidery known to have been made between 1588 and 1725, the earliest and latest firm dates for this type of work. We have seen that the angels and the trees could conceivably belong to a period contemporary with Bess of Hardwick (d. 1608), but that multi-coloured and striped elements, as exhibited in the Ashburnham type (Fig. 5), probably date from the end of the seventeenth century.

Crucial to the dating of the Hardwick piece is the design of the central medallion and the border, and it is these elements that strongly suggest that it is an embroidery of the early eighteenth century rather than of the seventeenth. The device of the central medallion was introduced from much earlier Middle Eastern Islamic designs, especially book-bindings, but it takes on a particular form in textiles from the end of the seventeenth century onwards. It becomes scalloped in a more pronounced way, and is combined with large, and often rather inelegant, corner quarter-medallions, and with very broad flower-strewn borders. Figure 6 shows a typical eighteenth-century Gujarati embroidery whose layout is very close to the Hardwick piece, although the field design is more conventional. A general diminution in the scale of floral elements in carpets, textiles, and manuscript and album borders, took place in the last years of the seventeenth century, when the bold designs of the high Mughal period gave way to much smaller scrolling patterns of flower heads and delicate leaves. It would appear, by comparison with these later pieces, that the Gujarati embroidery at Hardwick can be dated to the early eighteenth century rather than the late sixteenth. While we may never know how it ended up in Derbyshire, it is safe to assume that it was bought by one of the various descendants of Bess of Hardwick who further enriched the furnishings of the Hall.