The needle's excellency: English needlework of the Tudor and Stuart periods in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Magazine Antiques, June, 1996 by Nicola J. Shilliam

In the early twentieth century, English needlework dating from the fifteenth to the early eighteenth century became highly sought after by collectors, particularly in Britain.(1) Thanks to certain generous donors and the collecting policies of discerning curators, this period is also one of the strengths of the Textile and Costume Collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

From its venerable origins in ecclesiastical textiles, English needlework assumed a distinctive character as the Tudor dynasty transformed English society from medievalism into a Renaissance nation state. Opus Anglicanum (literally, English work) achieved great fame throughout Europe by the end of the thirteenth century for its superb craftsmanship and sumptuousness, including its extensive use of underside couching in gold thread and subtle, split-stitch silk details.(2) As imported woven textiles (such as velvets and brocades from Italy) became more available in England during the fifteenth century, typical ecclesiastical needlework began to change. Designs on copes, chasubles, altar cloths, and other textiles for sacred use became simpler, often incorporating embroidered motifs such as angels (see Pl. III)(3) and Italianate palmette-pomegranates appliqued onto velvet. Before Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries began in 1535, skilled groups of nuns and monks specialized in creating this type of church needlework.

The Reformation brought major changes in the patronage of the arts. The sale of church lands enriched not only the crown but also the nobility and the gentry, who commissioned great houses and new civic buildings that required more sophisticated furniture and furnishings, such as elegant long covers for tables and sideboards and hangings embroidered with imported silk on linen. The Tudor monarchs actively encouraged the arts in order to bolster the prestige of the new dynasty, and heraldic imagery, which legitimated newly acquired power, remained a feature of much English embroidery. Although professional embroiderers, many of them men, were still responsible for certain items for court, ceremonial, and aristocratic use, the work of amateur needlewomen of the upper and rising middle classes assumed a new prominence.

Samplers, made to practice the stitches, motifs, and techniques needed to create more complex embroidered objects, formed a genre that has long appealed to collectors - partly for their exquisite craftsmanship and partly for the insight they offer into the lives of the young women who made them. The frequent depiction of strong, if sometimes bloodthirsty, Biblical heroines such as Judith and Esther on samplers and other embroideries of the mid-seventeenth century has been hailed by recent feminist historians as evidence of the advocacy of powerful female role models in Stuart society.(4) The figures across the top of the whitework sampler in Plate IV probably depict Judith and her maid with the head of Holofernes, whom Judith slew to save her people.(5) To the left is the decapitated body of Holofernes, with its bloody stump.

After completing a polychrome sampler, young needleworkers usually progressed to these more difficult whitework samplers, which were intended to perfect the stitches needed to make the early needle lace that was used extensively to adorn fashionable clothing and textiles. Such samplers also refined the embroiderer's skills in working the detached buttonhole stitches that were essential for creating panels for caskets and raised- and padded-work pictures.

The Renaissance brought new sources of imagery for both embroidery and other decorative arts. Allegorical and mythological subjects were culled from so-called emblem books and from prints illustrating the works of classical authors. Emblem books in particular provided intriguing motifs with esoteric meanings that flattered the educated patron and inspired needleworkers and other designers alike. For example, the emblem of a serpent coded around a strawberry plant at the lower right of the cushion cover in Plate V was probably inspired by a woodcut in the first English emblem book, Geoffrey Whitney's Choice of Emblemes and other devises [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED].(6) There it was accompanied by the warning, "Latet anguis in herba" (literally, "A snake lies in the grass," or more elegantly, "There is concealed danger"). Emblems showing snakes entwined around plants, staffs, and arrows were quite common and not only recur frequently on the cushion cover but were also used by jewelers. Elizabeth I received a jeweled pin depicting a snake wrapped around an arrow as a New Year's gift from the countess of Oxford in 1583.(7)

Floral ornament, reminiscent of the scrolling decoration on medieval illuminated manuscripts and often derived from illustrations of individual plants, or slips, in later printed herbals, were perennially popular with English embroiderers. The details of a cover illustrated in Plate II, with its repeated motifs of stylized yet identifiable garden flowers (including roses, cornflowers, carnations, and irises) enclosed in a glittering lattice of plaited braid and chain stitches, reveals the Elizabethan love of botany and gardening.(8) In the dedication of his Herball or Generall Historie of Plantes (London, 1597), John Gerard wrote to Sir William Cecil, Lord Burghley, Queen Elizabeth's lord high treasurer: