Chapter V: Part I: Samplers (3)

Although, undoubtedly, much of the ornament upon samplers consists of designs that have been handed down from generation to generation by means of the articles themselves, pattern-books have not been altogether lacking even from early days. They have not, however, rivalled either in quantity or quality those which treat of the sister Art of lace-making, for, so far as is known, early English treatises on the subject are limited to some half a dozen, and these occupy themselves as much with lacework as with embroidery.

The first English book that is known is in reality a foreign one; it is entitled, "New and Singular Patternes and Workes of Linnen Serving for Patternes to make all sorts of Lace Edginges and Cut Workes. Newly invented for the profite and contentment of Ladies, Gentilwomen and others that are desireous of this Art. By Vincentio. Printed by John Wolfe 1591." We have not been able to find a copy, and therefore can do no more than chronicle its existence.

A volume upon which needleworkers of the seventeenth century must have relied much more largely for their ideas was published in its early years under the title of "The Needle's Excellency. A New Booke wherein are divers admirable workes wrought with the needle. Newly invented and cut in copper for the pleasure and profit of the industrious. Printed for James Boler, and are to be sold at the Syne of the Marigold in Paules Churchyard." This treatise went to twelve editions at least, but, nevertheless, is very rare. The twelfth, "enlarged with divers newe workes, needleworkes, purles, and others never before printed. 1640," is to be found in the British Museum Library, but even that copy has suffered considerably from usage, for many plates are missing, and few are in consecutive order. The title-page consists of an elaborate copper plate, in which are to be seen Wisdom, Industrie, and Follie; Industrie, seated in the middle under a tree with a formal garden behind her, is showing Follie, who is decked out in gorgeous Elizabethan costume, her work, and Follie is lifting her hands in astonishment at it. Following the title-page comes a lengthy poem by Taylor, the Water Poet, upon the subject of needlework. So far as one can judge from the samplers of the period, the designs for needlework in the book, which consist of formal borders, have been very seldom copied, but some for drawn work undoubtedly have a close resemblance to those which we see in existing pieces. Another book, which I have been unable to find in the Museum, is described as "Patternes of Cut Workes newly invented and never published before: Also Sundry Sorts of Spots, as Flowers, Birdes, and Fishes, etc., which will fitly serve to be wrought, some with gould, some with silke, and some with creuell in coullers; or otherwise, at your pleasure."

From "The Needle's Excellency" we have many clues as to needlework in the early seventeenth century. First of all, as to the articles for which samplers would be required, the following are mentioned: "handkerchiefs, table cloathes for parloures or for halls, sheetes, towels, napkins, pillow beares." Then as to the objects which were delineated on embroideries, it states that:--

"In clothes of Arras I have often seene
Men's figured counterfeits so like have beene
That if the parties selfe had been in place
Yet Art would vie with nature for the grace."

Again,

"Flowers, Plants and Fishes,
Beasts, Birds, Flyes and Bees,
Hills, Dales, Plains, Pastures,
Skies, Seas, Rivers, Trees,
There's nothing ne'er at hand or farthest sought
But with the needle may be shap'd and wrought."

It would seem from the foregoing that the volumes would be of more profit to the worker of embroidered pictures than to sampler-makers, and this was no doubt the case; for when the former went out of fashion, the books dealing with the subject disappeared too, and nothing further of any note was published, except in the beginning of the last century, when the National Schools were furnished with manuals which dealt more with plain sewing than with decorative needlework.

The Last of the Samplers

I can hardly close my remarks upon the entertaining subject, the elucidation of and material for which has filled many spare hours, without a word of regret at having to pen the elegy of the sampler.

It may be said that even so long ago as the era of the _Spectator_ there were those who sounded its death knell, and who considered that the days when a lady crowded a thousand graces on to the surface of a garter were gone for ever. For did it not go to the heart of one of Mr Spectator's correspondents to see a couple of idle flirts sipping their tea for a whole afternoon, in a room hung round with the industry of their great-grandmothers, and did he not implore that potentate to take the laudable mystery of embroidery into his serious consideration?

But even then there were matrons who upheld the craft, and of whom an epitaph could be written that "she wrought the whole Bible in tapestry, and died in a good old age after having covered three hundred yards of wall in the Mansion House." Besides, the samplers themselves show that the industry, if not the Art, continued all through that century and for at least half of the nineteenth.

The decadence of the sampler has never been more tenderly or pathetically dealt with than in the description given of the dame's school in the sketch entitled "Lucy," in Miss Mitford's "Our Village."[9]

... There are seven girls now in the school working samplers to be
framed. "Such a waste of silk, and time, and trouble!" I said to Mrs
Smith, and Mrs Smith said to me. Then she recounted the whole battle
of the samplers, and her defeat; and then she sent for one which, in
spite of her declaration that her girls never finished anything, was
quite completed (probably with a good deal of her assistance), and of
which, notwithstanding her rational objection to its uselessness, Lucy
was not a little proud. She held it up with great delight, pointed out
all the beauties, selected her own favourite parts, especially a
certain square rosebud, and the landscape at the bottom; and finally
pinned it against the wall, to show the effect that it would have when
framed. Really, that sampler was a superb thing in its way. First came
a plain pink border; then a green border, zig-zag; then a crimson,
wavy; then a brown, of a different and more complicated zig-zag; then
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 or scarlet, or
orange-scarlet; on the other by the famous rosebud, then divers
sentences, religious and moral;--Lucy was quite provoked with me for
not being able to read them; I daresay she thought in her heart that I
was as stupid as any of her scholars; but never was MS. so illegible,
not even my own, as the print-work of that sampler;--then last and
finest, the landscape, in all its glory. It occupied the whole narrow
line at the bottom, and was composed with great regularity. In the
centre was a house of a 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 that there was any difference, 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, the man grey, the woman pink, his attendant
white, and hers black. Next to these figures, on either side, rose two
fir-trees from two red flower-pots, nice little round bushes of a
bright green or intermixed with brown stitches, which Lucy explained,
not to me--"Don't you see the fir-cones, sir? Don't you remember how
fond she used to be of picking them up in her little basket at the
dear old place? Poor thing, I thought of her all the time that I was
working them! Don't you like the fir-cones?"--After this, I looked at
the landscape almost as lovingly as Lucy herself.

NOTE.--The only modern sampler in The Fine Art Society's Exhibition in which beadwork was employed. This is the more remarkable as it apparently dates from about the period when beadwork was so much in fashion for purses, etc. As we shall see in our illustrations of pictures in imitation of tapestry (Plate XXI.), beadwork was very common in the seventeenth century, but we have not seen a single specimen of this material dated in the eighteenth century, unless it be this one, which we place at the end of the eighteenth or the beginning of the nineteenth century.]

It has been prophesied that:--

"Untill the world be quite dissolv'd and past
So long at least the needles use shall last."

I trow not, if for "use" the word "Art" may be substituted.

It is true that recent International Exhibitions have included some marvellous specimens of adroitness in needlework, such, for instance, as the wonders from Japan; but these _tours de force_, and even the skilled productions from English schools, as, for instance, "The Royal School of Art Needlework," and which endeavour fitfully to stir up the dying embers of what was once so congenial an employment to womankind, are no indications of any possibility of needlework regaining its hold on either the classes or the masses.

Samplers can never again be a necessity whereby to teach the young idea, and every year that passes will relegate them more and more into the category of interesting examples of a bygone and forgotten industry.

One sampler dated within the last half century finds a place in this book, but it is indeed a degraded object, and is included here to show to what the fashion had come in the Victorian era, an era notable for huge sums being expended on Art schools, and over a million children receiving Art instruction at the nation's expense. The sampler is dated 1881, and was the work of a lady of seventeen years of age. The groundwork is a common handkerchief, the young needlewoman evidently considering that its puce-coloured printed border was a better design than any she could invent. It was produced at a school, for there are broidered upon it the names of thirty-five other girls, besides seven bearing her own patronymic. As will be seen by the reproduction (Fig. 54), it is adorned with no less than nine alphabets, not one of which contains an artistic form of lettering. As to the ornament, the cross and anchor hustle the pawnbroker's golden balls, and formless leaves surround the single word "Love," all that the maker's invention could supply of sentimentality. This is apparently the best that the deft fingers of Art-taught girlhood could then produce. The flash in the pan that, round about the date of its creation, was leading to the production of the "chairback" in crewels, collapsed before machine-made imitations, and well it might when even a knowledge of how to stitch an initial is unnecessary, as we can obtain by return of post from Coventry, at the price of a shilling or so a hundred, a roll of our names in red, machine-worked, lettering. Truly it seems as if any use for needlework in the future will be relegated to an occasional spasmodic effort, such as when war confronts us and our soldiers are supposed to be in need of a hundred thousand nightcaps or mufflers.

The decay of needlework amongst the children of the middle classes may perhaps be counterbalanced by other useful employments, but undoubtedly with those of a lower stratum of society the lack of it has simply resulted in their filling the blank with the perusal of a cheap literature, productive of nothing that is beneficial either to mind or body.

One of the quaintest of the Embroidery pictures. Differing as it does from the majority of its fellows in the costume of its figures, and valuable as it is as a record of the dress of the first years of the seventeenth century, the piquancy and variety of the subjects depicted combine with these to give it an unusual interest. As regards the dress, it denotes a period towards the close of the reign of James I. The ruff is still worn by the doctors, but the boots of the gentleman who walks with a lady are very close to the fashion of Charles I. The subjects combine religious and mundane. The former comprise Christ in the Temple instructing the doctors, Susannah and the Elders, and a remarkable scene of Martyrs at the stake, one of the latter being in the uncomfortable position of having a stone protruding from his forehead. The latter show the squire and his lady beside their residence, young ladies out for an airing, and others about to enter a Pergola. Its maker has not only been happy through the vitality imparted to the human puppets, but has succeeded equally well with animal life; witness the rabbit and squirrel beneath the apple tree and the greyhound and hare in the lower corner. The water in which Susannah laves her legs is worked in imitation of ripples, and looks fresher than the rest owing to the recent removal of the talc with which it was covered. The clouds in the upper part of the moss, etc., in the lower portion come dark in the reproduction as they are made of purl, which has tarnished. It will be noted that those of the pictures in which the surface is not entirely covered with embroidery are usually worked upon white satin. This was a fashion of the time, and supplanted velvet, the material hitherto used, owing, it is assumed, to its being an easier material to work upon, but also probably to its beautiful surface resembling a background of parchment, and to the magnificent quality which was then made.]