THE DEVELOPMENT OF EMBROIDERY IN AMERICA

 By Candace Wheeler

 [Illustration: CANDACE WHEELER

 From the painting by her daughter Dora Wheeler Keith. 

 _Painted by Dora Wheeler Keith_]

 THE DEVELOPMENT OF EMBROIDERY IN AMERICA

 _By_

 CANDACE WHEELER

 _Illustrated_

 [Illustration]

 HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS NEW YORK AND LONDON MCMXXI

 DEVELOPMENT OF EMBROIDERY IN AMERICA

 Copyright, 1921, by Harper & Brothers Printed in the United States of America X-V

 CONTENTS

 CHAP. PAGE

 Introductory. The Story of the Needle 3

 I. Beginnings in the New World 10

 II. The Crewelwork of Our Puritan Mothers 17

 III. Samplers and a Word About Quilts 48

 IV. Moravian Work, Portraiture, French Embroidery and Lacework 62

 V. Berlin Woolwork 96

 VI. Revival of Embroidery, and the Founding of the Society of Decorative Art 102

 VII. American Tapestry 121

 VIII. The Bayeux Tapestries 144

 ILLUSTRATIONS

 CANDACE WHEELER. From the painting by her daughter Dora Wheeler Keith Frontispiece

 MOCCASINS OF PORCUPINE QUILLWORK. Made by Sioux Indians _Facing_ 12

 PIPE BAGS OF PORCUPINE QUILLWORK. Made by Sioux Indians 12

 MAN'S JACKET OF PORCUPINE QUILLWORK. Made by Sioux Indians 14

 MAN'S JACKET OF PORCUPINE QUILLWORK. Made by Plains Indians 14

 CREWEL DESIGN, drawn and colored, which dates back to Colonial times 18

 TESTER embroidered in crewels in shades of blue on white homespun linen. Said to have been brought to Essex, Mass. , in 1640, by Madam Susanna, wife of Sylvester Eveleth 22

 RAISED EMBROIDERY ON BLACK VELVET. Nineteenth century American 22

 QUILTED COVERLET made by Ann Gurnee 26

 HOMESPUN WOOLEN BLANKET with King George's Crown embroidered with home-dyed blue yarn in the corner. From the Burdette home at Fort Lee, N. J. , where Washington was entertained 26

 CHEROKEE ROSE BLANKET, made about 1830, of homespun wool with "Indian Rose" design about nineteen inches in diameter worked in the corners in home-dyed yarns of black, red, yellow, and dark green. From the Westervelt collection 26

 BED SET, Keturah Baldwin pattern, designed, dyed, and worked by The Deerfield Society of Blue and White Needlework, Deerfield, Mass. 32

 BED COVERS worked in candle wicking 32

 SAMPLER worked by Adeline Bryant in 1826, now in the possession of Anna D. Trowbridge, Hackensack, N. J. 50

 SAMPLER embroidered in colors on écru linen, by Mary Ann Marley, aged twelve, August 30, 1820 52

 SAMPLER embroidered in brown on écru linen, by Martha Carter Fitzhugh, of Virginia, in 1793, and left unfinished at her death 52

 SAMPLER worked by Christiana Baird. Late eighteenth century American 54

 MEMORIAL PIECE worked in silks, on white satin. Sacred to the memory of Major Anthony Morse, who died March 22, 1805 54

 SAMPLER of Moravian embroidery, worked in 1806, by Sarah Ann Smith, of Smithtown, L. I. 54

 SAMPLER worked by Nancy Dennis, Argyle, N. Y. , in 1810 56

 SAMPLER worked by Nancy McMurray, of Salem, N. Y. , in 1793 56

 PETIT POINT PICTURE which belonged to President John Quincy Adams, and now in the Dwight M. Prouty collection 56

 SAMPLER in drawnwork, écru linen thread, made by Anne Gower, wife of Gov. John Endicott, before 1628 60

 SAMPLER embroidered in dull colors on écru canvas by Mary Holingworth, wife of Philip English, Salem merchant, married July, 1675, accused of witchcraft in 1692, but escaped to New York 60

 SAMPLER worked by Hattie Goodeshall, who was born February 19, 1780, in Bristol 60

 NEEDLEBOOK of Moravian embroidery made about 1850, now in the possession of Mrs. J. N. Myers, Bethlehem, Pa. 64

 MORAVIAN EMBROIDERY worked by Emily E. Reynolds, Plymouth, Pa. , in 1834, at the age of twelve, while at the Moravian Seminary in Bethlehem, and now owned by her granddaughter 64

 MORAVIAN EMBROIDERY from Louisville, Ky. 66

 LINEN TOWELS embroidered in cross-stitch. Pennsylvania Dutch early nineteenth century 70

 "THE MEETING OF ISAAC AND REBECCA"--Moravian embroidered picture, an heirloom in the Reichel family of Bethlehem, Pa. Worked by Sarah Kummer about 1790 74

 "SUFFER LITTLE CHILDREN TO COME UNTO ME"--Cross-stitch picture made about 1825, now in the possession of the Beckel family, Bethlehem, Pa. 74

 ABRAHAM AND ISAAC. Kensington embroidery by Mary Winifred Hoskins, of Edenton, N. C. , while attending an English finishing school in Baltimore in 1814 76

 FIRE SCREEN embroidered in cross-stitch worsted 78

 FIRE SCREEN, design, "The Scottish Chieftain, " embroidered in cross-stitch by Mrs. Mary H. Cleveland Allen 78

 FIRE SCREEN worked about 1850 by Miss C. A. Granger, of Canandaigua, N. Y. 78

 EMBROIDERED PICTURE in silks, with a painted sky 80

 CORNELIA AND THE GRACCHI. Embroidered picture in silks, with velvet inlaid, worked by Mrs. Lydia Very, of Salem, at the age of sixteen while at Mrs. Peabody's school 80

 CAPE of white lawn embroidered. Nineteenth century American 84

 COLLARS of white muslin embroidered. Nineteenth century American 84

 BABY'S CAP. White mull, with eyelet embroidery. Nineteenth century American 86

 BABY'S CAP. Embroidered mull. 1825 86

 COLLAR of white embroidered muslin. Nineteenth century American 86

 EMBROIDERED SILK WEDDING WAISTCOAT, 1829. From the Westervelt collection 88

 EMBROIDERED WAIST OF A BABY DRESS, 1850. From the collection of Mrs. George Coe 88

 EMBROIDERY ON NET. Border for the front of a cap made about 1820 90

 VEIL (unfinished) hand run on machine-made net. American nineteenth century 90

 LACE WEDDING VEIL, 36 × 40 inches, used in 1806. From the collection of Mrs. Charles H. Lozier 92

 HOMESPUN LINEN NEEDLEWORK called "Benewacka" by the Dutch. The threads were drawn and then whipped into a net on which the design was darned with linen. Made about 1800 and used in the end of linen pillow cases 92

 BED HANGING of polychrome cross-stitch appliquéd on blue woolen ground 98

 NEEDLEPOINT SCREEN made in fine and coarse point. Single cross-stitch 98

 HAND-WOVEN TAPESTRY of fine and coarse needlepoint 100

 TAPESTRY woven on a hand loom. The design worked in fine point and the background coarse point. A new effect in hand weave originated at the Edgewater Tapestry Looms 100

 EMBROIDERED MITS 104

 WHITE COTTON VEST embroidered in colors. Eighteenth-nineteenth century American 104

 WHITE MULL embroidered in colors. Eighteenth-nineteenth century American 104

 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 104

 DETAIL of linen coverlet worked in colored wool 108

 LINEN COVERLET embroidered in Kensington stitch with colored wool 108

 QUILTED COVERLET worked entirely by hand 118

 DETAIL of quilted coverlet 118

 THE WINGED MOON. Designed by Dora Wheeler and executed in needle-woven tapestry by The Associated Artists, 1883 122

 SEVENTEENTH CENTURY DESIGN TAPESTRY PANEL 126

 THE MIRACULOUS DRAUGHT OF FISHES. Arranged (from photographs made in London of the original cartoon by Raphael, in the Kensington Museum) by Candace Wheeler and executed in needle-woven tapestry by The Associated Artists 130

 MINNEHAHA LISTENING TO THE WATERFALL. Drawn by Dora Wheeler and executed in needle-woven tapestry by The Associated Artists, 1884 132

 APHRODITE. Designed by Dora Wheeler for needle-woven tapestry worked by The Associated Artists, 1883 134

 FIGHTING DRAGONS. Drawn by Candace Wheeler and embroidered by The Associated Artists, 1885 140

 THREE SCENES FROM THE BAYEUX TAPESTRY 146

THE DEVELOPMENT OF EMBROIDERY IN AMERICA

INTRODUCTORY -- THE STORY OF THE NEEDLE

The story of embroidery includes in its history all the work of theneedle since Eve sewed fig leaves together in the Garden of Eden. We arethe inheritors of the knowledge and skill of all the daughters of Eve inall that concerns its use since the beginning of time. 

When this small implement came open-eyed into the world it brought withit possibilities of well-being and comfort for races and ages to come. It has been an instrument of beneficence as long ago as "Dorcas sewedgarments and gave them to the poor, " and has been a creator of beautysince Sisera gave to his mother "a prey of needlework, 'alike on bothsides. '" This little descriptive phrase--alike on both sides--will atonce suggest to all needlewomen a perfection of method almost withoutparallel. Of course it can be done, but the skill of it must have beenrare, even in those far-off days of leisure when duties and pleasuresdid not crowd out painstaking tasks, and every art was carried as far ashuman assiduity and invention could carry it. 

A history of the needlework of the world would be a history of thedomestic accomplishment of the world, that inner story of the existenceof man which bears the relation to him of sunlight to the plant. We candeduce from these needle records much of the physical circumstances ofwoman's long pilgrimage down the ages, of her mental processes, of hergrowth in thought. We can judge from the character of her art whethershe was at peace with herself and the world, and from its status webecome aware of its relative importance to the conditions of her life. 

There are few written records of its practice and growth, for an artwhich does not affect the commercial gain of a land or country is notapt to have a written or statistical history, but, fortunately in thiscase, the curious and valuable specimens which are left to us tell theirown story. They reveal the cultivation and amelioration of domesticlife. Their contribution to the refinements are their very existence. 

A history of any domestic practice which has grown into a habit marksthe degree of general civilization, but the practice of needlework doesmore. To a careful student each small difference in the art tells itsown story in its own language. The hammered gold of Eastern embroiderytells not only of the riches of available material, but of the habit ofpersonal preparation, instead of the mechanical. The little Bibledescription of captured "needlework alike on both sides" speaksunmistakably of the method of their stitchery, a cross-stitch of coloredthreads, which is even now the only method of stitch "alike on bothsides. "

It is an endless and fascinating story of the leisure of women in allages and circumstances, written in her own handwriting of painstakingneedlework and an estimate of an art to which gold, silver, and preciousstones--the treasures of the world--were devoted. More than this, itsintimate association with the growth and well-being of family life makesvisible the point where savagery is left behind and the decrees ofcivilization begin. 

I knew a dear Bible-nourished lonely little maid who had constructed forherself a drama of Eve in Eden, playing it for the solitary audience ofself in a corner of the garden. She had brought all manner of fruits andhad tied them to the fence palings under the apple boughs. This littleEve gathered grape leaves and sewed them carefully into an apron, theneedle holes pierced with a thorn and held together by fiber strippedfrom long-stemmed plantain leaves. Here she and her audience of self hidunder the apple boughs and waited for the call of the Lord. 

The long ministry of the needle to the wants of mankind proves it tohave been among the first of man's inventions. When Eve sewed fig leavesshe probably improvised some implement for the process, and everydaughter of Eve, from Eden to the present time, has been indebted tothat little implement for expression of herself in love and duty andart. For this we must thank the man who, the Bible relates, was "thefather of all such as worked in metals, and made needles and gave themto his household. " He is the first "handy man" mentioned inhistory--blest be his memory!

If the day should ever come, not, let us hope, in our time or that ofour children, when the manufacturer shall find that it no longer pays tomake needles, what value will attach to individual specimens! If theywere only to be found in occasional bric-à-brac shops or in thecollections of some far-seeing hoarder of rarities, it would bedifficult to overrate the interest which might attach to them. How, fromthe prodigal disregard of ages and the mysteries of the past, wouldemerge, one after another, recovered specimens, to be examined andjudged and classified and arranged!

Perhaps collections of them will be found in future museums underdifferent headings, such as:

"Needles of Consolation, " under which might come those which Mary Stuartand her maids wrought their dismal hours into pathetic bits ofembroidery during the long days of captivity, or the daughter of thesorrowful Marie Antoinette mended the dilapidations of the pitiful andragged Dauphin; or:

"Needles of Devotion, " wielded by canonized and uncanonized saints inand out of nunneries; or:

"Needles of History, " like those with which Matilda stitched the prowessof William the Conqueror into breadths of woven flax. 

Possibly there may arise needle experts who, upon microscopicexamination and scientific test, will refer all specimens to positivedate and peculiar function, and by so doing let in floods of light uponancient customs and habits. It is idle to speculate upon a conditionwhich does not yet exist, for, happily, needles for actual hand sewingare yet in sufficient demand to allow us to indulge in their purchasequite ungrudgingly. 

I was once shown a needle--it was in Constantinople--which thedark-skinned owner declared had been treasured for three hundred yearsin his family, and he affirmed it so positively and circumstantiallythat I accepted the statement as truth. In fact, what did it matter? Itwas an interesting lie or an interesting truth, whichever one mightconsider it, and the needle looked quite capable of sustaining anothercentury or so of family use. Its eye was a polished triangular hole madeto carry strips of beaten metal, exactly such as we read of in the Bibleas beaten and cut into strips for embroidery upon linen, suchembroidery, in fact, as has often been burned in order to sift the puregold from its ashes. 

Not only the history, but the poetry and song of all periods are starredwith real and ideal embroideries--noble and beautiful ladies, whosechief occupations seem to have been the medicining of wounds received intheir honor or defense, or the broidering of scarfs and sleeves withwhich to bind the helmets of their knights as they went forth totourney or to battle. In these old chronicles the knights fought or mademusic with harp or voice, and the women ministered or made embroidery, and so pictured lives which were lived in the days of knights and ladiesdrifted on. The sword and the needle expressed the duties, the spirit, and the essence of their several lives. The men were militant, the womendomestic, and wherever in castle or house or nunnery the lives of womenwere made safe by the use of the sword the needle was devoting itself tocomforts of clothing for the poor and dependent, or luxuries ofadornment for the rich and powerful. So the needle lived on through allthe civilizations of the old world, in the various forms which theydeveloped, until it was finally inherited by pilgrims to a new world, and was brought with them to the wilderness of America. 

CHAPTER I -- BEGINNINGS IN THE NEW WORLD

The history of embroidery in America would naturally begin with theadvent of the Pilgrim Mothers, if one ignored the work of nativeIndians. This, however, would be unfair to a primitive art, whichaccomplished, with perfect appropriateness to use and remarkableadaptation of circumstance and material, the ornamentation of personalapparel. 

The porcupine quill embroidery of American Indian women is unique amongthe productions of primitive peoples, and some of the dresses, deerskinshirts, and moccasins with borders and flying designs in black, red, blue, and shining white quills, and edged with fringes hung with theteeth and claws of game, or with beautiful small shells, are as trulyobjects of art as are many things of the same decorative intent producedunder the best conditions of civilization. 

To create beauty with the very limited resources of skins, hair, teeth, and quills of animals, colored with the expressed juice of plants, was aproblem very successfully solved by these dwellers in the wilderness, and the results were practically and æsthetically valuable. 

In the Smithsonian Institution at Washington, D. C. , there has happilybeen preserved a most interesting collection of these early efforts. Thesmall deerskin shirts worn as outer garments by the little Sioux wereperhaps among the most interesting and elaborate. They are generallyembroidered with dyed moose hair and split quills of birds in theirnatural colors, large split quills or flattened smaller quills usedwhole. The work has an embossed effect which is very striking. A coatfor an adult of Sioux workmanship, made of calfskin thicker and lesspliant than the deerskin ordinarily used for garments, carries a broadband of quill embroidery, broken by whorls of the same, the center ofeach holding a highly decorated tassel made of narrow strips ofdeerskin, bound at intervals with split porcupine quills. Theseornamental tassels carry the idea of decoration below the bands, andhave a changeable and living effect which is admirable. In a smallershirt, the whole body is covered at irregular intervals with whorls ofthe finest porcupine quill work, edged by a border of interlaced blackand white quills, finished with perforated shells. Many of the designsare edged with narrow zigzag borders of the split quills in naturalcolors carefully matched and lapped in very exact fashion. There is onesmall shirt, made with a decorative border of tanned ermine skins inalternate squares of fur and beautifully colored quill embroidery, notone tint of which is out of harmony with the soft yellow of the deerskinbody. The edge of the shirt is finished in very civilized fashion, withermine tails, each pendant, banded with blue quills, at alternatingheights, making a shining zigzag of blue along the fringe. Thesimplicity of treatment and purity of color in this little garment werefascinating, and must have invested the small savage who wore it withthe dignity of a prince. 

The mother who evolved the scheme and manner of decoration carried herbit of genius in an uncivilized squaw body, but had none the less a truefeeling for beauty, and in this mother task lifted the plane of the artof her people to a higher level. 

[Illustration: _Left_--MOCCASINS of porcupine quillwork, made by SiouxIndians. 

_Right_--PIPE BAGS of porcupine quillwork, made by Sioux Indians. 

_Courtesy of American Museum of Natural History, New York_]

The purely decorative ability which lived and flourished before theadvent of civilization lost its distinctive simplicity of character whenwoven cloth of brilliant red flannel and the tempting glamour ofcolored glass beads came into their horizon, although they acceptedthese new materials with avidity. Porcupine quill work seems to havebeen no longer practiced, although a few headbands of ceremony are to befound among the tribes, and now and then one comes across a veritabletreasure, an evidence of long and unremitting toil, which has beenpreserved with veneration. 

Of course many valuable results of the best early embroideries stillexist among the Indians themselves. 

A very striking feature of both early and late work is the fringing, which plays an important part in the decoration of garments. The fringematerials were generally of the longest procurable dried moose hair, thefinely cut strips of deerskin, or, in some instances, the tough stems ofriver and swamp grasses twisted, braided and interwoven in everyconceivable manner, and varied along the depth of the fringes by smallperforated shells, teeth of animals, seeds of pine, or other shapely andhard substances which gave variety and added weight. Beads of bone andshell are not uncommon, or small bits of hammered metal. In one or twoinstances I have seen long deerskin fringes with stained or painteddesigns, emphasized with seeds or shells at centers of circles, orcorners of zigzags. This ingenious use of a decorative fringe gave aneffect of elaborate ornament with comparatively small labor. 

Perhaps the best lesson we have to learn from this bygone phase ofdecorative effort is in the possibilities of genuine art, where scantmaterials of effect are available. 

A thoughtful and exact study of early Indian art gives abundantindication of the effect of intimacy with the moods and phenomena ofNature, incident to the lives of an outdoor people. 

Many of the designs which decorate the larger pieces, like shirts andblankets, were evidently so inspired. The designs of lengthened andunequal zigzags are lightning flashes translated into embroidery; thelateral lines of broken direction are water waves moving in masses. There are clouds and stars and moons to be found among them, and if wecould interpret them we might even find records of the sensations withwhich they were regarded. 

[Illustration: MAN'S JACKET OF PORCUPINE QUILLWORK Made by SiouxIndians. 

_Courtesy American Museum of Natural History, New York_]

[Illustration: MAN'S JACKET OF PORCUPINE QUILLWORK Made by PlainsIndians. 

_Courtesy of American Museum of Natural History, New York_]

It would seem to argue a want of inventive faculty, that theaboriginal women never conceived the idea of weaving fibers together intextiles, but were contented with the skins of animals for warmth ofbody covering. The two alternatives of so close and warm a substance astanned skins, or nakedness, seem to a civilized mind to demand someintermediate substance. This, however, was not felt as a want, at leastnot to the extent of inspiring a textile. Perhaps we should never havehad the unique porcupine quill embroidery except for the close-grainedskin foundation, which made it possible and permanent. Certainly thecleverness with which the idea of weaving has been used in the evolutionof the Indian blanket shows that only the initial thought was lacking. The subsequent use of the arts of spinning and weaving, with theretention of the original idea of decoration in design and coloring, hasmade the Indian blanket an article of great commercial value. 

Fortunately, these productions are valuable to their producers, and evento other members of the tribes, and were carefully preserved fromcasualties, so that there are still many examples of Indian manufacture, such as belts of wampum, and headbands of ceremony, to be found amongexisting tribes. 

These early specimens are not only intrinsically valuable, but give manya clue to what may be called the spiritual side of the aborigines. Theyhad not learned the limits of representation, and as this history dealswith results of life and not with the impulse toward expression whichlies at the root of design, we need not attempt more than a suggestionof some of the results. The unguided impulses of Indian art, as seen orimagined in their work, lies behind the work itself and can be read onlyby its materialization. 

CHAPTER II -- THE CREWELWORK OF OUR PURITAN MOTHERS

The crewelwork of New England was the first ornamental stitcherypracticed in this country by women of European race, and in their handsmade its first appearance even during the days of privation and nightsof fear which were their portion in this strange new world to which theyhad come. 

The seed of it was brought by that winged creature of destiny, the_Mayflower_, hidden in the folds or decorating the borders of theprecious household linen which was a part of the gear of the firstPilgrims. In its hollow interior there was room for bed dressings andtable napery, even when the high-posted bedsteads and tables which theyhad adorned were abandoned, or exchanged for peace of mind and libertyof action. 

It may have declared itself in the very first years of settlement, before they had encountered the savage antagonism of the aborigines, andwhile they still had only the privations incident to pioneer life; orit may have been after the long struggle for ascendancy and possessionwas over, and they could settle down in hard-won homes. Upon neighboringor contiguous farms there they gradually drew together the threads ofmemory concerning former peaceful occupations, and wove them once moreinto the warp of daily life. They could visit one another, exchangingdomestic experiences, or reminiscences of spiritual struggles of theirown or of fellow Pilgrims, and old-time hand occupations would be amutual lullaby and an exorcism of anxiety. 

The real beginning of embroidery as a national art was probably at alater period, for its previous practice would be but a continuation ofold-world occupations or diversions of life. 

The devoted mothers of the American race, who sailed the seas in thosefar-off days, might have brought some favorite "piece" of embroideryamong their most intimate belongings, wherewithal to while away thehours of weary days upon the limitless breadths of ocean. There would beintervals of calm between storms, and periods when even the merest shredof a home-practiced art would be doubly and trebly valued, like apiece of heavenly raiment to a naked and banished angel. 

[Illustration: CREWEL DESIGN, drawn and colored, which dates back toColonial times. 

_In the possession of the Dunham family of Cooperstown. _]

The most natural effort of the woman standing in the midst of such newand strenuous conditions as surrounded the Pilgrim mothers in America, would be to reproduce something which had meant peace and tranquillityin former days. We can imagine her, searching the closely packediron-bound chests which held most of the worldly goods of the traversingpilgrims--those famous chests, the boards of which had been carefullydoweled and faithfully put together to resist outward and inwardpressure--packed and repacked with constant misgivings and hopefulforesight. In those crowded treasure chests it was possible there mightbe found skeins of crewel, and even working patterns which some hopefulinstinct had prompted her to preserve. 

While the Puritan mother was scheming to add embroidery to heroccupations, she did not forget to train each small maid of the familyto the use of the needle. Ruth and Peace and Harmony and Mercy madetheir samplers as faithfully as though they were growing up under theshade of the apple trees of old England instead of among the blackenedstumps of newly cut forests. 

So the old art survived its transplantation and rooted itself in spiteof storms of terror, and during and after the test of fire and blood, and spread, after the manner of art and knowledge, until it became thejoy and comfort of a new race, a vehicle of feminine dexterity and anexpression of the creative instinct with which in a greater or lesserdegree we are all endowed. 

We can easily believe that stores of linen and precious china, as wellas the small wheels for the spinning of the flax, could not be denied tothe devoted women who chose to share the hard fortunes of their Pilgrimhusbands and fathers. It is probable that in one form or anotherpossessions of crewel embroidery were transported with them. 

I know of no well-authenticated specimen which came in actual substancein that elastic vessel, but undoubtedly there were such, while many andmany existed in the minds and memories of the women of the new colony, to come to life and take on actual form, color and substance when thedays of their privations were numbered. If such actual treasured thingsexisted and were preserved through the early days of colonial life, every stitch of them would hold within itself traditions of tranquillityin a world where homes stood, and fields were tilled in safety, becauseof the vast plains of ocean which lay between them and savage tribes. 

In the earliest days of the colonies we could hardly expect more thanthe necessary practice of the needle, but when we come to the secondperiod, when neighborhoods became towns, and cabins grew into more orless well-equipped farmhouses, Puritan women gladly reverted to theaccomplishments of pre-American conditions. The familiar crewelwork ofEngland was the form of needlework which became popular. 

In looking for materials with which to recreate this art, they had notat that time far to seek. Wool and flax were farm products, necessitiesof pioneer life, and their manufacture into cloth was a well-understooddomestic art. 

Domestic animals had shared the tremendous experiment of transplantationof a fragment of the English race, and had suffered, no doubt, withtheir masters and owners, the struggles with savages and unaccustomedcircumstances, but they had survived and increased "after their kind. "Even through the strenuous wars against their very existence byuncivilized man, they lived and increased. Cows "calved, " and sheep"lambed, " and wool in abundance was to be had. 

The enterprising Puritan woman pulled the long-fibered straggling lockof wool, sorted out and rejected from the uniform fleeces, carded itwith her little hand cards into yard-long finger-sized rolls, andtwisted it upon her large wheel spindle, producing much such thread asan Italian peasant woman spins upon her distaff to-day as she walks uponthe shore at Baiæ. 

If the pioneer was a natural copyist, she doubled and twisted it, tomake it in the exact fashion of the English crewel; if adventurous andindependent, she worked it single threaded. This yarn had all the pliantqualities necessary for embroidery, and was in fact uncolored crewel. 

[Illustration: TESTER embroidered in crewels in shades of blue on whitehomespun linen. Said to have been brought to Essex, Mass. , in 1640, byMadam Susanna, wife of Sylvester Eveleth. 

_Courtesy of Essex Institute, Salem, Mass. _

To the right, raised embroidery on black velvet. Nineteenth centuryAmerican. ]

So, also, the production of flax thread, when the crop of flax wasgrown, and the long stems had struggled upward to their greatestheights, and finished themselves in a cloud of multitudinous blueflax flowers, beautiful enough to be grown for beauty alone, they pulledand made into slender bundles, and laid under the current of the brookwhich neighbored most pioneer houses, until the thready fibers could bewashed and scraped from the vegetable outer coat, the perishable partsof their composition, and combed into separateness. Then it was readyfor the small flax wheel of the housewife. Every woman had both woolwheel and flax wheel, the latter of all grades of beauty, from thosemade for the use of queens and ladies of high degree--royal forelaboration--to the modest ashen wheel, derived from a long line ofindustrious and careful foremothers, or copied by the clever Pilgrimfathers, from some adventurous wheel which had made the long voyage fromcivilized Holland to uncivilized America. 

For color, the simplest and most at hand expedient was a dip in theuniversal indigo tub, which waited in every "back shed" of the Puritanhomestead. One single dip in its black-looking depths and the skein ofspun lamb's wool acquired a tint like the blue of the sky. Immersion ofa day and night gave an indelible stain of a darker blue, and a week'srepose at the bottom of the pot made the wool as dark in tint as theindigo itself. For variety in her blues, the enterprising housewife usedthe sunburned "taglocks" which were too hopelessly yellow for webs ofwhite wool weaving, and gave them a short immersion in the tub, with theresult of a beautiful blue-green, tinged through and through with asunny luster, and this color was sun-fast and water-fast, capable ofholding its tint for a century. 

We know how knots of living wool grow golden by dragging through dew andlying in the sun, and how the ladies of Venice sat upon the roofs oftheir palaces with locks outspread upon the encircling brims ofcrownless hats, in order to capture the true Venetian tint of hair. Wedo not know by what alchemy the sun _silvers_ a web spread out towhiten, and yet _gilds_ the human tresses of ladies and yellows the"taglocks" of sheep. Chemists may be able to explain, but simple woman, unversed in the mysteries of chemistry, cannot. Whatever may have beenthe science of it, this golden hue added to medium and dark blue a triadof shades, which proved to be most effective when placed upon purewhite of bleached linen, or the gray-cream of the unbleached web. 

The color seekers soon learned that every indelible stain was a dye, andif little God-fearing Thomas came home with a stain of ineffaceablegreen or brown on the knees of his diminutive tow breeches, the mothercarefully investigated the character of it, and if it was unmoved by thepersuasive influence of "soft soap and sun, " she added it to a listwhich meant knowledge. It is to be hoped that this was often consideredan equivalent for the "trouncing" which was the common penalty ofaccident or inadvertence suffered by the Puritan child. In truth, Solomon's unwholesome caution, "Spare the rod and spoil the child, " wasall too strictly observed in those conscience-ridden Puritan days. I hada child's lively disapproval of Solomon, since the curse of hissarcastic comment came down with the Puritan strain in my own blood, andI have a smarting recollection of it. 

God-fearing Thomas and his brothers added to their mother's artisticequipment not only a list of variously shaded brown from the bark of theblack walnut tree, and of yellows from the leaves and twigs of thesumac and wild cherry, but numberless others. She was an untiring colorhunter, an experimenter with the juices of plants and flowers andberries, and with every unwash-outable stain. She set herself to theexciting task of repetition and variation. She tried the velvet shell ofyoung butternuts upon threads of her white wool, and found a springgreen, and if she spread over it a thinnest wash of hemlock bark, theywere olive, and if she dipped them in mitigated indigo, lo! they were ofthe green of sea hollows. The butternut in all stages of its growth, from the smallest and greenest to the rusty black of the ripe ones, andthe blackest black of the dried shell, was a mine of varied color; andthe brass kettle of from ten to twenty quarts capacity, which served somany purposes in domestic life, could be tranquilly carrying out some ofher propositions in the corner of the wide chimney while dinner wascooking, or in the ashes of the burned-out embers while the householdslept. 

[Illustration: QUILTED COVERLET made by Ann Gurnee. ]

[Illustration: HOMESPUN WOOLEN BLANKET with King George's Crownembroidered with home-dyed blue yarn in the corner. From the Burdettehome at Fort Lee, N. J. , where Washington was entertained. 

_Courtesy of Bergen County Historical Society, Hackensack, N. J. _]

[Illustration: CHEROKEE ROSE BLANKET, made about 1830 of homespun woolwith "Indian Rose" design about nineteen inches in diameter worked inthe corners in home-dyed yarns of black, red, yellow, and dark green. From the Westervelt collection. 

_Courtesy of Bergen County Historical Society, Hackensack, N. J. _]

It was interesting and skillful work to extract these colors, and theemulation of it and the glory of producing a new one was not withoutits excitement. There was a certain "fast pink" which was the secretof one ingenious ungenerous Puritan woman, who kept the secret of thedye, when rose pink was the unattainable want of feminine New England. She died without revealing it, and as in those days there were nochemists to boil up her rags and test them for the secret, the "Windhampink, " so said my grandmother, "made people sorry for her death, although she did not deserve it. " This little neighborly fling passeddown two generations before it came to me from the later days of thecolony. 

Yellows of different complexions were discovered in mayweed, goldenrodand sumac, and the little-girl Faiths and Hopes and Harmonys came inwith fingers pink from the handling of pokeberries and purple fromblackberry stain, tempting the sight with evanescent dyes which wouldnot keep their color even when stayed with alum and fortified with salt. All this made Mistress Windham's memory the more sad. A good reliablerose red was always wanting. Madder could be purchased, for it wasraised in the Southern colonies, but the madder was a brown red. Finallysome enterprising merchantman introduced cochineal, and the vacuum wasfilled. With a judicious addition of logwood, rose red, wine red anddeep claret were achieved. 

The dye of dyes was indigo, for the blue of heaven, or the paler blue ofsnow shadows, to a blue which was black or a black which was blue, waswithin its capacity. And the convenience of it! The indigo tub waseverywhere an adjunct to all home manufactures. It dyed the yarn for theuniversal knitting, and the wool which was a part of the blue-grayhomespun for the wear of the men of the household. "One-third of whitewool, one-third of indigo-dyed wool, and one-third of black sheep'swool, " was the formula for this universal texture. Perhaps it was nottoo much to say that the gray days of the Pilgrim mother's life wereenriched by this royal color. 

The soft yarns, carefully spun from selected wool, took kindly to thenatural dyes, and our friend, the Puritan housewife, soon found herselfin possession of a stock of home-manufactured material, soft andflexible in quality, and quite as good in color as that of the lamentedEnglish crewels. The homespun and woven linens with which her chestswere stocked were exactly the ground for decorative needlework of thekind which she had known in her English childhood, long before questionsof conscience had come to trouble her, or the boy who had grown up to beher husband had been wakened from a comfortable existence by thecat-o'-nine-tails of conscience, and sent across the sea to stifle hisdoubts in fighting savagery. 

Probably the Puritan mother could stop thinking for a while about thetraining of Thomas and Peace and Harmony, and the rest of the dozen anda half of children which were the allotted portion of every Puritanwife, while she selected out intervals of her long busy days, as oneselects out bits of color from bundles of uninteresting patches, anddevoted them to absolutely superfluous needlework. 

What a joy it must have been to ponder whether she should use deep pinkor celestial blue for the flowers of her pattern, instead of rememberinghow red poor baby Thomas's little cushions of flesh had grown under thesmart slaps of her corset board when he overcame his sister Faith in afair fight about nothing, and what a relief the making of crewel rosesmust have been from the doubts and cares of a constantly increasingfamily!

She sorted out her colors, three shades of green, three of cochinealred, two of madder--one of them a real salmon color--numberless shadesof indigo, yellows and oranges and browns in goodly bunches, ready forthe long stretches of fair solid white linen split into valances orsewed into a counterpane. Truly she was a happy woman, and she wouldshow Mistress Schuyler, with her endless "blue-and-white, " what shecould do with _her_ colors! Then she had a misgiving, and reflected fora moment on the unregeneracy of the human soul, and that poor MistressSchuyler's quiet airs of superiority really came from her Dutch blood, for her mother was an English Puritan who had married a Hollander, andher own husband revealed to her in the dead of night, when all heartsare opened, his belief that "Brother Schuyler had been moved to emigratemuch more by greed of profitable trade with the savages than by longingsfor liberty of conscience. "

She went back to her "pattern, " which she just now remembered had beenlent her by poor Mistress Schuyler, and was soon absorbed in makinglong lines of pin pricks along the outlines of the pattern, so that shecould sift powdered charcoal through and catch the shapes of leaves andcurves on her fair white linen. 

Her foot was on the rocker of the cradle all the time, and the last babywas asleep in it. The hooded cherry cradle which had rocked the threegirls and four boys, counting the wee velvet-scalped Jonathan, againstwhose coming the cradle had been polished with rottenstone and whale oiluntil it shone like mahogany. 

Should the roses of the pattern be red or pink? and the columbines blueor purple? She could make a beautiful purple by steeping the sugar paperwhich wrapped her precious cone of West Indian "loaf sugar, " andsugar-paper purple was reasonably fast. So ran the thoughts of the dear, straight-featured Puritan wife as she sorted her colors and worked herpattern. 

At this period of her experience of the new life of the colonies, thechief end of her embroidery was to help in creating a civilized home, toadd to what had been built simply for shelter and protection, some ofthe features which lived and grew only in the atmosphere of safety andcontent. Hospitality was one of the features of New England life, andthe first addition to the family shelter was a bedroom, which bore thetitle of the "best bedroom, " and a tall four-post bed, which was the"best bed. " The adornment of this holy altar of friendship was an urgentduty. 

When I began this allusion to the "best bedroom, " I left the housewifesorting her tinted crewels for its adornment, and she still sat, happilycutting the beautiful homespun linen into lengths for the two bedvalances, the one to hang from the upper frame which surrounded the topof her four-post bedstead, and the other, which hung from the bed frameitself, and reached the floor, hiding the dark space beneath the bed. The "high-post bedstead" had long groups of smooth flutes in the upwardcourse of its posts, and no footboard, a plain-sawed headboard andsmooth headposts. There must be a long curtain at the head of the bed, which would hide both headboard and plain headposts, and this curtainshe meant should have a wide border of crewelwork at the top and bunchesof flowers scattered at intervals on its surface. 

[Illustration: BED SET. Keturah Baldwin pattern, designed, dyed, andworked by The Deerfield Society of Blue and White Needlework. Deerfield, Mass. ]

[Illustration: BED COVERS worked in candle wicking. 

_Courtesy of Colonial Rooms, John Wanamaker, New York_]

None of Mistress Schuyler's "blue-and-white" for her! It should carryevery color she could muster, and the upper valance should have the sameborder as the head curtain. The lower valance would not need it, for thecounterpane would hang well over, and she meant somehow to bend theborder design into a wreath and work it in the center of thecounterpane, and double-knot a fringe to go entirely around it, the sameas that which should edge the upper valance. 

It was a luxurious bed dressing when it was finished, and nothing in itof material to differentiate it from the embroideries which were beingdone in England at the very time. There were no original features ofdesign or arrangement. The close-lapping stitches were set in exactlythe same fashion, and, considering the absolute necessity of growing andmanufacturing all the materials, it was a wonderful performance. 

It was not alone bed hangings which were subjects of New Englandcrewelwork; there were mantel valances, which covered the plain woodenmantels and hung at a safe distance above the generous household fires. These were wrought with borders of crewelwork, and finished withelaborate thread and crewel fringes. They were knotted intodiamond-shaped openings, above the fringes, three or four rows of them, the more the better, for in the general simplicity of furnishing, thesethings were of value. Then there were table covers and stand covers andwall pockets of various shapes and designs, and, in short, wherever thehousewife could legitimately introduce color and ornamentation, crewelwork made its appearance. 

In the very infancy of the art of embroidery in America, the primitiveneedlewoman was possessed of means and materials which fill theembroiderers of our rich later days with envy. Homespun linen is nolonger to be had, and dyes are no longer the pure, simple, hold-fastjuices which certain plants draw from the ground; and try as we may toemulate or imitate the old embroidered valances which hung from thetesters of the high-post bedsteads and concealed the dark cavitiesbeneath, and the coverlet besprinkled with bunches of impossible flowersdone in home-concocted shades of color upon heavy snow-white linen, wefall far short of the intrinsic merits of those early hangings. 

There are many survivals of these embroideries in New England families, who reverence all that pertains to the lives of their founders. Bedhangings had less daily wear and friction than pertained to otherarticles of decorative use, and generally maintained a healthy existenceuntil they ceased to be things of custom or fashion. When this time camethey were folded away with other treasures of household stuffs, in thereserved linen chest, whence they occasionally emerge to tell tales ofearlier days and compare themselves with the mixed specimens ofneedlework art which have succeeded them, but cannot be properly calledtheir descendants. 

The possession of a good piece of old crewelwork, done in this country, is as strong a proof of respectable ancestry as a patent of nobility, since no one in the busy early colonial days had time for such work savethose whose abundant leisure was secured by ample means and liberalsurroundings. The incessant social and intellectual activity demanded bymodern conditions of life was uncalled for. No woman, be she gentle orsimple, had stepped from the peaceful obscurity of home into the fieldof the world to war for its prizes or rewards. If the man to whom shebelonged failed to win bread or renown, the women who were bound in hisfamily starved for the one or lived without the luster of the other. 

I have shown that even in the early days of flax growing and indigodyeing the New England farmer's wife had come into her heritage, notonly of materials, but of the implements of manufacture. She had thesmall flax wheel which dwelt in the keeping room, where she could sitand spin like a lady of place and condition, and the large woolen wheelstanding in the mote-laden air of the garret, through which she walkedup and down as she twisted the yarn. 

Later, the colonial dame, if she belonged to the prosperous class--forthere were classes, even in the beginning of colonial life--had herbeautifully shaped mahogany linen wheel, made by the skillful artificersof England or Holland, more beautiful perhaps, but not more capable thanthat of the farm wife, whittled and sandpapered into smoothness by herhusband or sons, and both were used with the same result. 

The pioneer woodworker had a lively appreciation of the new woods of thenew country, and made free use of the abundant wild cherry for thefurniture called for by the growing prosperity of the settlements, itsclose grain and warm color giving it the preference over other nativewoods, excepting always the curly and bird's-eye maple, which werenovelties to the imported artisan. 

I remember that "curly maple" was a much prized wood in my ownchildhood, and that after carefully searching for the outward marks ofit among the trees of the farm, I asked about the shape of its leavesand the color of its bark, so that I might know it--for children weresupposed to know species of trees by sight in my childhood. "Why, " saidmy mother, "it looks like any other maple tree on the outside; it isonly that the wood is curly, just as some children have curly hair. "Even now, after all these years, a plane of curly maple suggests thecurly hair of some child beloved of nature. 

The beautiful curly, spotted and satiny maple wood was, however, "out offashion" when the roving shipmasters began to bring in logs of SantoDomingo mahogany in the holds of their far-wandering barks, and thecabinetmakers to cut beautiful shapes of sideboards, and curving legsand backs of chairs, as well as the tall carved headposts and the headand footboards of luxurious beds from them. It was not only that theywere a repetition of English luxury, but that they made more ofthemselves in plain white interiors, by reason of insistent color, thanthe blond sisterhood of maples could do. Cherry, which shared in adegree its depth of color, held its world for a longer period, but nowood could withstand the magnificence of pure mahogany red, with thestory of its vegetable life written along its planes in lines and waves, deepening into darks, and lightening into ocher and gold along itssurfaces. 

If the cabinetry of New England is a digression, it is perhaps excusableon the ground of its close connection with the crewel work of NewEngland, of which we are treating, and to which we shall have somethingof a sense of novelty in returning, since at least the complexion of ourcolonial embroidery has experienced a change. 

So, in spite of the success of the early Puritan woman in producingtints necessary to the various needs of colored crewelwork, thesupremacy of indigo as a dye led to a lasting fashion of embroideryknown as "blue-and-white. " It was the assertion of absolute and triedmerit in materials which led to its success. We sometimes see thisemergence of persistent goodness in instances of some human career, where indefatigable integrity outruns the glamour of personal gift. Thiswas the fortune of the "blue-and-white, " which not only created a style, but has achieved persistence and has broken out in revivals all alongthe history of American embroidery. It has been somewhat identified withdomestic weaving, for the loom has always been a member of the NewEngland family, the great home-built loom, standing in the far end ofthe kitchen, capable of divers miracles of creation between dawn andsunset. 

On this much-to-be-prized background of homespun linen the differentshades of indigo blue could be, and were, very effectively used, and itis worthy of note that it repeated the simple contrasts of the Cantonchina or the "blue Canton" which were the prized gifts brought to theirfamilies by the returning New England seamen in the profitable "Indiatrade, " which soon became a commercial fact. 

"Blue-and-white" had at first been evolved by tight-boundcircumstances. Excellent practice in shades of blue had given it acertified place in the embroidery art of America, but we do not find itin collections of old English embroidery. It is one of the smallmonuments which mark the path of the woman colonist, narrowed bycircumstances, which created a recognized style. It is not to bewondered at that blue-and-white crewelwork made a place for itself inthe history of embroidery which was a permanent one. The circumstancesof Puritan life being so simple and direct would induce a correspondingsimplicity of taste, and simplicity is apt to seize upon firstprinciples. 

Every colorist knows that strong but peaceful contrast is one of thefirst laws of color arrangement, and the unconscious yoking of white andblue placed one of the strongest color notes against unprotesting andreceptive white. This made a new manner or style of embroidery. Itspermanence may have been influenced by the art of one of the oldestpeoples of the world, and as we have said, the prevalence of Cantonchina upon the dressers and filling the mantel closets and serving thetables of the rich, was beginning to appear in all houses of growingprosperity, even where pewter ware and dishes carved from wood stillheld the place of actual service. 

The Puritan housewife could arrange her grades of blue according to theChinese colors of this oldest domestic art of the world, and becorrespondingly happy in the result. Chinese design, however, had noinfluence in the growing practice of embroidery, and here also aninstinctive law prevailed. She recognized that even the highlyartificial landscape art of her idolized plates would not suit theflexible and broken surfaces of her equally cherished linen, or thesurroundings of her life. 

It was small wonder that this became a favorite style of embroidery andhas in it the seeds of permanence. A table setting of snow-white orcream-white homespun, scalloped and embroidered in lines of bluecrewels, shining with the precious Canton blue, was, and would be evenat this day, a thing to admire. 

The first deviation from the habitual crewelwork is to be found in the"blue-and-white, " for although the same stitch was employed, it wasmore often in outline than solid. The designs were sketches instead of"patterns" as had formerly been the case. Although this variety of workcomes under the head of colonial crewelwork, there was in it thebeginning of the changes and variety effected by differing circumstancesand influences--those vital circumstances which leave their tracesconstantly along the history of needlework. It was owing to variousreasons that outline embroidery largely took the place of solidcrewelwork. 

The question of design must have been a rather difficult one, as therewere no designs, and almost no sources of design for needlework, and atthis stage of the art in New England original design seems not to havesuggested itself. It would certainly have been quite natural to havecopied pine trees and broken outlines of hills, but as this class ofembroidery was almost entirely used for hangings and decorativefurnishings, the Pilgrim mothers seem to have had an instinctive sensethat such design was incongruous. Consequently they copied Englishmodels. We find designs of crewelwork of the period in English museumsidentically the same as in the New England work, thorned roses andvoluminously doubled pinks, held together in borders of long curvedlines or scattered at regular intervals in groups and bunches. 

My grandmother explained to me in that long-ago period, where her greatage and my inquisitive youth met and exchanged our several andindividual surplus of thought and talk, that to a certain extent ladiesof colonial days copied many of their designs from what were calledIndia chintzes. These chintzes seem to have been the intermediate wearbetween homespun of either flax or wool and the creamy satins or thethick "paduasoy, " the more flexible "lutestring" silks, worn by greatladies of the period, and the wrought India muslins for lessconventional occasions. India chintzes were printed upon white or tintedgrounds of hand-spun cotton, in colors so generously full of substanceas to have almost the effect of brocaded stuffs, and adaptations fromtheir designs were suitable for embroidery. I remember thethree-cornered and square bits of India chintz which my grandmothershowed me in long-preserved "housewives, " or "huz-ifs, " as she calledthem. They were lengths of domestic linen on which small squares ortriangles of chintz were sewn, making a series of small pockets, eachone stuffed with convenient threads or bits of colored sewing silks, orneedle and thimble. These were pinned at the belt of the activehousewife, and hung swaying against her skirts if she rose from hersewing, or were conveniently at hand if she sat patching orembroidering. I remember that some of my grandmother's "huz-ifs" stillheld threads of different colored crewels wound on bits of cardboard, and any embroiderer might envy the convenience of such holders. 

I do not see, in fact, why there should not be a revival of "huz-ifs, " apleasant new fashion, founded upon the old, holding in harmoniousvariety all the wonders of modern manufacture, as well as makingmementos of former gowns of one's own and of one's friends. They mightbe studied gradations of color and design, and be enriched by harmoniousbindings. If my dwindling time holds out, perhaps I shall institute orassist at such a renewal of old conveniences, in spite of sharp contrastof purposes, adding to home costume a grace of pendent color. 

I was talking of design, when "huz-ifs" intruded, and was saying that atthe period when "blue-and-white" took on the "outline practice" designwas a difficult question; indeed, it is always a difficult question forembroiderers. It is so important a part or quality of the art ofembroidery. In fact, it is the business of the successful embroiderer toknow as much about design as she must about stitchery and color. 

After the advent of "blue-and-white, " embroidery took on many differentfeatures. Curiously enough, when it was confined to decorative uses, itscharacter immediately changed. Crewelwork of the period was not given tohangings and furniture, but to clothing. An embroidered apron became ofmuch more importance than a bed valance or counterpane. The young girlbegan by embroidering her school aprons with borders of forget-me-notsand mullein pinks, in colored crewels. 

I remember seeing among my grandmother's savings an apron of grayunbleached linen, quite dark in color, with a border of single pinksentirely around it. The design had evidently been drawn from the floweritself, and the whole performance was essentially different from thatof a slightly earlier period. The materials of homespun linen andhome-dyed crewels were the same. The thing which was different andshowed either a cropping-out of original thought or a bias toward thestyle of embroidery lately introduced by the famous school of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, was an over-and-over stitch instead of the old crewelmethod. This over-and-over stitch was apparent in all crewel embroiderydevoted to personal wear, but was never found in articles used for houseor decorative purposes. It was certainly a proper distinction, as the_flat_ of crewel was not capable of shadow and was more inherently apart of the textile, as much so, indeed, as a stamped or wovendecoration would have been. 

It was not long before the over-and-over stitch demanded silks andflosses instead of crewels for its exercise, and silk or satin for thebackground of its exploits. There were satin bags covered with the mostdelicate stitchery, and black silk aprons with wreaths of myrtle donewith silks or flosses, and, finally, satin pelerines exquisitelyembroidered in designs of carefully shaded roses. Although nothingremarkable or epoch-making happened in the art of embroidery, itretained an even more than respectable existence. The skill, taste, andlove for the creation of beauty, which were the heritage of the race, were kept alive. 

CHAPTER III -- SAMPLERS AND A WORD ABOUT QUILTS

A chapter upon Samplers, by right, should precede the discussion ofcolonial embroidery, although the practice of mothers in crewelwork wassimultaneous with it. They were carried on at the same time, but theembroidery was work for grown-up people, while samplers were babywork--a beginning as necessary as being taught to walk or talk, to thefuture of the child. Fortunately, the very infant interest in samplershas tended to their preservation, and when the child grew to womanhoodthe sampler became invested with a mingling of family interests andaffections, and she, the executant, came to look upon it withmotherliness. The loving pride of the mother in the child'saccomplishment also tended to the care and preservation of the firstwork of the small hands. 

As late as the twenties of the eighteenth century, infant schools stillexisted and samplers were wrought by infant fingers. Eighty-five yearsago, I myself was in one of a row of little chairs in the infant school, with a small spread of canvas lying over my lap and being sewn to myskirt by misdirected efforts. My box held a tiny thimble and spools ofgreen and red sewing silk, and I tucked it under alternate knees forsafety. 

_Sarah Woodruff!_--I wonder where she is now?--sat next to me in mysampler days, and her canvas was white, while mine was yellow. Herborder was worked with blue, and mine with green. With a child'sinscrutable and wonderful awareness of underlying facts, I knew thatSarah Woodruff's father was richer than mine, and that the white canvasand blue border, which the teacher said "went with it, " was anindication of it. I have it now, the little faded yellow parallelogramof canvas, on which the germ of the very fingers with which I am nowwriting wrought with painstaking care--"Executed by Candace Thurber, herage six years. " They have since had various fortunes and experiences, these fingers, and have wrought to the satisfaction, I hope, of theirforegone line of Puritan ancestors. 

The sampler has special claims upon the world, because it is probablethat all forms of textile design originated with it. In fact, design forneedlework began with small squares formed by crossing stitches at thejunction of textile fiber. 

In sequences these squares formed lines, blocks, and corner, and indouble-line juxtaposition made the form of border probably the oldestornamental decoration in the world, generally known as a Roman border. This decoration escaped from textiles into stone and building materials, and in fact appeared in the elaboration of all materials, from thefronts of temples to the ornamentation of a crown. The most ancientexamples of design are founded upon a square, and this points inevitablyto the stitch covering the crossing of threads, the cross-stitch, whichpreceded all others and remained the only decorative stitch untilweaving sprang into so fine an art that interstices between threads areunnoticeable. Then, and not until then, the long over-stitch, the _opusplumarium_, which we call "Kensington, " was invented, and served to makeEnglish embroidery famous in early English history. This was the stitchused by the Pilgrim mothers in their crewel embroidery, as we use itto-day in most of our decorative presentations. 

[Illustration: SAMPLER worked by Adeline Bryant in 1826, now in thepossession of Anna D. Trowbridge, Hackensack, N. J. ]

In spite of the achievements of the _opus plumarium_, we are indebtedto simple cross-stitch, to the obligations of the mathematical square ofhand weavings, for all the wonderful borderings which have been evolvedby ages of the use of the needle, since decoration began. We do not stopto think of the artistic intelligence or gift which made mathematicalspaces express beautiful form, any more than we stop in our reading tothink of the sensitive intelligence which drew a letter and made it theexpression of sound, and yet most of us use the result of someexceptional intelligence and feel the exaltation of what we callculture. 

The stitch itself is entitled to the greatest respect, as the very firstform of decoration with the needle--an art growing out of and controlledby the earlier art of weaving. Decorative bands of cross-stitch come tous on shreds of linen found in the sepulchers of Egypt and the burialgrounds of the prehistoric races of South America. I have seen, in acollection of textiles found in their ancient burial places, the mostelaborate and beautiful of cross-stitch borders, wrought into thefabrics which enriched Pizarro's shiploads of loot sent from Vicuna, Peru, to the court of Spain at the time of the wonderful and barbarous"Conquest. " All of the old "Roman" borders are found in this collection, the best designs the world has produced, those which architects of theperiod used upon the fronts and in the interiors of their firstcreations. And here arises the ever recurring question ofthought-sharing between the most widely removed of the earlier humanraces. How did early Peruvians and far-off Latins think in the sameforms, and how did they come to select certain ones as the best, andcleave to them as a common inheritance? But leaving the puzzle of designand returning to the cross-stitch, which was its first interpretation ormedium, and to the little Puritans who shared its acquaintance andpractice with the women of all ages, we may see how the New Englandsampler opened the door of inheritance. 

As Eve sewed her garments of leaves in the Garden of Eden, so each oneof these little Puritan Eves, so far removed in the long history of therace from the first one, was heir to her ingenuities as well as herfailings, from her patching together of small and inadequate things, toher creative function in the kingdom of the world, as well as to herattempts to sweeten life, and to her failures and successes. 

[Illustration: _Left_--SAMPLER embroidered in colors on écru linen, byMary Ann Marley, aged twelve, August 30, 1820. _From Providence, R. I. _

_Right_--SAMPLER embroidered in brown on écru linen, by Martha CarterFitzhugh, of Virginia, in 1793, and left unfinished at her death. 

_Courtesy of Essex Institute, Salem, Mass. _]

The learning to do an A or a B in cross-stitch was the beginning ofhousehold doing, which is the business of woman's life. The decorativeand the useful were evenly balanced in sampler making. All this skill inlettering could be applied to the stores of household linen in the wayof marking, for cross-stitch letters, done in colored threads, were apart of the finish of sheets and pillowcases and fine toweling whichmade so important a part of the riches of the household, and it led byeasy grades of familiarity to more comprehensive methods of decoration. In truth, the letters first practiced in cross-stitch opened the door toall future elaborations, and were the vehicle of moral instruction aswell; for little Puritans took their first doses of Bible history incarefully embroidered text, and their notions of pictorial art fromcross-stitch illustrations. One finds upon some of the early examplespictures of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, with the ever presentauthor of sin, climbing the stem of the tree of life, or Jacob's dreamof angels ascending and descending a ladder, intersecting clouds ofblue and smoke-colored stitches. 

These pictorial samplers are certainly interesting, but those whichconfine themselves to simple cross-stitch with borders, and the name ofthe little child who wrought them, touch a note of domestic life whichis more than interesting. 

The sampler was purely English in its derivation and followed theEnglish with great fidelity, although redolent of Puritan life andthought. Sometimes, indeed, it carried cross-stitch to the very limit ofits capability in an attempt to render Bible scenes pictorially, but forthe most part it was confined to the practice of various styles oflettering consolidated into text or verse. 

The material upon which they were worked was generally of canvas, eitherwhite or yellow, and this was of English manufacture. As allmanufactures were things of price, later samplers were often worked uponcoarse homespun linens, which, barring the variations in the size of thethreads inevitable in hand-spinning, made a fairly good material forcross-stitch. 

[Illustration: _Left_--SAMPLER worked by Christiana Baird. Lateeighteenth century American. 

_Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York_

_Right_--MEMORIAL PIECE worked in silks, on white satin. Sacred to thememory of Major Anthony Morse, who died March 22, 1805. 

_Courtesy of Essex Institute, Salem, Mass. _]

[Illustration: SAMPLER of Moravian embroidery, worked in 1806, by SarahAnn Smith, of Smithtown, L. I. ]

Sampler making was a home rather than a school taught industry, goingdown from mother to daughter along with darning and other processesof the needle, and having no relation, except that of its dexterity, tothe distinct style of decorative embroidery called crewelwork, whichaccompanied it, or even preceded it. 

The collecting of samplers has become rather a fad in these days, and asthey are almost exclusively of New England origin, it gives anopportunity of acquaintance with the little Puritan girl which is notwithout its charm. As most of their samplers were signed with theirnames, the acquaintance becomes quite intimate, and one feels that theselittle Puritans were good as well as diligent. Here is HarmonyTwitchell's name upon a blue and white sampler. What child whose namewas Harmony could quarrel with other children, or how could this other, whose long-suffering name was Patience, be resentful of the roughnessesof small male Puritans? Hate-evil and Wait-still and Hope-still andThanks and Unity must have sat together like little doves and madecrooked A's and B's and C's and picked out the frayed sewing-silkthreads under the reproofs of the teacher of the Infant School, MissMather or Miss Coffin or Miss Hooker, whose father was aclergyman, or even Miss Bradford, whose uncle was the Governor?

All this is in the story of the sampler, and so the teaching andpractice of the canvas went constantly forward. The method was sosimple, quite within the capacity of an alphabet-studying child. To makean A in cross-stitch was to create a link between the baby mind and theletter represented. There was no choice, no judgment or experienceneeded. The limit of every stitch was fixed by a cross thread, onelittle open space to send the needle down and another through which tobring it back, and the next one and the next, then to cross the threadsand the thing was done. Yes, the little slips could make a sampler, every one of them, and when it was made, sometimes it was put in a framewith a glass over it, and Patience's mother would show it to visitors, and Patience would taste the sweets of superiority, than which there isnothing to the childish heart, nor even to mature humanity, so sweet. 

[Illustration: _Left_--SAMPLER worked by Nancy Dennis, Argyle, N. Y. , in1810. 

_Right_--SAMPLER worked by Nancy McMurray, of Salem, N. Y. , in 1793. 

_Courtesy Mrs. E. M. Sanford, Madison, N. J. _]

[Illustration: PETIT POINT PICTURE which belonged to President JohnQuincy Adams, and now in the Dwight M. Prouty collection. 

_Courtesy Colonial Rooms, John Wanamaker, New York_]

There were Infant Schools in my own days, little congregations ofchildren not far removed from babyhood, who were taught the alphabetfrom huge cards, and repeated it simultaneously from the greatblackboard which was mounted in the center of the room. In the schools, as well as at home, every little girl-baby was taught to sew, tooverhand minutely upon small blocks of calico, the edges turned over andbasted together. When a perfect capacity for overhand sewing wasestablished, the next short step was to the sampler, and the tinyfingers were guided along the intricacies of canvas crossings. The dearlittle rose-tipped fingers! the small hands! velvet soft and satinsmooth, diverse even in their littlenesses! They were taught even thento be dexterous with woman's special tool, the very same in purpose andintent with which queens and dames and ladies had played long before. 

The sampler world was a real world in those days, full of youth and asliving as the youth of the world must always be, but now it is dead asthe mummies, and the carefully preserved remains are only the shellwhich once held human rivalries and passions. 

Quilts

The domestic needlework of the late seventeenth and early eighteenthcenturies, should not be overlooked in a history of embroidery, itbeing often so ambitiously decorative and the stitchery so remarkable. The patchwork quilt was an instance of much of this effort. It wasunfortunate that an economic law governed this species of work, whichprevented its possible development. The New England conscience, sworn toutility in every form, had ruled that no material should be _bought_ forthis purpose. It could only take advantage of what happened, and itseldom happened that cottons of two or three harmonious colors cametogether in sufficient quantity to complete the five-by-five orsix-by-six which went to the making of a patchwork quilt. Neverthelessone sometimes comes across a "rising sun" or a "setting sun" bedquiltwhich is remarkable for skillful shading, and was an inspiration in thehouse where it was born, and where the needlework comes quite within thepale of ornamental stitchery. 

This variety of domestic needlework, and one or two others which areakin to it, survived in the northern and middle states in the form ofquilting until at least the middle of the nineteenth century, while inthe southern states, especially in the mountains of Kentucky and NorthCarolina, it still survives in its original painstaking excellence. 

Among the earlier examples of these quilts one occasionally finds onewhich is really worthy of the careful preservation which it receives. Iremember one which impressed itself upon my memory because of thehumanity interwoven with it, as well as the skill of its making. It wasa construction of blocks, according to patchwork law, every alternateblock of the border having an applied rose cut from printed calico inalternate colors of yellow, red, and blue. These roses were carefullyapplied with buttonhole stitch, and the cotton ground underneath cutaway to give uniform thickness for quilting. The main body of the quiltwas unnoticeably good, being a collection of faintly colored patches ofcorrect construction. The quilting was a marvel--a large carefully drawndesign, evidently inspired by branching rose vines without flowers, onlythe leafage and stems being used, and all these bending forms filled inwith a diamonded background of exquisite quilting. The palely coloredcenter was distinguished only by its needlework, leaving the rose borderto emphasize and frame it. 

There was a bit of personal history attached to this quilt in the shapeof a small tag, which said:

"This quilt made by Delia Piper, for occupation after the death of anonly son. Bolivar, Southern Missouri, 1845. "

The same kind friend who had introduced me to this quilt, finding meappreciative of woman's efforts in fine stitchery, took me to call uponother pieces which were equally worthy of admiration. One was a whitequilt of what was called "stuffed work, " made by working two surfaces ofcloth together, the upper one of fine cambric, the lower one of coarsehomespun. Upon the upper one a large ornamental basket was drawn, filledwith flowers of many kinds, the drawing outlines being followed by aback stitchery as regular and fine as if done by machine, looking, infact, like a string of beaded stitches, and yet it was accomplished by aneedle in the hand of a skillful but unprofessional sewer. The picture, for it was no less, was completed by the stuffing of each leaf andflower and stem with flakes of cotton pushed through the homespunlining. The weaving of the basket was a marvel of bands of buttonholedmaterial, which stood out in appropriate thickness. The centers ofthe flowers had simulated stamens done in knotted work. 

[Illustration: _Left_--SAMPLER in drawnwork, écru linen thread, made byAnne Gower, wife of Gov. John Endicott, before 1628. 

_Center_--SAMPLER embroidered in dull colors on écru canvas by MaryHolingworth, wife of Philip English, Salem merchant, married July 1675, accused of witchcraft in 1692, but escaped to New York. _From the Curwenestate. _

_Courtesy the Essex Institute, Salem, Mass. _

_Right_--SAMPLER worked by Hattie Goodeshall, who was born February 19, 1780, in Bristol. 

_Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art_]

I think this stuffed work was rather rare, for I have only seen twospecimens, and as it required unusual and exhaustive skill inneedlework, the production was naturally limited. The practice was oneof the exotic efforts of some one of large leisure and lively ambitionswho belonged to the class of prosperous citizens. 

"Patchwork, " as it was appropriately called, was more often a farmhouseindustry, which accounts for its narrow limits, since, with choice ofmaterial, even a small familiarity with geometrical design might bringgood results. It might have easily become good domestic art. Geometricalborders in two colors would have taken their place in decorative work, and the applied work, so often ventured upon, was the beginning of onevery capable method. The skillful needlework, the elaborate quilting, the stitchery and stuffing are worthy of respect, for the foundation ofit all was great dexterity in the use of the needle. 

CHAPTER IV -- MORAVIAN WORK, PORTRAITURE, FRENCH EMBROIDERY, ANDLACEWORK

While the ladies and house mistresses of New England were busy withtheir crewelwork, the children with their little samplers, and farmhousemothers sewed patchwork in the intervals of spinning and weaving, an entirely different development of needlework art had taken place, beginning in Pennsylvania. Embroidery in America did not growexclusively from seed brought over in the Mayflower. It sprang from manysources, but its finest qualities came from the influence of what wascalled "Bethlehem Embroidery. "

The advent of this style of needlework was interesting. It originated ina religious community founded in 1722 at Herrnhut, Germany, by CountZinzendorf. It was a strictly religious, semimonastic group of singlemen and single women, whose hearts were filled with zeal for missionwork. At that period, I suppose America seemed a possible and promisingfield for such efforts, and accordingly forty-five of the brothers andas many of the sisters turned their faces toward this new world. Onecan fancy that when the thought first entered their minds, of coming toa land peopled by savage Indians, with but a bare sprinkling of "theLord's people, " they trembled even in their dreams at the thought of thecruel incidents they might encounter in that wilderness toward whichthey were impelled by apostolic zeal, and the unquiet sea upon whichthey were about to embark foreshadowed an unknown future. But there wassmall danger for them upon the sea; surely they could not sink introubled waters, these etherial souls! The heavenly quality of themwould upbear the vessel and cargo. They would come safe to land, nomatter how tempestuous the elements!

I suppose, at all periods of the world, prophet and martyr stuff mightbe sifted out from the man-stuff of the times if the race had need ofthem. In normal states of growth, we call them "cranks" and look for noresults from their existence. But the elusive spirit of love never dies. It appears and reappears in the history of all races and times, andleaves its mark upon them in various shapes of beneficence. 

These missionary brothers and sisters had chosen as the theater of theirlabor that part of our broad land which was pleasantly christenedPennsylvania, and selecting a portion of the southern area, they foundedtheir colony and called it "Ephrata. "

It existed for forty years, constantly increasing its membership, andliving a life reaching out toward a perfection of goodness which seemedquite possible to their apostolic souls. 

Time, however, brought changes of circumstance and of mind, and aftermany philanthropic phases, in 1749 the mingled elements and aspirationsof the enlarged congregation were merged into two boarding schools, onefor boys, which was the germ of Lehigh University, and another for girlsat Bethlehem, which, under the careful fostering of the sisters, becamethe birthplace of the famous Moravian needlework. So were melted intothe modern form of scholastic instruction the various efforts ofreligious activity, the eternal reaching out for conditions in humanlife in which it is easy and natural to be good and happy. It had notbeen accomplished in this semimonastic life, but the efforts toward ithad their influence, and, you may judge by the quality of itsfounders, had never died. 

[Illustration: NEEDLEBOOK of Moravian embroidery, made about 1850. _Nowin the possession of Mrs. J. U. Myers, Bethlehem, Pa. _]

[Illustration: MORAVIAN EMBROIDERY worked by Emily E. Reynolds, Plymouth, Pa. , in 1834, at the age of twelve, while at the MoravianSeminary in Bethlehem, and now owned by her granddaughter. 

_Courtesy of Claire Reynolds Tubbs, Gladstone, N. J. _]

The two schools very early in their history seem to have established areputation for learning and culture which made them a desirableinfluence in the formative lives of the children of the most thoughtful, as well as the most prominent and prosperous, American families. Indeed, the school for girls became so popular as to lead to an extension andfounding of several branches in other of the southern states. The artand practice of fine needlework became a popular and necessary featureof them, distinguishing them from all other schools. "Tambour and fineneedlework" were among the extras of the school, and charged for, as welearn from school records, at the rate of "seventeen shillings andsixpence, Pennsylvania currency. "

It was not alone tambour and fine needlework, as we shall see later, that was taught by the Moravian Sisters, but the ribbon work, crêpework, and flower embroidery, and picture production upon satin. Thesepictures, however important as performances, were not the most commonform of needlework taught by the Sisters. Flower embroidery was theusual form of practice, and it was of a quality which made each one awonder of execution and skill. The materials were satin of a superbquality for the background, or Eastern silk of softness and strength, and the silks used in the stitchery were generally "slack twisted" silkthreads of very pure quality, and in certain cases, where they would notbe likely to fray, lustrous flosses of Eastern make. The stitch used inthese flower pieces was an over-and-over stitch, or what was calledsatin-stitch, which was without the lap of Kensington stitch. There wasin every piece of embroidery done under the instruction of theaccomplished and devoted Sisters certain virtues, certain effects ofconscientious and patient work, mingled with the love of good andbeautiful art, which were plainly visible. It had in all its flowerpieces, and they were many, the quality of beautiful charm. The ministryof nature may have had something to do with this, since the lives of theexecutants were open to its influences. 

[Illustration: MORAVIAN EMBROIDERY from Louisville, Ky. ]

One can make a mental picture of those early days beside the peaceful"Lehi, " where the Sisters taught and nurtured the young girls of veryyoung America, and trained them in such beautiful and womanlyaccomplishments. The scattered bits of needlework which remain to us areso fine, so clear, so thoroughly exhaustive of all excellence intechnique, that they are to the art of embroidery what the ivoryminiature is to painting. We cannot but hail the memory of the Sistersof Bethlehem with respect and admiration. 

I became familiar with the work of this community when I was arrangingan historic exhibition of American Embroidery for the Bartholdi Fair in1883. Few people may remember that, among the means for the installationof the Bartholdi Statue of Liberty which welcomes the world at theentrance to the harbor of New York, was an effort called the BartholdiFair, held in the then almost new and very popular Academy of Design atthe northwestern corner of Fourth Avenue and Twenty-third Street. Knowing the value of Bethlehem work, I made an effort to secure arepresentative collection, with the result of gathering a mostinteresting group of specimens, mainly by the interest and help of Mr. Henry Baldwin of Lehigh University, to whom I was referred forassistance in my purpose. I have before me now the correspondence whichensued, a most painstaking, kind and patient one on his part, giving memuch interesting history of the Bethlehem mission, as well as its lifeand progress. Among the legends is one--that during our Revolutionarywar, Pulaski recruited some of his Legion at Bethlehem, and ordered abanner, which was carried by his troops until he fell in the attack uponSavannah. This banner is now in the rooms of the Maryland HistoricalSociety, and I find the question of its having been an order from CountPulaski, or a gift to the Legion, is one of very lively interest in thecommunity. 

This exhibit of 1883 was as complete an historical collection ofAmerican needlework as was possible, and I have a list of ten articlesloaned from collections in Bethlehem, which reads as follows:

1. Embroidered pocketbook of black silk with flowers in bright colors. Former property of Bishop Bigler. 

2. Embroidered needlebook of white satin with bright flowers, date 1800. 

3. Embroidered needlebook of white satin with bright flowers and vines, dated 1786. 

4. Sampler, dated 1740. 

5. Yellow velvet bag embroidered with ribbon work. 

6. Black velvet bag embroidered in crêpe work with flowers. 

7. White satin workbag embroidered in fine tracery of vines. 

8. A box with embroidered pincushion on top. 

9. A blue silk pocketbook with very fine ribbon work. 

10. A paper box done with needle in filigree. 

It will be seen by this list how varied were the forms of needleworktaught at Bethlehem. The crêpe work mentioned in No. 6 is, probablyowing to the perishable character of its material, very rare, but wasextremely beautiful in effect. Bits of colored crêpe were gathered intoflower petals and sewed upon satin, roses laid leaf upon leaf and builtup to a charming perfection, while the stems and foliage were partiallyor wholly embroidered in silk. 

The ribbon embroidery of No. 5, has been revived by the New York Societyof Decorative Art and practiced with great success. The flowerembroideries, in the specimens exhibited, were of two sorts--the smallgroups being done with fine twisted silks in a simple "over and over"stitch, called at that time "satin stitch, " alike on both sides, exceptthat on the right side the flowers and leaves were raised from thesurface by an under thread of cotton floss called "stuffing. " This didnot prevent, as it might easily have done, an unvarying regularity andsmoothness, which was like satin itself, thread laid beside thread as ifit were woven instead of sewed. 

In the larger flowers, the sewing silk had been split into flosses, orperhaps the prepared flosses were used in the "tent stitch, " which isnow known as "Kensington. " The colors of all these specimens were asfresh as natural flowers, speaking eloquently in praise of earlyprocesses of dyeing. 

[Illustration: LINEN TOWELS embroidered in cross-stitch. PennsylvaniaDutch early nineteenth century. 

_Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art_]

These things seem to fairly exhale gentility, that quality-compact ofeverything superior in the life of early American womanhood. I haveespecially in mind one cushion where flowers, apparently as fresh incolor as when the cushion was young, are laid upon a ground of silk ofthe pinky-ash color, once known as "ashes of roses. " The real charmof the thing, that which lends it a tender romance, is the legend workedupon the back of the cushion in brown silk stitches which are easilymistaken for the round-hand copperplate writing of the period--"Wroughtwhere the peaceful Lehi flows. " One seems to breathe the very air of thesecluded valley, peopled by brethren and sisters set apart from thestrenuous duties of the builders of a new nation, and distinguished forlearned and devoted effort toward the perfection of moral, andspiritual, rather than the conquests of material, life. 

The Sisters had many orders from the outside world, as well as fromvisitors, and the profit upon these helped to maintain the school. Manyof these orders were in the shape of pocketbooks, pincushions, bags, etc. , having a bunch, or wreath, or cluster of flowers on one side, wonderfully wrought in silken flosses or sewing silks, and on the other, some pretty sentiment or legend done in dark brown floss in the mostperfect of "round-hand"; so perfect, in fact, that it would require theclosest scrutiny to decide that it was not handwritten script. 

These plentiful orders for things were induced by the severalattractions of the situation, the remoteness from warlike and politicaldisturbances, and the relationship of so many young girl lives, as wellas the interest which attached to the school and community, making aconstant demand in the shape of small articles of use or luxury, decorated by the skillful fingers of the Sisters. 

Parallel with this fine practice of flower embroidery, was a period offar more important needlework, which we may call Picture Embroidery. This also owed its introduction to the Moravian School of Bethlehem, although it was probably of early English origin, going back to thatperiod when English embroidery was the wonder of the world; and the_opus plumarium_, or feather-pen stitch, or tent stitch, or Kensingtonstitch, as it has been known in succeeding ages, first attractedattention as a medium of art. 

Passing from England to Germany it became purely ecclesiastical, andeven now one occasionally finds in Germany, and less often in England, bits of ecclesiastical embroidery of unimaginable fineness, commemorating Christ's miracles and other incidents of Bible history. Iknow of one small specimen of ancient English art, covering a space offive by seven inches, where the whole Garden of Eden with its weightytragedy is represented by inch-long figures of Adam and Eve, and aman-headed snake, discussing amicably the advantages of eating or noteating the forbidden fruit. 

Such elaboration in miniature embroidery made good the claim of Englishneedlework to its first place in the world, since nothing more wonderfulhad or has been produced in the whole long history of needlework art. Itwas undoubtedly from this school, filtered through generations ofsecular practice, that the Moravian picture embroidery came to be ageneral American inheritance. 

To adapt this wonderful method to the uses of social life was anadmirable achievement, and whether by the sisters of the Moravianschool, or the growth of pre-American influence and time, we do notcertainly know, the fact remains, however, that it was here so cunninglyadapted to the circumstances and spirit of colonial and early Americandays as to seem to belong entirely to them, and it would seem quiteclear that Bethlehem was the source of the most skillful needlework artin America. It was there that the fine ladies of the late eighteenth andearly nineteenth centuries, who sat at the embroidery frame in theintervals when they were not "sitting at the harp, " acquired theirskill. 

It was the romantic period of embroidery that makes a very tellingcontrast to the earlier crewel and later muslin embroidery of the NewEngland states. The pieces were seldom larger than eighteen or twentyinches square, the size probably governed by the width of the superbsatin which was so often used as a background. Not invariably, however, for I have seen one or two pieces worked upon gray linen where thesurface was entirely covered by stitchery, landscape, trees, and skyshowing an unbroken surface of satiny texture. Pictures from Biblesubjects are frequent, and these have the air of having been copied fromprints; in fact, I have seen some where the print appears underneath thestitches, showing that it was used as a design. These Scripture piecesseem to have employed a lower degree of talent than those havingoriginal design, and were probably the somewhat perfunctory work ofyoung girls whose interests were elsewhere. One picture which I haveseen was treasured as a record of a very romantic elopement--the loverin the case, riding gayly away with his beloved sitting on a pillionbehind him, and no witnesses to the deed but a small sister, standing atthe gate of the homestead with outstretched hands and staring eyes. 

[Illustration: _Left_--"THE MEETING OF ISAAC AND REBECCA"--Moravianembroidered picture, an heirloom in the Reichel family of Bethlehem, Pa. Worked by Sarah Kummer about 1790. 

_Courtesy of Elizabeth Lehman Myers_

_Right_--"SUFFER LITTLE CHILDREN TO COME UNTO ME"--Cross-stitch picturemade about 1825, now in the possession of the Beckel family, Bethlehem, Pa. 

_Courtesy of Elizabeth Lehman Myers_]

The most important picture which I have seen in portrait needlework cameto light at the Baltimore Exhibition, and was a piazza group of fivefigures, a burly sea-captain seated in a rocking chair in a nauticaldress and his own grayish hair embroidered above his ruddy face, hiswife in a white satin gown seated beside him, and his three daughters ofappropriately different ages grouped around, while the ship _Constance_was tied closely to the edge of the blue water which bordered theforeground of the picture. The composition of this picture was evidentlythe work of some experienced artist, for its incongruous elements kepttheir places and did not greatly clash. Taken as a whole it was anastonishing performance, quite too ambitious in its grasp for the novelart of needlework, and yet a thing to delight the hearts of thedescendants, or even casual possessors. 

The Moravian teaching and practice spread the principles of needleworkart so widely that it developed in many different directions. Thewonderful silk embroidery applied to flowers was, like the arts ofdrawing and painting, capable of being used in copying all forms ofbeauty. It was sometimes, not always, successfully applied to landscaperepresentation, and grew at last into a scheme of needleworkportraiture, in this form perpetuating family history. It was sometimesused in conjunction with painting, the faces of a family group beingdone in water color upon cardboard by professional painters who weremembers of the art guild, who wandered from one social circle toanother, supplying the wants of embroideresses ambitious of distinctionin their accomplishments. The small painted faces were cut from thecardboard upon which they had been painted and worked around, often withthe actual hair of the original of the portrait. I have seen one pictureof a Southern beauty, where the golden hair had been wound into tinycurls, and sewn into place, and the lace of the neckwear was socleverly simulated as to look almost detachable. Of course such pictureswere the result of individual experiment on the part of some very ableand ambitious needlewoman. 

[Illustration: ABRAHAM AND ISAAC. Kensington embroidery by Mary WinifredHoskins of Edenton, N. C. , while attending an English finishing schoolin Baltimore in 1814. 

_Courtesy of Mrs. R. B. Mitchell, Madison, N. J. _]

One can imagine that the effect of them in social life was to addgreatly to the vogue of the art of needlework. The most numerous ofthese relics were called "mourning pieces"--bits of memorialembroidery--the subject of the picture being generally a monumentsurmounted by an urn, overhung with the sweeping branches of a willow, while standing beside the monument is a weeping female figure, the facediscreetly hidden in a pocket handkerchief. The inscriptions, "Sacred tothe memory, " etc. , were written or printed upon the satin in India ink, and often the letters of the name were worked with the hair of thesubject of the memorial. 

In these pieces it is rather noticeable that the mourning figure isalways draped in white, which leads to the conclusion that it is apurely emblematic figure of an emotion, rather than a real mourner. Theshading of the monument was generally done in India ink, so that theactual embroidery was confined to the trunk and long branches ofweeping willow, and the dress of the figure, and the ground upon whichwillow and monument and figure stand. The faces being always hidden bythe handkerchief, and a tinted satin serving for the sky, the executionof these memorial pictures was comparatively simple. They certainly bearan undue proportion to those happy family portraits where mother andchildren, or husband and wife, sit in love and simplicity before thepillared magnificence of the family mansion. 

[Illustration: _Left_--FIRE SCREEN embroidered in cross-stitch worsted. _From the McMullan family of Salem. _

_Courtesy Essex Institute, Salem, Mass. _

_Right_--FIRE SCREEN, design, "The Scottish Chieftain, " embroidered incross-stitch by Mrs. Mary H. Cleveland Allen. 

_Courtesy Essex Institute, Salem, Mass. _]

[Illustration: FIRE SCREEN worked about 1850 by Miss C. A. Granger, ofCanandaigua, N. Y. ]

Perhaps the greater simplicity and ease of execution of the mourningpieces had something to do with their greater number. They may have beenthe first spelling of the difficult art of pictorial embroidery. Thebest of these picture embroideries were certainly wonderful creations asfar as the use of the needle was concerned, and I fancy were done in thelarge leisure of some colonial home where early distinction in the artof needlework must have gone hand in hand with the skill of thetraveling portrait painter. These dainty productions, with theirdelicately painted faces and hands, are far more often found than thosewith embroidered flesh. In some of these, faces painted with realminiature skill upon bits of parchment have been inserted orsuperimposed upon the satin, the edges, as I have said, carefullycovered by embroidery, done with single hair threaded into the needleinstead of silk. In one case which I remember, the yellow hair of achild was knotted into a bunch of solid looking curls covering the headof a small figure, while the face of the mother was surmounted by bandsof a reddish brown. This little touch of realism gave a curious note ofpathos to the picture of a life separated from the present by time andoutgrown habits, but linked to it by this one tangible proof of actualexistence. 

The drawing or plan of these pictures was evidently done directly uponthe satin ground, as one often finds the outlines showing at the edge ofthe stitches; but in the few specimens I have found where they wereworked upon linen it had been covered with a tracing on strong thinpaper, and the entire design worked through and over both paper andcanvas. Those which were done upon linen seemed to belong to an earlierperiod than those worked on satin, which was perhaps an Americanadaptation of the earlier method. Certainly the soft thick India satin, which was the ground of so many of them, made a delightful surface forembroidery, and blended with its colors into a silvery mass where workand background were equally effective. Two of these have survived thecentury or more of careful seclusion which followed the proud éclat oftheir production. One of the fortunate heirs to many of these exhibitedtreasures told me of a package or book containing heads in water color, evidently to be used as copies for the faces which might be foundnecessary for efforts in embroidery. The painting of these was perhaps apart of the education or accomplishment considered necessary to girls ofprominent and successful families of the day. 

Under favorable circumstances, such as a convenient relation betweenartist and needlework, this art would have developed into needleworktapestry. The groups would have outgrown their frames, and left theirpicture spaces on the walls, and, stretching into life-size figures, have become hangings of silken broidery, such as we find in Spain andItaly, from the hands of nuns or noble ladies. 

[Illustration: EMBROIDERED PICTURE in silks, with a painted sky. 

_Courtesy of Essex Institute, Salem, Mass. _]

[Illustration: CORNELIA AND THE GRACCHI. Embroidered picture in silks, with velvet inlaid, worked by Mrs. Lydia Very of Salem at the age ofsixteen while at Mrs. Peabody's school. 

_Courtesy of Essex Institute, Salem, Mass. _]

The influence of the Bethlehem teaching lasted long enough to build up avery fine and critical standard of embroidery in America. It would bedifficult to overestimate the importance of the influence of this schoolof embroidery upon the needlework practice of a growing country. Itsqualities of sincerity, earnestness, and respect for the art ofneedlework gave importance to the work of hands other than that ofnecessary labor, and these qualities influenced all the various forms ofwork which followed it. The first divergence from the original work wasin its application, rather than its method, for instead of having astrictly decorative purpose its application became almost exclusivelypersonal. Flower embroidery of surpassing excellence was its generalfeature. The materials for the development of this form of art wereusually satin, or the flexible undressed India silk which lent itself soperfectly to ornamentation. Breadths of cream-white satin, of athickness and softness almost unknown in the present day, were stretchedin Chippendale embroidery frames, and loops and garlands of flowers ofevery shape and hue were embroidered upon them. They were often done forskirts and sleeves of gowns of ceremony, giving a distinction evenbeyond the flowered brocades so much coveted by colonial belles. 

This beautiful flower embroidery was, like its predecessor, the rarepicture embroidery, too exacting in its character to be universal. Itneeded money without stint for its materials, and luxurious surroundingsfor its practice. Some of the beautiful old gowns wrought in that dayare still to be seen in colonial exhibitions, and are even occasionallyworn by great-great-granddaughters at important mimic colonialfunctions. 

Floss embroidery upon silk and satin was not entirely confined toapparel, for we find an occasional piece as the front panel of one ofthe large, carved fire screens, which at that date were universally usedin drawing-rooms as a shelter from the glare and heat of the great openfires which were the only method of heating. As the back of the screenwas turned to the fire and the embroidered face to the room, itsdecoration was shown to admirable advantage, and one can hardly accountfor the rarity of the specimens of these antique screens, except uponthe supposition that the roses, carnations, and forget-me-nots werestill more effective when wrought upon the scant skirt of a colonialgown, instead of being shrouded in their careful coverings in thedeserted drawing-room, and my lady of the embroidery might moreeffectively exhibit them in the lights of a ballroom. In recording thechanges in the style and purposes of embroidery, from the days ofhomespun and home-dyed crewel to the almost living flowers wrought withlustrous flosses upon breadths of satin which were the best of theworld's manufacture, one unconsciously traverses the ground of domesticand political history, from the days of the Pilgrims to the pomp ofcolonial courts. 

French Embroidery

The character and purposes of the art varied with every political andnational change. In the middle of the eighteenth century, a demand hadgone out from the new and growing America, and wandering over the seashad asked for something fine and airy with which to occupy delicatehands, unoccupied with household toil. The carefully acquired skill ofthe earlier periods of our history became in succeeding generationsalmost an inheritance of facility, and easily merged into the elaboratestitchery called French embroidery. I can find no trace of its havingbeen _taught_, but plenty of proofs of its existence are to be seen onthe needlework pictures under glass still hanging in many anold-fashioned parlor, or relegated to the curiosity corner of moderndrawing-rooms. It is possible that the close intimacy existing betweenFrance and England at that period may have influenced this art. ManyFrench families of high degree were seeking safety or profit in thiscountry, and the convent-bred ladies of such families would naturallyhave shared their acquirements with those whose favor and interest wereimportant to them as strangers. There was another form of this Frenchembroidery, the materials used being cambrics, linens, and muslins ofall kinds, the most precious of which were the linen-cambrics and Indiamulls. The use of the former still survives in the finest of Frenchembroidered pocket handkerchiefs, but the latter is seldom seen exceptin the veils and vests of Oriental women, or in the studio draperies ofall countries. 

[Illustration: CAPE of white lawn embroidered. Nineteenth centuryAmerican. 

_Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York_]

[Illustration: COLLARS of white muslin embroidered. Nineteenth centuryAmerican. 

_Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York_]

The threads used were flosses of linen or cotton, preferably thelatter, which were almost entirely imported. With these restrictedmaterials, wonders of ornamentation were performed. The stitch, quitedifferent from that of crewelwork or picture embroidery of the precedingperiod, was the simple over and over stitch we find in French embroideryof the present day. The leaves of the design or pattern were frequentlybrought into relief by a stuffing of under threads. 

Everything was embroidered; gowns, from the belt to lower hem, finishedwith scalloped and sprigged ruffles in the same delicate workmanship, were everyday summer wear. Slips and sacques, which were not quite asmuch of an undertaking as an entire gown, were bordered and ruffled withthe same embroidery. The amount and beauty of specimens which stillexist after the lapse of nearly a century is quite wonderful. Smallarticles, like collars, capes and pelerines, were almost entirelycovered with the most exquisite tracery of leaf and flower, a perfectfrostwork of delicate stitchery, with patches of lacework introduced inspaces of the design. 

The designs were seldom, almost never, original, being nearly alwayscopied directly from what was called "boughten work, " to distinguish itfrom that which was produced at home. 

Many beautiful and skillful stitches were used in this form of work. Lace stitches, made with bodkins or "piercers, " or darning needles ofsufficient size to make perforations, were skillfully rimmed and joinedtogether in patterns by finer stitches, and open borders, andhemstitching, and dainty inventions of all kinds, for the embellishmentof the fabrics upon which they were wrought. 

With these materials and these methods most of the women of thedifferent sections of the country busied themselves from a periodbeginning probably about 1710 and extending to 1840, and it is safe tosay, notwithstanding the apparent simplicity of life between thosedates, that at no period in the history of woman was as much time andconsummate skill bestowed upon wearing apparel. Many a young girl of theday embroidered her own wedding dress, and during the months or years ofits preparation suffered and enjoyed the same ambition which goes on inthe present, to the acquirement of some wonder of French composition, orcostly ornament of point lace and pearls. 

[Illustration: _Left_--BABY'S CAP White mull, with eyelet embroidery. Nineteenth century American. 

_Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art_

_Right_--BABY'S CAP Embroidered mull. 1825. 

_Courtesy Mrs. Isaac Pierson, Canandaigua, N. Y. _]

[Illustration: COLLAR of white embroidered muslin. Nineteenth centuryAmerican. 

_Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art_]

Everything was embroidered. The tender, downy head of the newly bornbaby was covered with a cap of delicatest material incrusted to hardnesswith needlework. The baby's caps of the period are a perfect chapter ofhuman emotions; mother-love, emulation, pride, and declaration of familyor personal position are skillfully expressed in a multiplicity ofdecorative stitches. A six-foot length of baptismal robe carried forhalf its length the same elaborate stitchery. Long delicate ruffles wereedged with double rows of scallops. Double and triple collars and"pelerines" of muslin were to be found in the hands of all women of highor low degree. Articles of wearing apparel were done upon a soft finemuslin called mull, breadths of which were embroidered for skirts, lengths of it were scalloped and embroidered for flounces, andhand-lengths of it were done for the short waists and sleeves of thepretty Colonial gowns worn by our delicate ancestresses. One of thesegowns, stretched to its widest, would hardly cover a front breadth ofthe habit of one of our well-nurtured athletic girls of the present, andthe athletic girl can show no such handiwork as this. 

Beautiful embroidery it was that was lavished upon muslin gowns, baby'scaps and long, long robes, and upon aprons, pelerines and capes. Overstitch instead of tent stitch was the order of the day. "Tent stitch andthe use of the globes" was no longer advertised as a part of schoolroutine. Instead of this, there were the most delicate overstitches andmultitudinous lace-stitches which we nowhere else find, unless in thefinest of Asian embroidery. 

A large part of the eighteenth and the first quarter of the nineteenthcentury was a period of remarkable skill in all kinds of stitchery. Itwas not confined to embroidery, but was also applied to all varieties ofdomestic needlework. Hemstitched ruffles were a part of masculine aswell as feminine wear, and finely stitched and ruffled shirts for thehead of the household were quite as necessary to the family dignity asembroidered gowns and caps for its feminine members. 

It would be difficult to enumerate all the uses to which the nationalperfection of needle dexterity was put. It was, indeed, a nationaldexterity, for although its application was widely different in theeastern and southern states, the two schools of needlework, as we mayterm them, met and mingled to a common practice of both methods in themiddle states. 

[Illustration: EMBROIDERED SILK WEDDING WAISTCOAT, 1829. From theWestervelt collection. 

_Courtesy of Bergen County Historical Society, Hackensack, N. J. _]

[Illustration: EMBROIDERED WAIST OF A BABY DRESS. 1850. From thecollection of Mrs. George Coe. 

_Courtesy of Bergen County Historical Society, Hackensack, N. J. _]

Perhaps one may account for the prevalence of this kind of work, as itexisted at a period of very limited education or literary pursuits amongwomen. Domestic life was woman's kingdom, and needlework was one of itschief conditions. But whatever cause or causes stimulated the vogue ofthis variety of embroidery, we find it was universal among rich andpoor, in city and country, for nearly three-quarters of a century. Thenarrow roll of muslin, for scalloped flounces and ruffling, and theskeins of French cotton went everywhere with girls and women, except tochurch and to ceremonious functions where men were included. Needleworkwas far more than an interest, it was an occupation. 

The varieties of tambour work and open stitchery of various ornamentalkinds were possible for all capacities. It was a general form of fineneedlework, happily available to women of the farmhouse, as well as ofthe mansion, and its exceeding precision and beauty gave a character tothe purely utilitarian stitchery of the day which has made a highstandard for succeeding generations. The hemstitched ruffles of shirts, the stitched plaits of simpler ones, the buttonholed triangles at theintersection of seams--all these practically unknown to modernconstruction--were probably the result of the skillful and carefulneedlework ornamentation of simple fabrics. 

As an occupation, French embroidery practically displaced the making ofcabinet pictures of graceful ladies in scant satin gowns which hadoccupied the embroidery frame, or decorated drawing-room walls. Flowersceased to blossom upon pincushions, and the engrossing and prevalentoccupation of needlework was entirely devoted to personal wear. 

[Illustration: EMBROIDERY ON NET. Border for the front of a cap madeabout 1820. 

_Courtesy of Mrs. A. S. Hewitt_]

[Illustration: VEIL (unfinished) hand run on machine-made net. Americannineteenth century. 

_Courtesy of Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York_]

At this period, however, ships were coming into Boston and other easternports almost daily or weekly, instead of at intervals of weary months. Ships were going to and returning from China and the Indies and theislands of the sea, laden on their return voyages not only with spicesand liquors and sweets of the southern world, but with satins andvelvets and silks and prints, and delicately printed muslins andcambrics; and the fair linen and cotton flosses disappeared from thehands of needlewomen. Manufacturers had brought their looms to weavedesigns into the fabrics they produced and to simulate the work of theneedle in a way which made one feel that the very spindles thought andwrought with conscious love of beauty. 

The larger demands of luxurious living increased also the necessary workof the needle, and while the looms of France and Switzerland were busyweaving broidered stuffs, the needles of sewing women were kept at workfashioning the necessary garments of the millions of playing and workinghuman beings. It was the era which gave birth to the "Song of theShirt, " a day of personal and exacting practice. 

Lacework

The disappearance of the practice of French embroidery was as sudden asthe dropping of a theater curtain, but a coexistent art called Spanishlacework lingered long after muslin embroidery had ceased to be. It waschiefly used in the elaboration of shawls, and large lace veils, whichwere a very graceful addition to Colonial and early American costume. There is no difficulty in tracing this kind of decorative needlework. Itcame from Mexico into New Orleans, and from there, by various secrets oflocomotion, spread along the southern states. 

The veils were yard squares of delicate white or black lace, heavilybordered and lightly spotted with flowers, while the shawls weresometimes nearly double that size, and of much heavier lace, as they hadneed to be, to carry the wealth of decorative darning lavished uponthem. 

The design was always a foliated one, generally proceeding from a commoncenter, representing a basket or a knot of ribbon, which confined thebranching forms to the point of departure. The edges were heavilyscalloped, with an extension of the ornamentation which included a roseor leaf for the filling of every scallop. The centers of flowers, andeven of leaves, were often filled with beautiful variations of lacestitches worked into the meshes of the ground, and were very curious andinteresting. 

[Illustration: LACE WEDDING VEIL, 36 × 40 inches, used in 1806. From thecollection of Mrs. Charles H. Lozier. 

_Courtesy of Bergen County Historical Society, Hackensack, N. J. _]

[Illustration: HOMESPUN LINEN NEEDLEWORK called "Benewacka" by theDutch. The threads were drawn and then whipped into a net on which thedesign was darned with linen. Made about 1800 and used in the end oflinen pillow cases. 

_Courtesy of Bergen County Historical Society, Hackensack, N. J. _]

Darning with flosses upon both white and black bobbinet, or silk net, was a very common form of the art, and veils of white with seed orall-over designs darned in white silk floss, may be called the "personalneedlework" of the period, and some of the shawls were superb stretchesof design and stitching. This art, although so beautiful in effect, demanded very little of the skill necessary to the preceding methods ofembroidery. The lace was simply stretched or basted over paper or whitecloth, upon which the design was heavily traced in ink; the spaces whichwere to be solidly filled were sometimes covered with a shading of redchalk, and when this was done, it was a matter of simple running overand under the meshes of the net, in directions indicated by the shape ofthe leaf or flower. The work could be heavier or lighter, according tothe design and size or weight of the flosses used. I have seen a weddingveil worked upon a beautiful white silk net, carrying a sprinkling oforange flowers, darned with white silk flosses, and a heavy wreatharound the border. Certainly no veil of priceless point lace could be soetherially beautiful as was this relic of the past, and certainly nocommercial product, however costly, could carry in its transparent foldsthe sentiment of such a bridal veil, wrought in love by the bride whowas to wear it. 

I have seen one beautiful shawl, where the entire design was done inshining silver-white flosses, upon a ground of black net, with theeffect of a disappearance of the background, the wreaths and groups offlowers seeming to float around the figure of the wearer. 

In one or two instances, also, I have seen shawls in varicolored flossesproducing a silvery mass of ornamentation which was most effective, butthey were experiments which evidently did not commend themselves toNorth American taste. 

The same method of darning was used upon what was then called, "bobbinetfooting, " narrow lengths of bobbinet lace which were extensively used asruffles for caps and trimming and garniture of capes and variousarticles of personal wear. 

Cap bodies were also worked in this method; in fact, the decorativetreatment of caps must have been a trying question. The dignity of themarried woman depended somewhat upon the size of the cap she wore, andit was as necessary to convention that the crow-black locks of thematron of twenty-five should be hidden, as that the scant locks of sixtyshould be decently shrouded. 

Insertings of darned footing, alternating with bands of muslin, werelargely used in the construction of gowns, and, in short, this style ofneedlework, while not as universal or absorbing as French embroidery, continued longer in vogue and perhaps amused or solaced some who hadlittle skill or time for the more exacting methods of embroidery. 

CHAPTER V -- BERLIN WOOLWORK

It surprises us in these latter days of demand for the best conditionsin the prosecution of decorative work, that it should have lived at allthrough the days of existence in one-roomed log cabins of early settlersand the conflicting demands of pioneer life. It survived them all, andthe little, fast-arriving Puritan children were taught their stitches asreligiously as their commandments; and so American embroidery grew to bean art which has enriched the past and future of its executants. 

After the two periods of French and Spanish needlework passed by, thereappeared what was known as Berlin woolwork. Those who in earlier timeswere devoted to fine embroidery solaced their idleness with this newwork--certainly a poor substitute for the beautiful embroidery of thepreceding generation, but answering the purpose of traditionalemployment for the leisure class. This came into vogue and was ratherextensively used for coverings of screens, chairs, sofas, footstools andthe various specimens of household furniture made by workmen who hadserved with Adam, Chippendale and Sheraton, and who had brought books ofpatterns with them to the prosperous, growing market of the New World. Berlin woolwork was a method of cross-stitch upon canvas in coloredwools or silks--in fact, an extension of sampler methods into picturesand screens, or the more utilitarian chair and sofa covers. It wassometimes varied by using broadcloth or velvet as a foundation, thecanvas threads being drawn out after the picture was complete. Weoccasionally find entire sets of beautiful old mahogany chairs, withcushions of cross-stitch embroidery, the subjects ranging overeverything in the animal or vegetable world, so that one might sit inturn upon horses, bead-eyed and curled lap dogs, or wreaths of liliesand roses. 

Occasionally, also, a glassed and framed picture of elaborate design andbeautiful workmanship is seen, but as a rule it must be confessed thatin America this method of embroidery, as an art, failed to achievedignity. This was not in the least owing to the actual technique of theprocess, since beautiful tapestries have been accomplished, takingcanvas as a medium and foundation for a dexterous use of design andcolor. 

The square blocks of the canvas stitch are no more objectionable in anart process than the block of enamel of which priceless mosaics aremade, but one can easily see that if every design for mosaic work couldbe indefinitely reproduced and sold by the thousands, with numbered andcolored blocks of glass, something--we hardly know what--would be lostin even the most exact reproductions. 

Original design, however simple, is the expression of a thought, andpasses directly from the mind of the originator to the material uponwhich it is expressed; but when the design becomes an article ofcommercial supply it loses in interest, and if the process of productionis simple, requiring little thought and skill, the work also fails tocall out in us the reverence we willingly accord to skillful andpainstaking embroidery. 

[Illustration: BED HANGING of polychrome cross-stitch appliquéd on bluewoolen ground. 

_Courtesy of Brooklyn Museum_]

[Illustration: NEEDLEPOINT SCREEN made in fine and coarse point. Singlecross-stitch. 

_Courtesy of the Edgewater Tapestry Looms_]

Yet we must acknowledge there are many examples of Berlin woolwork whichpossess the merits of beautiful color and exact and even workmanship. Some of them are done upon the finest of canvas with silks of exquisiteshadings, and where figures are represented the faces are worked withsilk in "single stitch, " which means one crossing of the canvas insteadof two, as in ordinary cross-stitch. The latter was of course bettersuited for furniture coverings, both in strength and quality of surface, while the method of single stitch succeeded in presenting a smooth andwell-shaded surface, sufficiently like a painted one to stand for apicture. Indeed, veritable pictures were produced in this method andwere effective and interesting. In these specimens the faces and hands, while worked in the same cross-stitch, were varied by being done on asingle crossing of the canvas with one stitch, while the costumes andaccessories of the picture were done over the larger square of twothreads of the canvas, with the double crossing of the stitch. 

The faces were, in some cases, still further differentiated by beingwrought in silk instead of wool threads. 

The embroidered chair and sofa covers had quite the effect oftapestries, and were far better than a not uncommon variation of thesame needlework, where the broadcloth or velvet background held theembroidery. 

The designs were copied from patterns printed in color upon cross-ruledpaper, and consisted of bunches of flowers of various sorts, or picturesof dogs, and horses, and birds. A white lap dog worked upon a darkbackground was the favorite design for a footstool, and this smallobject tapered out the existence of decorative cross-stitch, until itgrew to be in use only as a decoration for toilet slippers. The finalend of this style of work was long deferred on account of the fact thata pair of cloth slippers, embroidered by the hands of some affectionategirl or doting woman, was a token which was not too unusual to carryinconvenient significance. It might mean much or little, much tendernessor affection, or a work of idleness tinctured with sentiment. 

[Illustration: _Left_--HAND-WOVEN TAPESTRY of fine and coarseneedlepoint. 

_Courtesy of the Edgewater Tapestry Looms_

_Right_--TAPESTRY woven on a hand loom. The design worked in fine pointand the background coarse point. A new effect in hand weave originatedat the Edgewater Tapestry Looms. 

_Courtesy of the Edgewater Tapestry Looms_]

The mechanical and commercial effect of this stitchery discouraged itsuse; its printed patterns and the regularity of its counted stitchesgiving neither provocation nor scope to originality of thought ordesign. This was not the fault of the stitch itself, since"cross-stitch" was the first form of needle decoration. It is, in fact, the A B C of all decorative stitchery, the method evolved by allprimitive races except the American Indian. It followed, more or lessclosely, the development of the art of weaving. When this had passedfrom the weaving together of osiers into mats or baskets, and hadreached the stage of the weaving of hair and vegetable fiber into cloth, the decoration of such cloth with independent colored fiber was the nextstep in the creation of values, and, naturally, the form of decorativestitches followed the lines of weaving. Simple as was its evolution, andits preliminary use, cross-stitch has a past which entitles it toreverence. With many races it has remained a habitual form ofexpression, and, as in Moorish and Algerian work, is carried to arefinement of beauty which would seem beyond so simple a method. It hasgiven form to a lasting style of design, to geometrical borders, whichhave survived races and periods of history, and still remain anunderlying part of the world of decorative linens. 

It is interesting to note that it had no place in aboriginal embroidery, and marks its creation as following the art of weaving. It is a longstep from this traditional past of its origin to the short past of thestitchery of America, where the little fingers of small Puritan maidsfollowed the lines evolved by the generations of the earlier world. 

CHAPTER VI -- REVIVAL OF EMBROIDERY, AND THE FOUNDING OF THE SOCIETY OFDECORATIVE ART

When French needlework had had its day, and the evanescent life ofBerlin woolwork had passed, for a period of half a century needleworkceased to flourish in America. Indeed, the art seemed to have died outroot and branch, and only necessary and utilitarian needlework waspracticed. It seems strange, after all the wonderful triumphs of theneedle in earlier years, that for the succeeding half or three-quartersof a century needlework as an art should actually have ceased to be. Ithad died, branch and stem and root, vanished as if it had never been. During at least half a century we were a people without decorativeneedlework art in any form. The eyes and thoughts of women were turnedin 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 trendof popular thought. It may be the attraction of new inventions, or theperfection of new processes, or even, and this is not uncommon, thecharm and fascination of some rare personality, whose ruling is absolutein its own immediate vicinity, and whose example spreads like circles inwater far and far beyond the immediate personal influence. We cannottrace this apparent dearth of the art to one particular cause, we onlyknow that in America the practice and study of music succeeded to itsplace in almost every household. The needle, that honored implement ofwoman, bade fair to be a thing almost of tradition, something whichwould be in time relegated to museums and collections, to be studiedhistorically, as we study the implements of the Stone Age, and otherprehistoric periods. 

I remember an amusing story told by a Baltimore friend, not given to themanufacture of instances, that during those years of dearth soon afterthe Civil War she was visiting a lovely southern family who had livedthrough the days of privation. One day there arose a great cry anddisturbance in the house, which turned out to be a quest for _the_needle, where was _the_ needle. Nobody could find it, although it couldbe proved that at a certain date it had been quilted into its accustomedplace on the edge of the drawing-room curtain of the east window. Finally it was found on the wrong curtain, minus the point, and thisdisability gave rise to a discussion. Should it be taken to town, andhave the point renewed by the watchmaker? This decision was discouragedby the daughter of the house, who related that the last time she hadtaken it for the same purpose, the watchmaker had said to her, "MissCassy, I have put a point on that needle three times, and I wouldseriously advise you to buy a new one. "

It was only in America that the needle had ceased to be an activeimplement. In England it had never been so constantly or feverishlyemployed. For the second time in its long history, its work becamepurely personal. The same necessity which impressed itself upon the poorlittle mother of mankind, when she sought among the fig leaves forwherewithal to clothe herself, was upon the domestic woman, who sewedcloth into skirts instead of vegetable fiber into aprons. 

[Illustration: _Left_--EMBROIDERED MITS

_Right_--WHITE COTTON VEST embroidered in colors. Eighteenth-nineteenthcentury American. 

_Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art_]

[Illustration: WHITE MULL embroidered in colors. Eighteenth-nineteenthcentury American. 

_Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art_]

[Illustration: EMBROIDERED VALANCE, part of set and spread for high-postbedstead, 1788. Worked in crewels on India cotton, by Mrs. GideonGranger, Canandaigua, New York. ]

It is curious to contrast the effect of this loss of embroidery inthe two countries, England and America. Doubtless there were otherreasons than the lost popularity of needlework as an art, that inEngland it should have resulted in the life or death practice ofnecessary needlework, and in America, that the facile fingers of womansimply turned to the ivory keys of the piano for occupation. But thefact remains that starvation threatened the woman of one country, whilein the other they were practicing scales. In England it was a period ofstress and strain, of veritable "work for a living, " the period of "TheSong of the Shirt. " Happily, in this blessed land, where hunger wasunknown, we were not conscious of its terrors, and perhaps hardly knewwhy the "cambric needle" and the darning needle were the only ones inthe market. Embroidery needles had "gone out. " Then came the relief ofthe sewing machine, born in America, where it was scarcely needed, butspeedily flying across the ocean to its life-saving work in England, where the tragedy of the poor seamstress was on the stage of life. Likemany another form of relief, it was not entirely adequate to thesituation. Its first effect was to create a need of remunerative work. The sewing machine took upon itself the toil of the seamstress, but itleft the seamstress idle and hungry. This was a new and even darkersituation than the last, but Englishwomen came to the rescue with aresuscitated form of needlework and embroidery tiptoed upon the emptystage, new garments covering her ancient form, and was welcomed withuniversal acclaim. 

Most cultivated and fortunate Englishwomen had a certain knowledge ofart and were eager to put all of their uncoined effort at the service ofthat body of unhappy women, who, without money, had the culture whichgoes with the use and possession of money. These unfortunate sisters, who were rather malodorously called decayed gentlewomen, became eagerand petted pupils of a new and popular organization called the SouthKensington School. Its peculiar claims upon English society gave it fromthe first the help of the most advanced and intelligent artisticassistance. The result of this was not only a resuscitation of oldmethods of embroidery, but the great gain to the school, or society, ofdesign and criticism of such men as Burne-Jones, Walter Crane, andWilliam Morris. 

It was with this vogue that it appeared in America, and attracted theattention of those who were afterward to be interested in the formationof a society which was founded for almost identical purposes. Not indeedto prevent starvation of body, but to comfort the souls of women whopined for independence, who did not care to indulge in luxuries whichfathers and brothers and husbands found it hard to supply. So, from whatwas perhaps a social and mental, rather than a physical, want, grew thegreat remedy of a resuscitation of one of the valuable arts of theworld, a woman's art, hers by right of inheritance as well as peculiarfitness. 

With true business enterprise, the new English Society prepared animportant exhibit for our memorial fair, the Centennial, held inPhiladelphia to mark the one-hundredth anniversary of nationalindependence. This exhibit of Kensington Embroidery all unwittinglysowed the seed not only of great results, but in decorative art workedin many other directions. The exhibits of art needlework from the NewKensington School of Art in London, their beauty, novelty and easyadaptiveness, exactly fitted it to experiment by all the dreamingforces of the American woman. They were good needlewomen by inheritanceand sensitive to art influences by nature, and the initiative capacitywhich belongs to power and feeling enabled them at once to seize uponthis mode of expression and make it their own. It was the means ofinaugurating another era of true decorative needlework, perfectlyadapted to the capacity of all women, and destined to be developed onlines peculiarly national in character. The effect of this exhibit wasnot exactly what was expected in the sale of its works, and longafterward, when discussing this apparent failure, in the face of animmediate adoption in America of the Society's methods and productions, I explained it to myself and an English friend, by the nationaldifference 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 withcolored wool. 

_Courtesy of Brooklyn Museum_]

It seems to me, after the observation and intimacy of years with thegrowing art of decoration in this country, that the color gift is a racegift with us. English art-work is nearly always characterized by subduedand modified harmony, while that of America has vivid and striking noteswhich play upon a higher key, and still melt as softly into eachother as the perfect modulations of the best English art. I was veryconscious of this during the year of my directorship of the Woman'sBuilding and exhibits in the World's Columbian Fair at Chicago, thatplace of wonderful comparisons of the art-work of the world. I couldnearly always recognize work of American origin by its singingcolor-quality, as different from the sharp semibarbaric notes ofOriental art as from the minor cadences of English decorative work. Butto return to the effect of the English exhibit at the PhiladelphiaCentennial: it was followed by the immediate formation of the Society ofDecorative Art in New York City, which became the parent of likesocieties in every considerable city or town in the United States. Byits good fortune in having a president who belonged by right of birth, and certainly of ability and achievement, to the best of New Yorksociety, the movement enlisted the sympathy and interest of theinfluential class of New York women, while there was waiting in theshadow a troop of able women who were shut out from the costly gayetiesof society by comparative poverty, but connected with it by friendshipsand 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 nearlyall of the different societies, and in this way every city became thecenter of this new-old form of embroidery, for what is called"Kensington Embroidery" is in fact a far-away repetition of old triumphsof the British needle. I use the word "British" advisedly, for it waswhen England was known as Britain among the nations that her embroiderywas a thing of almost priceless value. In modern English embroidery, thedays of Queen Anne have been the limit of backward imitation; and, infact, ancient English embroidery was a process of long and assiduouslabor, as well as of knowledge and inspiration. Our hurried modernconditions would not encourage the repetition of the hand-breadthpictures in embroidery of the earliest specimens, where countlessnumbers of stitches were lavished upon a single production. Theembroidered picture of The Garden of Eden described in chapter four is aspecimen of the minute representation. These specimens are, to the artof needlework, what the Dutch school of painting is to the great muralcanvases of the present day. 

The development of the nineteenth century in America was only at firstan exact reflection of English methods. The first thing which marked theinfluence of national character and taste was, that English models anddesigns almost immediately disappeared, only a few such, consisting ofthose which had been given to the art by masters of design like Morrisand Marcus Ward, were retained, and American needlewomen boldly took tothe representation of vivid and graceful groups of natural flowers, following the lead of Moravian practice and of flower painting, ratherthan that of decorative design. 

As a natural result, crewels were soon discarded in favor of silks, andnatural extravagance, or national influence, led to the use of costlymaterials instead of the linens of English choice and preference. So theold flower embroidery of Bethlehem had a second birth. American girlart-students soon found their opportunity in the creation of applieddesign, and before embroidery had ceased to be a matter ofrepresentation of flowers in colored silks, the flowers grew intorestrained and appropriate borders, or proper and correct spacedecoration, and the day of women designers for manufacturers had come. 

The circulars of the first Society of Decorative Art were not onlycomprehensive, but were ambitious. Its objects were set forth asfollows:

 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 Americanmind followed national impulses. Why, said the practical American, shallwe spend time and effort in doing things which are not adequate in finaleffect to the labor and cost we bestow upon them, and which do notreally accord with costly surroundings, and, in addition to thesedetriments, can and probably will be eaten by moths when all is done?The result of this interrogative reasoning was an immediate resort tosatins and silks and flosses, wherewith larger and more important thingsthan tidies were created--lambrequins, hangings, bedspreads, screens, and many other furnishings, all wrought in exquisite flosses, and moreor less beautiful in color. 

The institution of this Society of Decorative Art was in every respect atimely and popular movement. It followed the example of the EnglishSociety in making needlework the chief object of instruction. Ourartists became interested in the matter of design, as the Englishartists had been, and under their influence the scope of embroidery wasmuch enlarged. I remember the first contribution which indicatedoriginal talent was a piece of needlework by Mrs. W. S. Hoyt of Pelham, which was peculiarly ingenious, making a curious link between thecross-stitch tapestries of the German school and the woven tapestries ofFrance. This needlework was done upon a fabric which imitated the cordedtexture of tapestries, and was stamped in a design which carried thecolor and idea of a tapestry background. Upon this surface Mrs. Hoyt haddrawn a group of figures in mediæval costumes, afterward working them insingle cross-stitch over the ribs produced by the filling threads of thefabric. The figures and costumes were done in faded tints whichharmonized with the background, the stitches keeping the general effectof surface in the fabric. It will be seen that the result was extremelylike that of a tapestry of the fifteenth century. This was followed byan exhibit of various landscape pictures of Mrs. Holmes of Boston, adaughter-in-law of the poet and writer. Mrs. Holmes had chosen silks andbits of weavings for her medium, using them as a painter uses colorsupon his palette. A stretch of pale blue silk, with outlined hills lyingagainst it, made for her a sky and background, while a middle distanceof flossy white stitches, advancing into well-defined daisies, broughtthe foreground to one's very feet. Flower-laden apple branches againstthe sky were lightly sketched in embroidery stitches, like the daisies. It was a delicious bit of color and so well managed as to be asefficient a wall decoration as a water color picture. 

In what may be called pictorial art in textiles Mrs. Holmes was notalone, although her work probably incited to the same sort ofexperiment. 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 afield of swampy ground where the spotted leaves of the adder's tongue, the yellow water-lily, with its compact balls, and the flaming cardinalflower are growing, while swamp grasses are nodding above. This was asgood in its way as any sketch of them could be, and affected one withthe _sentiment_ of the scene, as it is the mission of art to do. MissWeld, Miss Carolina Townshend of Albany, Mrs. William Hoyt of Pelham andMrs. Dewey of New York, each contributed very largely to the formationof characteristic and progressive needlework art in America. There wereother individuals whose work was inciting many, who have also, perhapsunknown to themselves, helped in this progress. Indeed, I remember manypieces of embroidery, loaned for the Bartholdi Exhibition of 1883, whichwould have done credit to any period of the art, and each pieceundoubtedly had its influence. 

The work of schools or societies had been much less marked by originaldevelopment. During the ten years of their existence the four largestsocieties, those of New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Chicago, havebeen under the direction of English teachers, and have followed more orless closely the excellencies of the English School. Even in Boston, where, owing to the decided cultivation of art and the earlyintroduction of drawing in the public schools, one would have lookedfor a rather characteristic development, English designs and Englishmethods have been somewhat closely followed. 

In attempting to account for this fact one must remember that it isagainst the nature of associated authority to follow individual ororiginal suggestions. There must be a broad and well-trodden path forcommittees to walk together in, and the track of the Kensington Schoolis broad and authoritative enough for such following. The example andincitement of the various societies were the seed of much good andprogressive art in America. In saying this I do not by any means confinethe credit of the growth or development of needlework to this societyalone, for there have been other influences at work. What I mean to sayis this, that the other kindred societies, like the Woman's Exchange, the Needlework Societies, the Household Art Societies, and theBlue-and-White Industries started from this one root, and are as muchindebted to the original society as things must always be to the centralthought which inspired them. Compared with English work of the sameperiod, they were distinguished by a certain spontaneity of motiveand a luxuriance of effect, which has made these specimens more valuableto present possessors, and will make them far more precious asheirlooms. This sudden efflorescence of the art was, however, almost inthe hands of amateurs, except for the occasional effort by some of theadvanced 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 thedirection of embroidery upon linen, and in this line each and everysociety of decorative art has been a center of valuable teaching. At theColumbian Exposition, to which all prominent societies contributed, theperfection 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_ athing to be taken up and laid down according to moods and circumstances, but an educated profession or occupation for women, the acquirement of aknowledge which might develop indefinitely. 

Of course the trend of the decorative needlework was almost entirely inthe direction of stitchery pure and simple, devoted to table linen andluxurious household uses, and this grew to a point of absoluteperfection. Table-centers and doilies embroidered in colors on purewhite linen reached a point of beauty which was amazing. When I saw, atthe World's Columbian Exposition, the napery of the world, wrought byall races of women, I was delighted to see that the line of linenembroidery which was the direction of the common effort did not in theleast surpass the work sent by the Decorative Art societies of most ofour American cities. 

CHAPTER VII -- AMERICAN TAPESTRY

The Society of Decorative Art, has proved itself a means for theaccomplishment of the two ends for which it was founded--namely, thefostering and incitement of good taste in needlework and artisticproduction, and the encouragement of talent in women, as well asproviding a means of remunerative employment for their gifts in thisdirection. 

While the success of this Society was a source of great satisfaction tome, I had in my mind larger ambitions, which, by its very philanthropicpurposes, could not be satisfied, ambitions toward a truly greatAmerican effort in a lasting direction. 

I therefore allied myself with a newly formed group of men, allwell-known in their own lines of art, Louis Tiffany, famed for hisStained Glass, Mr. Coleman for color decoration and the use of textiles, and Mr. De Forest for carved and ornamental woodwork. My interests layin the direction and execution of embroideries. I can speakauthoritatively as to the effect upon it of the other arts, and I canhardly imagine better conditions for its development. The kindred artsof weaving and embroidery were carried on with those of stained glass, mural painting, illustration, and the other expressions of art peculiarto the different members. The association of different forms of artstimulated and developed and was the means of producing very importantexamples both in embroidery, needle-woven tapestries and loom weaving. 

As I was the woman member of this association of artists, it rested withme to adapt the feminine art, which was a part of its activities, to therequirements of the association. This was no small task. It meant thefitting of any and every textile used in the furnishing of a house toits use and place, whether it might be curtains, portieres, or wallcoverings. I drew designs which would give my draperies a framing whichcarried out the woodwork, and served as backgrounds for the desiredwreaths and garlands of embroidered flowers. I learned many valuablelessons of adaptation for the beautiful embroideries we produced. Thenet holding roses was a triumph of picturesque stitchery, and mostacceptable as placed in the house of the man whose fortunes dependedupon fish, and many another of like character. 

[Illustration: THE WINGED MOON

Designed by Dora Wheeler and executed in needle-woven tapestry by TheAssociated Artists, 1883. ]

Then one day appeared Mrs. Langtry in her then radiance of beauty, insisting upon a conference with me upon the production of a set ofbed-hangings which were intended for the astonishment of the Londonworld and to overshadow all the modest and schooled productions of theKensington, when she herself should be the proud exhibitor. She lookedat all the beautiful things we had done and were doing, and admired andapproved, but still she wanted "something different, something unusual. "I suggested a canopy of our strong, gauze-like, creamy silkbolting-cloth, the tissue used in flour mills for sifting the superfineflour. I explained that the canopy could be crosses on the under sidewith loops of full-blown, sunset-colored roses, and the hanging borderheaped with them. That there might be a coverlet of bolting-cloth linedwith the delicatest shade of rose-pink satin, sprinkled plentifully withrose petals fallen from the wreaths above. This idea satisfied thepretty lady, who seemed to find great pleasure in the range of ourexhibits, our designs and our workrooms, and when her order wascompleted, she was triumphantly satisfied with its beauty andunusualness. The scattered petals were true portraits done from nature, and looked as though they could be shaken off at any minute. I came tosee much of this beautiful specimen of womanhood, who played her part inthe eyes of the world; and of things of more lasting importance than hersomewhat ephemeral career, I should be tempted to tell amusingconclusions. She was an Oriental butterfly, which flitted along oursober, serious by-path of business and labor, looking for honey of anysort to be gathered on its sober track. 

When Mr. Tiffany came to me with an order for the drop-curtain of atheater, I did not trouble myself about a scheme for it, knowing that ithad probably taken exact and interesting form in his own mind. It was abeautiful lesson to me, this largeness of purpose in needlework. Thedesign for this curtain turned out to be a very realistic view of avista in the woods, which gave opportunity for wonderful studies ofcolor, from clear sun-lit foregrounds to tangles of misty green, meltinginto blue perspectives of distance. It was really a daring experiment inmethods of appliqué, for no stitchery pure and simple was in place inthe wide reaches of the picture. So we went on painting a woods interiorin materials of all sorts, from tenuous crêpes to solid velvets andplushes. It was one of Mrs. Holmes' silk pictures on a large scale, andwas perhaps more than reasonably successful. I remember the greatdelight in marking the difference between oak and birch trees andfitting each with its appropriate effect of color and texture of leaf;and the building of a tall gray-green yucca, with its thick satin leavesand tall white pyramidal groups of velvet blossoms, standing in the veryforeground, was as exciting as if it were standing posed for itsportrait, and being painted in oils. 

The variety of our work was a good influence for progress. We wereconstantly reaching out to fill the various demands, and, beyond them, to materialize our ideals. As far as art was concerned in our work, whatwe tried to do was not to repeat the triumphs of past needlework, but tosee how far the best which had been done was applicable to the present. 

If tapestries had been the highest mark of the past, to see whether andhow their use could be fitted to the circumstances of today, and, if wefound a fit place for them in modern decoration, to see that theirproduction took account of the methods and materials which belonged topresent periods, and adapted the production to modern demands. 

[Illustration: SEVENTEENTH CENTURY DESIGN TAPESTRY PANEL

_Courtesy of the Edgewater Tapestry Looms_]

We soon came to the ideal of tapestries which loomed above and beyond usand had been reached by every nation in turn which had applied art totextiles, but in all except very early work the accomplishment had beenmore of the loom than of hand work. My dream was of American Tapestries, made by embroidery alone, carrying personal thought into method. Wedecided that there was no reason for the limitation of the beautiful artof needlework to personal use, or even to its numerous domesticpurposes. This most intimate of the arts of decoration has been in theform of wall hangings for the bare wall spaces of architecture from thetime when dwellings passed their first limited use of protection anddefense. After this first use of houses came the instinct and longingfor beauty, and the feeling which prompts us in these wider days ofachievement to cover our wall spaces with pictures, moved our far-offforefathers and mothers to offer their skill in spinning, and weaving, and picturing with the needle hangings to cover the bareness of thehome. This impulse grew with the centuries, until tapestries were anatural art expression of different races of men, so that we haveItalian, Spanish, French, Dutch and English tapestries, each withnational tastes and characteristics of production. As time went on, inevitable machinery undertook the task of making wall hangings, withthe whole-hearted help of all who had given their lives to art, andtapestries had become a part of the riches of the world. When thegreater part of the world's wealth was in the possession of Popes andPrinces, it was usual to expend a goodly portion of it in works of art. Pictures and tapestries and exquisitely wrought metal work, weavings andembroideries, made priceless by costly materials and the thoughts andlabor of artists, were reckoned not as a sign of wealth but as actualwealth. They were really riches, as much as stocks and bonds are richestoday. Such things were accumulated as anxiously and persistently as oneaccumulates land or houses, or railroad bonds or stocks, and the buyerwas not poorer; but in fact he was richer for money expended in thisfashion. This everyday financial fact lay underneath and supported thebeautiful pageant of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, gilding themwith a radiance which has attracted the admiration and excited thewonder of all succeeding years. 

That flower and culmination of labor which we call art was the capitalof those early centuries, and took the place of the Bank, the Bourse, and the Exchange which later financial ideas have created. 

It is in a great measure to this fact, as well as to the intense lovefor, and appreciation of, art which distinguished this period, that weowe the wonderful treasures which have enriched the later world. Theybelong no longer to princes and prelates, but to governments andmuseums, and are object lessons to the student and the artisan, and aninheritance for both rich and poor of all mankind. 

Except in the light of these treasures of art, it would be difficult tounderstand how far-reaching and comprehensive was the greed of beautywhich possessed and distinguished the centers of tapestry production. The museums of the world are made up of what remains of them. Thepictures and tapestries, the weavings and embroideries, the carvings andmetal work which the world is studying, belonged to the daily life ofthose past centuries. The stamp of thought and the seal of art were setupon the simplest conveniences of life. The very keys of the locks andhinges of the doors were designed, not by mere workers in metal, but bysculptors and artists who were pre-eminent for genius. It was in thespirit of this period that Benvenuto Cellini modeled saltcellars as wellas statues, and his compeers designed carvings and gildings for statecarriages, and painted pictures upon the panels. Painters of divinepictures designed cartoons and borders for tapestries, and wreaths andgarlands for ceiling pilasters. 

Among the names of painters who designed cartoons for tapestries, wefind those of Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Titian, Guido and GiulioRomano, Albert Dürer, Rubens and Van Dyck. Indeed, there is hardly agreat name among the painters of the sixteenth and seventeenth centurieswhich has not contributed to the value of the tapestries dating fromthose times. Among them all none have a greater share of glory than theseries known as "The Acts of the Apostles, " designed by Raphael for PopeLeo X, in the year 1515. The history of these cartoons is full ofinterest. After the weaving of the first set of these tapestries, whichwas hung in the Sistine Chapel and regarded as among the greatesttreasures of the world, the cartoons remained for more than a hundredyears in the manufactory at Brussels. During this period one or moresets must have been woven from them, but in 1630 seven were transferredto the Mortlake Tapestry works near London, having been purchased byCharles I, who was advised of their existence by Rubens. The Mortlaketapestry had been established by James I, who was greatly aided by theinterest of the then Prince of Wales, and the Duke of Buckingham. It ischarming to think of "Baby Charles" and "Steenie" busying themselveswith the encouragement of art in the way of the production of tapestrypictures, and after the accession of the Prince, to follow the progressof this taste in the purchase of the famous cartoons, and the employmentof no less a genius than Van Dyck in the composition of new and moreelaborate borders for them. It was probably during the reign of Charlesthat these glorious compositions went into use as illustrations ofBiblical text, for we find "Paul preaching at Athens, " "Peter and Paulat the Beautiful Gate of the Temple, " and "The Miraculous Draught ofFishes" figuring as full-page frontispieces to many old copies of KingJames' Bible. After the tragic close of the reign of King Charles, thetreasures of tapestries he had accumulated were dispersed and sold byorder of Cromwell; but the cartoons remained the property of the nationand, though lost to sight for another hundred years or so, finallyreappeared from their obscurity, at Hampton Court, and in these lateryears, at the Kensington Museum, have again taken their place as one ofthe most valuable lessons of earlier centuries. It was probably thestory of these cartoons which inspired the determination which had takenpossession of us, to do a real tapestry, something greatly worthy ofaccomplishment. 

[Illustration: THE MIRACULOUS DRAUGHT OF FISHES

Arranged (from photographs made in London of the original cartoon byRaphael, in the Kensington Museum) by Candace Wheeler and executed inneedle-woven tapestry by the Associated Artists. ]

When we came to the decision to create tapestries, the actual substanceof them, as well as the art, was a thing to be considered. The woolfiber upon which they were usually based was a prey to many enemies. Dust may corrupt and moths utterly destroy fiber of wool, but dust doesnot accumulate on threads of silk, neither are they quite acceptable tothe appetite of moths. Therefore, we reasoned, if we did work which wasworthy of comparative immortality, it must be done with comparativelyimperishable material. Fiber of flax and fiber of silk shared thisadvantage, and the silk was tenacious of color, which was not the casewith flax; therefore we chose silk and went bravely to our task ofcreating American tapestries. 

Having decided upon our material, we consulted with our friendly andinterested manufacturers, and finally ordered a broad, heavily marked, loosely woven fabric which would hold our precious stitches safely andshow them to advantage. The woof of the canvas upon which we were toexperiment was also of silk, not fine and twisted like the warp, butsoft and full enough to hold silk stitchery. In this way the face of thecanvas, or ground, could be quite covered by a full thread of embroiderysilk passed under the slender warp and actually sewn into the woof. 

[Illustration: MINNEHAHA LISTENING TO THE WATERFALL

Drawn by Dora Wheeler and executed in needle-woven tapestry by TheAssociated Artists, 1884. ]

Being thus fully equipped for the production of real tapestries, welladapted to the processes of what I called "needle weaving, " since theneedle was really used as a shuttle to carry threads over and under thealready fixed warp, the next decision rested upon the subject of thisnew application of the art and the knowledge we had gained by study andpractice and love of textile art. With a courage which we now wonder at, we selected perhaps the most difficult, as it certainly is the mostbeautiful, of surviving tapestries, "The Miraculous Draught of Fishes, "the cartoon of which, designed by Raphael, is at present to be seen andstudied at the Kensington Museum in London. The decision to copy thiswas perhaps influenced by the fact that it was the only original cartoonof which I had knowledge, and my summer holiday in London was spent inits study, and schemes for its exact reproduction. As it was spread upona wall in museum fashion, a drawing could not be actually verified bymeasurements, but an expedient came to me which proved to besatisfactory. I had two photographs, as large as possible, made fromthe cartoon, and one of them, being very faintly printed, copied exactlyin color; the other was ruled and cut into squares, and was againphotographed and enlarged to a size which would bring them, when joined, to the same measurements as the original cartoon. These, very carefullyput together, made a working drawing for my tapestry copy, and thelighter photograph, which had been most carefully water-colored, gavethe color guide for the copy. 

It was interesting to find the perforations along the lines of thecomposition still showing in the photographed cartoon, and we made useof them by going over them with pin pricks, fastening the cartoon overthe sheet of silk canvas woven for the background, so that there was nopossibility of shifting. Prepared powder was sifted through the lines ofperforation and fixed by the application of heat, and we then had theentire composition exactly outlined upon the ground. After that the workof superimposing color and shading by needle weaving was a labor of loveand diligent fingers during many months. Every inch of stitchery wascarefully criticized and constantly compared with the colored copy, and at last it was a finished tapestry and was hung in a north light onone of the great spaces of the studio, where it was an object of expertexamination and general admiration. 

[Illustration: APHRODITE

Designed by Dora Wheeler for needle-woven tapestry worked by TheAssociated Artists, 1883. ]

It is by far the most important work accomplished by needle weavingwhich has ever been made in America, and is as veritable a copy of theoriginal as if it were painted with brush and pigment, instead of beingwoven with threads of silk. The low lights of the evening sky, thereflections of the boats, and the stooping figures of the fishermen, theperspective of the distant shore, and the wonderful grouping in theforeground, keep their charm in the tapestry as they do in the picture. Even the mystery of the twilight is rendered, with the subtle effect wefeel, but can scarcely define, in the original drawing. 

It has been a curiously direct process from the hand of the greatmaster, to this new reproduction, although it stands so far from histime and life. His very thought was painted by his very hand upon thepaper of the cartoon, and this painted thought has been photographedupon another paper which has served as a guide to the copy. 

It makes us sharers in the art riches of Raphael's own time, to see anew embodiment of his thought appearing as a part of the nineteenthcentury's accomplishments and possessions. 

After this achievement we naturally began to look for appropriate usefor the small tapestries, but here came our stumbling block. The breedof princes, who had been the former patrons of such works of art, wereall asleep in their graves, and knew not America, or its ambitions, andour native breed was not an hereditary one, building galleries inpalaces, and collecting there the largest of precious accomplishments inartistic skill in order to perpetuate their own memories, as well as toenrich their descendants. Our princes were perhaps as rich as they, andpossibly as powerful, but their ambitions did not usually extend to aline of posterity. Their palaces were contracted to a "three score andten" size; for each of them, no matter how wide his capability ofenjoyment, knew that it was personal and ended when his little spark oflife should be extinguished. I gladly record, however, that in theselater days some of them have made the American world their heirs, andare building and enriching museums and colleges, making them palaces ofgrowth and enlightenment, and so giving to the many what an older raceof princes built and enriched and guarded for the few. 

But in the meantime what were we to do about our tapestries? They werecostly, very costly to produce, and although we took account of thedelight of their creation and put it on the credit side of our books, along with the fact that the weekly pay roll of the tapestry room wentfor the comfort and maintenance of the students whom we loved andcherished, I soon realized the fact that a commercial firm could not beburdened with the fads of any one member. Before I had carried thisconclusion to its logical end, we had opportunities of using our skillworthily in several of the new great houses of the time. When theCornelius Vanderbilt house was erected on Fifth Avenue and Fifty-SeventhStreet we received an order for a set of tapestries for the drawing-roomwalls. These were executed from ideal subjects and of single figures. Iremember the "Winged Moon" among them, which was an ideal figure of thenew moon lying in a cradle of her own wings. This was but one of theset, one or two of which we afterward made in replica for an exhibit inLondon. There was no lack of subjects in our background of Americanhistory. The legends and beliefs of our North American Indians were fullof them, and one of the first we selected was the lovely story of"Minnehaha, Laughing Water, " from Longfellow's "Hiawatha. " The sketchhad been sent to us by Miss Dora Wheeler, as the prize composition ofthe Saturday Composition Class at Julien's Studio in Paris. 

The literary past of the country furnished subjects enough and to spare, and if we wished to walk into the shadowy realms of legend and fiction, there were the picturesque legends of the American Indian from which tochoose. Our subjects were often one-figure designs, as such pieces weresuitable in size to wall spaces and door openings. Of course commercialconsiderations could not be lost sight of in our enthusiasm for progressin textile art. Potter Palmer, the multimillionaire of Chicago, wasbuilding at the time a palace home on the Lake Shore, and one auspiciousday Mrs. Palmer bestowed her beautiful presence upon us, and wasmightily taken with our tapestries. Her clever mind was attracted by the"bookishness" of some of the panels of incidents from Americanliterature, and several of them went to beautify the great house on theLake Shore, in the form of several panels of portraits. Mrs. Palmer wasa delightful patron, her own enjoyment of art, in any of its forms, amounted to enthusiasm, and her great physical beauty, to a beautylover, made every visit from her an epoch. I have never seen the face ofan adult woman who has had the experience of wifehood and motherhoodwhich retained so perfectly the flawless beauty of childhood. I haveoften gazed at the angelic face of some child, and wondered why eachyear of life should wipe out some exquisite line of drawing, or absorbthe entrancing shadows which rest upon the face of childhood. It was agreat satisfaction to personally assist in the furnishing of the home ofthis beautiful aristocrat, whose own law allowed of no infringement byour mighty three, having been shaped in a mind enriched by muchclassical study and constant acquaintance with the beautiful. 

When our embroideries and needlework had taken their place in thiscountry, we were asked to make part of an Exhibition of American Art inLondon. This we were very glad to do, for the artistic gratification ofbeing able to measure what we were doing with the best art of the kindabroad. It was also pleasant to be considered worthy company with thebest in our own land, to rub shoulders with our best painters, our greatmakers of stained glass, leaders who take genuine pleasure in idealwork. Of course this applies to amateur work only, as professionaldecoration must accord with the general plan which has been selected. 

[Illustration: FIGHTING DRAGONS

Drawn by Candace Wheeler and embroidered by The Associated Artists, 1885. ]

I had reason to think that the Exhibition made by the Associated Artistsat Chicago was of lasting use to all lovers of needlework, the worldover, since so many other races came there to get their world lessons. Ilearned much that was of value to me from familiar study of the exhibitsfrom different countries, from their excellencies and differences andthe reasons why such wide divergences existed, and from observation ofthe people themselves who produced them--for many of the exhibits werein charge of practical needleworkers who knew the history of their artfrom its very beginning. I found more of interest in Oriental artfrom seeing that it was not merely a perfunctory repetition of stitchesand patterns, but that there was a stanch, almost a religious, integrityin doing the thing exactly as it had been done by generations offorefathers, and that the silks and tissues and flosses and threads ofgold were the best the world produced. In the presence of such fidelity, what mattered it that the borders and blocks were formed of angles, orzigzags, or squares, or any other fixed and mechanical shapes? Thespirit of it was true to its race and traditions. In the face of it, allour beautiful copies of flowers, and growths, and gracious forms ofnature seemed almost experimental--the art of growing and changingnations. 

But as we do not make the early art of long existent races models uponwhich to shape our search for the most beautiful, the persistence ofEastern form in embroidery need not prevent our progress in design. Imade an interesting note of this persistence of Eastern design, when, many years ago, I had an opportunity of examining some mummy wrappingsfrom a burial ground at Lima, Peru. They were wonderful weavings ofaboriginal cloth, bordered with embroidery done in dyed or coloredthreads of flax, in designs as purely Eastern as can be found in anyancient or modern Eastern embroidery. How could it happen that theornamental designs of the Far East and the Far West should touch eachother? Was it similarity of thought knowledge, the kinship of the humanmind, or some long-forgotten means of transmission of the material andactual, of which we all-knowing moderns do not even dream? Thiswonderful South American embroidery of past ages antedated many antiqueremains of the art of stitchery which we treasure with as wide a marginof time as lies between their day and ours. 

Embroidery has become a dependence and a business for thousands ofwomen, and it is this which secures its permanence. We may trustskillful executants who live by its practice to keep ahead of thechanging fancies of society and invent for it new wants and newfashions. And this, because their chance of living depends upon it, andit promises to be a permanent and growing art. It may, and will, undoubtedly, take on new directions, but it is no longer a lost art. Onthe contrary, it is one where practice has attained such perfection thatit is fully equal to any new demands and quite competent to answer anyof the higher calls of art. 

CHAPTER VIII -- THE BAYEUX TAPESTRIES

While a description of this most important work of women's hands mayseem somewhat irrelevant in a book devoted to the development of the artof embroidery in America, it is so important a link in the subject ofstitchery, executed as it was in the eleventh century, that a shortchapter on this most interesting and vital subject may not come amiss. 

Among all our present possessions of early skill, perhaps nothing ismore widely known than what is called the Bayeux Tapestry. This muchvenerated work is not tapestry at all, but a pictorial record inoutline, done with a needle, as simply as though written in ink, atleast according to our present understanding of what is known astapestry. 

We read of the subject, and the name of William the Conqueror loomslarge in the imagination. We think of the tapestry as a greatillustrated page of history, large in proportion not alone to the deedsit chronicles, but to their importance in the story of one of thegreatest, perhaps, of the modern races; and across this illustrated pagewe fancy the prancing of war horses and the prowess of the knight, thepassing of seas and the march of armies, with all the attendant tragedyof circumstance. 

But this is only in one's mind. The reality is a more or less tatteredstrip of grayish-white linen, two feet in width and two hundred andthirty feet long, and along this frail bridge between the past andpresent march the actors in the great conquest. It seems but aninadequate pathway, but it has borne its phalanxes of men, its twohundred horses, its five hundred and fifty-five dogs and other animals, its forty-one ships, its numberless castles and trees, its roads andfarms safely through all the intervening years from 1066 to 1919, and itstill holds them. 

In truth, we wonder much over this production of the past, and not aloneover the heroes who career so mildly in their armor of colored crewelson the linen background. We wonder, in the first place, how a continuousweb of over two hundred feet in length could have been woven. Then, weknow that lengths of woven stuffs are limited only by the requirementsof commerce, and that Matilda was of Flanders, and her father hadlearned the princely trick of loving and encouraging manufactures, andhad, indeed, taught it to his daughter, and that Flanders was a notedcenter of manufacture. Then we decide that if Matilda had called for astrip of linen two thousand feet long, whereon to write the warlikehistory of a spouse who began his gentle part toward her (for so historyavers) by pulling her from her horse and rolling her in the mud becauseshe refused to marry him, it would have been forthcoming as easily astwo hundred. Should the Queen of England require a stretch of linen aslong as from England to America, whereon to record the successes of herreign, who doubts that it would be supplied her?

[Illustration: THREE SCENES FROM THE BAYEUX TAPESTRY]

So, when the question of this web is disposed of, we wonder who drew allthese figures of men and horses, for Queen Matilda and her ladies tooverlay with stitchery, and why his name has not come down to us. Wedecide within our minds, for it never occurs to us to impute suchability in drawing to the Queen or her ladies, that it was the work ofsome monkish brother who varied his illuminating labor upon missalsand copies of the Scripture by doing these worldly and interestingthings. 

We think of the never to be forgotten Gerard in _The Cloister and theHearth_, and wonder if it was some monastery-trained youth like him whorested from the creation of saints and angels upon vellum, to drawfighting knights upon linen, and whether, perchance, his hushed heartburned within him at the stir and valor of the deeds he portrayed. Andthen some one, better informed than we, points out the figure of adwarf, nicely labeled as Turold--for many of the actors in thisembroidered story are labeled in delicate stitches--and tells us thathis was the hand that set the copy for all the happy and beloved maidsof the Queen, and the hapless and perhaps equally beloved Saxon maids. We wonder, again, how these skillful and noble Saxons like to findthemselves thus writing their own infelicities and humiliations for allthe world to see, and then--for so does the human mind go groping intomotives and springs of action--we wonder if their famous skill inneedlework, of which the wide-awake Matilda must surely have known, putit into her head to make this curious life-record of her great lord, and we reflect that if it were so, it would only be another facet of hermany-sided ability. 

But that was underneath the surface. Outside was the queenlymagnificence and wifely glorification of her lot, a smooth current ofirresistible prosperity. Underneath was the whirling and buzzing of thewheels of thought, the springs of motion which governed the greatcurrent. 

In truth, two such clever thought centers as William of Normandy andMatilda of Flanders seldom in the world have made a conjunction, or wewould have had more great conquests to record. We may fancy what we willin the far background which this slender length of linen reaches, allthe byplay which accompanied the guarded life of the castle, thereligious life of the cathedral and monastery, the colored and banneredpomp of duke and noble. 

It was all mightily picturesque, with its contrasts of gorgeousness andprivation, but probably Matilda the dexterous thought that times weregood enough when she could sit in safety, surrounded by her maids andpriests, and write her royal journal as she pleased, with a threadedstylus; and well for us that she elected to do this, although herrecords are written in so quaint a fashion that amusement and interestare twin spectators of the result. 

Two borders, upper and lower, remind one irresistibly of a child'sprocessional picture on a slate. The figures are done in outline only, colors corresponding to those used in the body of the work. Each borderis some six inches wide, and has the air of a little running commentaryor enlargement of the main story. There are variations and incidentswhich could not perhaps be put down in the main body, where all thefigures are worked solidly in the stitch which has been rechristened"Kensington stitch. " The horses are worked in red-brown and graycrewels, some of them duly spotted and dappled, the banners andgonfalons carefully wrought in the colors and devices belonging to them. The whole work follows scrupulously the scenes of the Conquest, givingthe lives of the actors both in Normandy and England, as well as thetransit from one country to the other. 

The first scene evidently represents Edward the Confessor givingaudience to Harold, the last of the Saxon kings. The next gives theembarkation of Harold, and the third his capture in France. 

Then comes the death of Edward, and the tapestry story strugglesineffectually with the incidents of his death and funeral; and theelection of Harold as King of England, showing him seated crowned and inroyal robes under a very primitive canopy. After this, the scene shiftsagain to France, and portrays the preparations for invasion made by theDuke of Normandy, who was called by the people of the country he invaded"William the Conqueror, " and who have continued to know him only by thatname through all succeeding centuries, the shame and sorrow ofvanquishment quite buried under the glory of the performance, Saxon andNorman uniting in esteem of the successful result. 

All this history is duly set forth in archaic simplicity by the stitchesof Queen Matilda, who, in preserving the record of the deeds of herdoughty lord, has set down also a record of herself as the ideal wife, who glorifies her husband, and merges all she is of woman into thatcondition--and still it is only a strip of linen worked in crewels. Allthe triumphs of the great Conqueror are written upon it, but none of thedisappointments. The needlework story does not relate (how could it whenMatilda's active, trained and industrious fingers had been stilled bydeath?) the sorrows which overcame even her fortunate hero--that hisbody was robbed of its clothing, and lay naked and dishonored beside adisputed grave, where even the solemn claim of death to burial wasresisted until an old wrong "done in the body" was righted. And thoughhis son reigned after him, and he founded a royal line, perhaps one ofthe greatest enjoyments of his successful life consisted in watching thefingers of his well-beloved Matilda as they worked this linen record. 

Of course it is the great events it portrays and the human interest itholds which make this tapestry exceedingly valuable, for, artistically, it is of no more value than a child's sampler. But, simple as it is, volumes have been written about it. Scholars and historians have poredover its pictured history, money without stint has been spent in paperreproductions of it, and, finally, the whole important embroiderysociety of Leeds, England, spent two industrious years in copying it, and earned fame and envy thereby. 

The wonderful remains of the work of skilled fingers serve to dignifythe art of which it is capable, and to sing a varied song in the ears ofthe modern embroiderer, who follows her own will in spite oftime-hallowed examples. The women of today, 1920, have been called towork that is widely different from that of the ages when embroidery wasa natural recourse and almost universal practice, but it is an art whichhas done too much for the progress of the world, in all its differentphases, to die, or to cease to progress. There will always be quietsouls, whose lives have been made so by circumstances, who will findsolace in the practice of needlework, so we may safely leave with theman art which has done so much for mankind. 

 THE END

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Transcriber's note:

The following corrections have been applied to the text:

Porcupine quill work seems to havebeen no longer practiced, 'no' is missing in the original text

which were novelties to the imported artisan. Corrected from 'novelites'

Miss Mather or Miss Coffin or Miss Hooker 'of' corrected to 'or'