Art in Needlework Part 13

The direction taken by the st.i.tch always helps to explain the drawing; or, if the needlewoman cannot draw, to show that she cannot--as, for example, in the tulip herewith (83). A less intelligent management of the st.i.tch it would be hard to find. The needlestrokes, far from helping in the very slightest degree to explain the folding over of the petals, directly contradict the drawing. The flower might almost have been designed to show how not to do it; but it is a piece of old work, quite seriously done, only without knowing. The embroidress is free, of course, to work her st.i.tches in a direction which does not express form at all, so as to give a flat tint, in which is no hint of modelling; but the intention is here quite obviously naturalistic. The rendering below (84) shows the direction the st.i.tches should have taken. The turn-over of the petals is even there not very clearly expressed, but that is the fault of the drawing (very much on a par with the workmanship), from which it would not have been fair to depart.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 84. MORE EXPRESSIVE LINES OF St.i.tCHING.]

A more clever fulfilment of the naturalistic intention is to be seen in Ill.u.s.tration 76. The drawing of the doves is in the rather loose manner of the period of Marie Antoinette; but the treatment of the st.i.tch is clever in its way--the way, as I have said, rather of painting than of embroidery, giving as it does the roundness of the birds' bodies but no hint of actual feathering, such as you find in the bird in Ill.u.s.tration 85. There, every st.i.tch helps to explain the feathering. By a discreet use of what I must persist in calling the same st.i.tch (that is, satin-st.i.tch and the variety of it called plumage-st.i.tch) the embroiderer has rendered with equal perfection the sweep of the broad wing feathers and the fluffy feathering of the breast. It is by means of the direction of the st.i.tch, too, that the drawing of the neck is so perfectly rendered.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 85. SATIN AND PLUMAGE St.i.tCHES.]

The direction of the st.i.tch is varied to some purpose in the head in Ill.u.s.tration 80, where the flesh is all in straight upright st.i.tches, whilst the hair is st.i.tched in the direction of its growth.

The five petals on the satin-st.i.tch sampler (Ill.u.s.tration 36)--to descend from the masterly to the elementary--show something of the difference it makes in what direction the st.i.tch is worked. It matters more, of course, in some st.i.tches than in others; but in most cases the direction of the st.i.tch suggests form, and needs accordingly to be considered.

It scarcely needs further pointing out how the direction of the st.i.tch may help to explain the construction of the form, as in the case of leaves, for example, where the veining may be suggested; or of stalks, where the fibre may be indicated. There is no law as to the direction of st.i.tch, except that it should be considered. You may follow the direction of the forms, you may cross them, you may deliberately lay your st.i.tches in the most arbitrary manner; but, whatever you do, you must do it with intelligent purpose. An artist or a workwoman can tell at once whether your st.i.tch was laid just so because you meant it or because you knew no better.

Having laid your st.i.tches deliberately, it is best to leave them, and not to work over them with other st.i.tching. St.i.tching over st.i.tching was resorted to whenever elaboration was the fashion; but the simpler and more direct method is the best. The way the veins are laid in cord over the satin-st.i.tch in the lotus leaves in Ill.u.s.tration 40 is the one fault to be found with an all but perfect piece of work.

The st.i.tching over the laid silver mid-rib in Ill.u.s.tration 92 is better judged. It may be said, generally speaking, that except where, as in the case of laid-work, the first st.i.tching was done in antic.i.p.ation of a second, and the work would be incomplete without it, st.i.tching over st.i.tches should be indulged in only with moderation.

St.i.tching is sometimes done not merely over st.i.tches, but upon the surface of them, not penetrating the ground-stuff. Unless, in such a case, the first st.i.tching is of such compact character as to want no strengthening, it amounts almost to a sin against practicality not to take advantage of the second st.i.tching to make it firmer.

CHURCH WORK.

It is customary to draw a distinction between church, or ecclesiastical as it is called, and other embroidery; but it is a distinction without much difference. Certain kinds of work are doubtless best suited to the dignity of church ceremonial, and to the breadth of architectural decoration; accordingly, certain processes of work have been adopted for church purposes, and are taken as a matter of course--too much as a matter of course. The fact is, work precisely like that employed on vestments and the like (Ill.u.s.tration 86) was used also for the caparison of horses and other equally profane purposes.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 86. RENAISSANCE CHURCH WORK.]

Practical considerations, alike of ceremonial and decoration, make it imperative that church work should be effective: religious sentiment insists that it should be of the best and richest, unsparingly, and even lavishly given; common sense dictates that the loving labour spent upon it should not be lost. And these and other such considerations involve methods of work which, by constant use for church purposes, have come to be cla.s.sed as ecclesiastical embroidery. But there is no consecrated st.i.tch, no st.i.tch exclusively belonging to the church, none probably invented by it. For embroidery is a primitive art--clothes were st.i.tched before ever churches were furnished; and European methods of embroidery are all derived from Oriental work, which found its way westwards at a very early date. Phrygia (sometimes credited with the invention of embroidery) pa.s.sed it on to Greece, and Greece to Italy, the gate of European art.

Christianity produced new forms of design, but not new ways of work. The methods adopted in the nunneries of the West were those which had already been perfected in the harems of the East.

Embroidery for the church must naturally take count of the church, both as a building and as a place of worship; but, as apart from all other needlework, there is no such thing as church embroidery; and the branding of one very dull kind of thing with that name is in the interest neither of art nor of the church, but only of business.

"Ecclesiastical art" is just a trade-term, covering a vast amount of soulless work. There is in the nature of things no reason why art should be reserved for secular purposes, and only manufacture be encouraged by the clergy. The test of fitness for religious service is religious feeling; but that is hardly more likely to be found in the output of the church furnisher (trade patterns overladen with stock symbols), than in the st.i.tching of the devout needlewoman, working for the glory of G.o.d, in whose service of old the best work was done.

Many of the examples of old work given on these pages are from church vestments, altar furniture, and the like; information on that point will be found in the descriptive index of ill.u.s.trations at the beginning of the book; but they are here discussed from the point of view of workmanship, with as little reference as possible to religious or other use: that is a question apart from art.

The distinguishing features of church work should be, in the first place, its devotional spirit, and, in the second, its consummate workmanship. In it, indeed, we might expect to find work beyond the rivalry of trade controlled by conditions of time and money. Even then it would be but the more perfect expression of the same art which in its degree enn.o.bled things of civic and domestic use.

Church embroidery, as usually practised in these days, is not only the most frigid and rigid in design, but the hardest and most mechanical in execution--which last arises in great part from the way it is done. It is not embroidered straight upon the silk or velvet which forms the groundwork of the design, but separately on linen. The pattern thus worked is cut out, and either pasted straight on to the ground-stuff, or, if the linen is at all loose, first mounted on thin paper and then cut out and pasted on to the velvet, where it is kept under pressure until it is dry. In either case the edges have eventually to be worked over.

This habit of working on linen or canvas and applying the embroidery ready worked on to the richer stuff, though early used on occasion, does not seem to have been common until a period when manufacture generally usurped the place of art. The work in Ill.u.s.tration 87 was done directly on to the silk. In the latter half of the 18th century there was a regular trade in embroidery ready to sew on, by which means purveyors could turn out in a day or two what would have taken months to embroider.

Even if it had been the invariable mediaeval practice to work sprays or what not upon canvas and apply them bodily to the velvet, that would not make it the more workmanlike or straightforward way of working. If needle st.i.tches are the ostensible means of getting an effect upon a stuff, it seems only right they should be st.i.tched upon that stuff. To work the details apart and then clap them on to it, stands to embroidery very much in the relation of hedge-carpentering to joinery. Nor is it usually happy in result. Occasionally, as in the case of Miss C. P.

Shrewsbury's vine-leaf pattern (Ill.u.s.tration 88), it disarms criticism.

More often it looks stuck-on. A way of avoiding that look is to add judicious after-st.i.tching on the stuff itself; and this must not be confined to the sewing on or outlining merely, but allowed to wander playfully over the field, so as to draw your eye away from the margin of the applied patch, and lead you to infer that, some of the needlework being obviously done on the velvet, all of it is. But to disguise in this way the line of demarcation, even if you succeed in doing it, is at best the art of prevarication.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 87. GOTHIC CHURCH WORK.]

No doubt it is difficult to work upon velvet. The stuff is not very sympathetic, and the st.i.tching has a way of sinking into the pile, and being, as it were, drowned in it. But the trailing spirals of split-st.i.tch which play about the applied spots in many a mediaeval altar cloth hold their own quite well enough to show that silk can be worked straight on to the velvet.

That gold may be equally well worked straight on to velvet may be seen in any Indian saddle cloth. Heavy work of this kind may be rather man's work than woman's; but that is not the point. The question is, how to get the best results; and the answer is, by working on the stuff.

It may be argued that in this way you cannot get very high relief; but the occasions for high relief are, at the best, rare. If you want actual modelling, as in the Spanish work referred to in a previous chapter, that must, of course, be worked separately, built up, as it were, upon the canvas and worked over. And there is no reason why it should not, for in no case does it appear to be st.i.tching. In fact, it aims deliberately at the effect of chased and beaten metal.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 88. MODERN CHURCH WORK BY MISS SHREWSBURY.]

Heavy applique of any kind affects, of course, not only the thickness but the flexibility of the material thus enriched--an important consideration if it is meant to hang in folds.

A PLEA FOR SIMPLICITY.

The simplest patterns are by no means the least beautiful. It is too much the fashion to underrate the artistic value of the less pretentious forms of needlework, and especially of flat ornament, which has, nevertheless, its own very important place in decoration. As for geometric pattern, that is quite beneath consideration--it is so mechanical! Mechanical is a word as easily spoken as another; but if needlework is mechanical, that is more often the fault of the needlewoman than of the mechanism she employs. The Orientals, who indulged so freely in geometric device, were the least mechanical of workers. It is our rigid way of working it which robs geometric ornament of its charm. The needleworker has less than ever occasion to be afraid of geometric pattern; for it is peculiarly difficult to get in it that appearance of rule-and-compa.s.s-work which makes ornament so dull.

The one real objection to geometric pattern is that it is nowadays so cheaply and so mechanically got by _weaving_ that, however freely it may be rendered, there is a danger of its suggesting mechanical production, which embroidery emphatically ought not to do. There is a similar objection nowadays to some st.i.tches, such, for example, as chain-st.i.tch and back-st.i.tch, which suggest the sewing-machine.

Embroidery does not to-day take quite the place it once did. It was used, for example, by the early Coptic Christians to supplement tapestry. That is to say, what they could not weave they st.i.tched; it was only to get more delicate detail than their tapestry loom would allow, that they had recourse to the needle. Needlework was, in fact, an adjunct to weaving. Later, in mediaeval times, the Germans of Cologne, for their church vestments and the like, wove what they could, and enriched their woven figures with embroidery.

Again, a great deal of Oriental embroidery, and of peasant work everywhere, is merely the result of circ.u.mstances. Where money is scarce and time is of no account, it answers a woman's purpose to do for herself with her needle what might in some respects be even better done on the loom. Her preference for handwork is not that it has artistic possibilities, but that it costs her less. She would in many cases prefer the more mechanically produced fabric, if she could get it at the same price. We do not find that Orientals reject the productions of the power-loom--which they would do if they had the artistic instincts with which we credit them.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 89. SIMPLE St.i.tCHING ON LINEN.]

It results from our conditions of to-day that there are some kinds of needlework we admire, which yet are not worth our doing, such, for example, as the all-over work, which does not amount to more than simple diaper, and which really is not so much embroidering on a textile as converting it into one of another kind. Glorified instances of this kind of work occur in the shawl work of Cashmere, and in those beautiful bits of Persian st.i.tching which remind one of carpet-work in miniature, if they are not in fact related to carpet-weaving.

Embroidery was at one time the readiest, and practically the only, means of getting enrichment of certain kinds. To-day we get machine embroidery. As machinery is perfected, and learns to do what formerly could be done only by the needle, hand-workers get pushed aside and fall out of work. Their chance is, in keeping always in advance of the machine. There is this hope for them, that the monotony of machine-made things produces in the end a reaction in favour of handwork--provided always it gives us something which manufacture cannot. Possibly also there is scope for amateurs and home-artists in that combination of embroidery and hand-weaving with which the power-loom, though it has superseded it, does not enter into compet.i.tion.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 90. SIMPLE COUCHING ON LINEN.]

It is not so much for geometric ornament as for simple pattern that I here make my plea, for that reticent work of which so much was at one time done in this country--mere back-st.i.tching, for example, or what looks like it, in yellow silk upon white linen; or the modest diaper, archaic, if you like, but inevitably characteristic, in which the navete of the sampler seems always to linger; or again, the admirably simple work in Ill.u.s.tration 89. This last does not show so delicately in the photographic reproduction as it should, because, being in grey and yellow on white linen, the relative value of the two shades of colour is lost in the process. In the original the broader yellow bands are much more in tone with the ground, and do not a.s.sert themselves so much. Such as it is, only an artist could have designed that border-work, and any neat-handed woman could have embroidered it.

Think again of the delicate work in white on white, too familiar to need ill.u.s.tration, which makes no loud claim to be art, but is content to be beautiful! Is that to be a thing altogether of the past now that we have Art Needlework? Art needlework! It has helped put an end to the patience of the modern worker, and to inspire her too often with ambitions quite beyond her powers of fulfilment.

What one misses in the work of the present day is that reticent and unpretending st.i.tchery, which, thinking to be no more than a labour of loving patience, is really a work of art, better deserving the t.i.tle than a flaunting floral quilt which goes by the name of "art needlework"--designed apparently to worry the eye by day and to give bad dreams by night to whoever may have the misfortune to sleep under it. Is anyone nowadays modest enough to do work such as the couching in outline in Ill.u.s.tration 90? Yet what distinction there is about it!

EMBROIDERY DESIGN.

Perfect art results only when designer and worker are entirely in sympathy, when the designer knows quite what the worker can do with her materials, and when the worker not only understands what the designer meant, but feels with him. And it is the test of a practical designer that he not only knows the conditions under which his design is to be carried out, but is ready to submit to them.

The distinction here made between designer and embroiderer is not casual, but afore-thought, notwithstanding the division of labour it implies. Enthusiasm has a habit of outrunning reason. Because in some branches of industry subdivision of labour has been carried to absurd excess, it is the fashion to demand in all branches of it the autograph work of one person, which is no less absurd. To try and link together faculties which Nature has for the most part put asunder, is futile.

That designer and worker should be one and the same person is an ideal, but one only very occasionally fulfilled. When that happens (Ill.u.s.trations 61 and 88) it is well. But the attempt to realise it commonly works out in one of two ways: either a good design is spoilt in the working for want of executive skill on the part of the designer, or good workmanship is spent on poor design, as good, perhaps, as one has any right to expect of a skilled needleworker.