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EMBROIDERY. 12 EMBROIDERY.

NUMEROUS as are the subjects treated on in this work, there are few which furnish a more pleasing occupation than Embroidery. To this art our readers are indebted for some of the most elegant articles of dress. It may, also, afford them opportunities of displaying their taste and ingenuity; and offers a graceful occupation, and an inexhaustible source of laudable and innocent amusement. “The great variety of needleworks,“ says Mrs. Griffith, “which the ingenious women of other countries, as well as of our own, have invented, will furnish us with constant and amusing employment; and though our labours may not equal a Mineron's, or an Aylesbury's, yet, if they unbend the mind, by fixing its attention on the progress of any elegant, or imitative art, they answer the purpose of domestic amusement; and, when the higher duties of our situation do not call forth our exertions, we may feel the satisfaction of knowing, that we are, at least, innocently employed.”

This art may be traced to the most distant periods of antiquity. Coloured Embroidery and Tapestry were, according to Pliny, known, in very remote ages, among the Jews and Babylonians. As a proof that this art was applied, in the time of Homer, to what may be termed historical subjects, Helen is described, in the third book of the Iliad, as occupied in embroidering the evils of the Greeks and Trojans, of which she was the cause; and when the intelligence of Hector's death was brought to Andromache, Far in the close recesses of the dome, Pensive she plied the melancholy loom; A growing work employed her secret views, — Spotted, diverse, with intermingled hues. Penelope beguiled the tedious hours, during Ulysses ' absence at the siege of Troy, with Embroidery; and we might adduce many other instances, by which it would be clearly shown, that the art was held in equal estimation by the noble ladies of antiquity, in the olden times, who, surrounded and assisted by their bower women, employed themselves by representing, in the richest Tapestry work, the heroic deeds which their living relatives, or noble ancestors, had achieved. Many of these splendid monuments of the genius and industry of the ladies of those days, are still preserved, and constitute the hangings, and other decorations, of the state apartments of some old palaces and castles. Magnificent works of this nature were also performed in convents, by the nuns and ladies of rank, who, from choice, or otherwise, resided within their walls; the talents of the greatest masters in the art of painting being often employed to produce the designs. Raphael's celebrated cartoons were a series of scripture pieces, exccuted as patterns to be worked in Tapestry.

The art, at length, rose into such high esteem, and Tapestry became so generally adopted, for hangings of apartments, that the needle could no longer supply the immense demand for it; and looms were invented, in which it was woven on the most extensive scale. This improved method is supposed to have originated in Flanders; it was introduced into England in the reign of Henry the Eighth. James the First gave a large sum of money towards the erection of a manufactory for weaving Tapestry, at Mortlake, on the banks of the Thames, which flourished there for many years. The manufacture of Tapestry in France, was introduced under the auspices of Henry the Fourth; and that kingdom may boast of having once possessed the most magnificent establishment of the kind that ever existed : we allude to the Hotel Royal des Gobelins, which a French dyer, of the name of Giles Gobelin, early in the sixteenth century, erected for the purpose of carrying on his business, near a rivulet, which ran through the suburbs of St. Marcel, in Paris. In the water of this rivulet he discovered certain qualities, which he supposed would be beneficial in the prosecution of his improvement on the mode of dyeing red. His undertaking appeared to be so absurd, that the building was called Gobelin's Folly; but, eventually, he produced so splendid a scarlet, that he grew into high repute as a dyer; and he and his family continued to carry on the business in the same place, until about the year 1667; when the building was purchased by the French government, and Tapestry, on an immense scale, was manufactured there for a considerable period. The establishment is still kept up, but has long been a mere shadow of its former greatness.

A slight sketch of the mode in which Tapestry was woven in this great manufactory, may not be altogether uninteresting. Artists of eminence were employed to design and paint in watercolours, on stiff card, or pasteboard, patterns, called cartons, or cartoons, of the full size of the subjects intended to be woven. The carton was covered with perpendicular and horizontal black lines; its surface thus presenting a series of squares, corresponding with those formed by the upright and cross threads of Tapestry. The workman counted the number of squares in each colour on the carton, as a guide to the number of stitches, or threads, to be inserted in worsteds, or silks, of the respective colours, in the Tapestry; looms, both perpendicular and horizontal were employed, similar in general principle to those in which carpets and hearth rugs are woven at the present day. Threads, called the warp, were stitched the long way of the intended piece; and alternately elevated and depressed by machinery, for the purpose of introducing between them the silks, or worsteds, intended to form the pattern, and which were collected, by the side of the workman, wound on reels, and inserted in the warp by means of a stick, called the flute, corresponding with a weaver's shuttle. The Tapestry being thus woven in breadths, when joined or fine drawn together, formed one grand sub-