Embroidery designs by Gertrude Jekyll

Illustration: Gertrude Jekyll. Iris embroidery design for a cushion cover, 1880.

Although Gertrude Jekyll is today primarily known for her pioneering work in garden design, she was very much an Arts and Crafts pioneer as well. She was proficient in fine art, embroidery, interior design, photography, metalwork, woodwork, she also mastered a number of rural skills including thatching, fencing and walling. She was friends with a wide range of artists, designers and writers including important members of the English Arts and Crafts movement such as John Ruskin and William Morris.

As far as embroidery is concerned she was both an accomplished embroiderer as well as a designer for the craft. The two illustrations shown in the is article were part of a set of floral based motifs produced in a publication entitled Handbook of Embroidery, published in 1880. Along with Jekyll, design work was reproduced by such artists and designers as Edward Burne-Jones, Fairfax B. Wade, George Aitchison, Mary Herbert, Selwyn Image, Walter Crane and William Morris.

Although the book did give practical advice as to the different aspects of the craft of embroidery, it did not give detailed charts concerning the work of contemporary artists and designers. As can be seen in the two illustrations which were Jekyll's contribution to the book, the idea was to give a generalised idea as to how to pursue creative pattern work in embroidery. They were examples of what could be achieved within the craft in 1880, but were clearly only examples.

The Handbook of Embroidery produced in some respects a snapshot of contemporary embroidery in 1880. There was a cross-section of styles and compositions that were both particular to individual artists, but also managed to incorporate more generalised styling from the period. Although all of the contributions are not necessarily those designed specifically in 1880, they do refer to design work that would have appealed to contemporary audiences in 1880.

Jekyll seems by nature and certainly through her broad range of skills, to be firmly part of the English Arts and Crafts movement. However, her two design examples shown here appear as a much more simplified, but also energetic contribution to the style. Her work appears unfussy, practical and paired down to the minimum required, a perfect combination to a book that to be fair, although aimed at a cross-section of embroiderers, was significantly pitched at those with perhaps more limited skills.

Illustration: Gertrude Jekyll. Periwinkle embroidery design for a cushion cover, 1880.

Jekyll's two embroidery designs were meant to be interpreted for cushion covers, although anyone with a little skill could have taken the design work and re-interpreted it in any number of different scenarios. In many respects, this flexibility is the true beauty of this particular textile craft and is probably why it has lasted so many generations and in so many different cultural formats. Because embroidery is an applied craft, one design can technically be reinterpreted and reinvented in a number of different formats using different materials on a wide range of background fabrics. Embroidery has always been particularly effective as a costume embellishment, turning an outfit into a specialised format, depending on the style and type of embroidered pattern and threads used.

Interestingly, the Handbook of Embroidery avoided any real reference to embroidery as an artwork. All bar a few of the examples supplied by the various artists and designers were interpreted by the book as practical accessories, whether they be borders for table covers, curtains or indeed cushions. There were a few examples that were loosely termed panels, but these could easily be seen as framed work within domestic accessories. The only definite wall-hanging designation went to William Morris, even though his design work examples were purely pattern and not a compositional format.

The author, L. Higgin, was well aware that embroidery in 1880 was both a practical domestic choice as well as an aesthetic one and planned to explore the fine art side of embroidery in another publication. It seems that it was the complexity of the issue of art embroidery, with its uniquely creative approach to composition and colour, which was deemed as being a separate subject to embroidery for accessories, and perhaps even a different audience.

The fine art and practical craft aspects of embroidery, producing both domestic and aesthetic versions of the textile craft, give it a broad impact within the decorative arts world, perhaps broader than many other aspects of textile based work. Although fine art embroidery has technically existed throughout much of the crafts history, it is the work produced during the latter half of the nineteenth century that perhaps has come to identify for many the aesthetic quality of the craft.

Although, as already said, Jekyll today is patently and perhaps rightly better known for her pioneering garden design, it is always interesting, helpful and often relevant to see aspects of a creative career used within other formats and disciplines. It often gives an insight into the more obvious aspects of the creative journey of a particular individual, no matter how slight it may appear to some.

Further reading links:
The Gardens of Gertrude Jekyll
Gertrude Jekyll and the Country House Garden: From the Archives of Country Life
Gertrude Jekyll: The Making of a Garden--Gertrude Jekyll - An Anthology
Colour schemes for the flower garden
The Unknown Gertrude Jekyll
Gardener's Essential Gertrude Jekyll
Gertrude Jekyll
Arts and Crafts Gardens
Gertrude Jekyll on Gardening
Gertrude Jekyll: A Vision of Wood and Garden
Gertrude Jekyll and the Country House Garden: From the Archives of Country Life. Judith B. Tankard
Gertrude Jekyll's Lost Garden: The Restoration of an Edwardian Masterpiece
The Beauties of a Cottage Garden (English Journeys)
The Gardening Companion (Wordsworth Reference)
Lost Gardens of Gertrude Jekyll
The Illustrated Gertrude Jekyll: Colour Schemes for the Flower Garden
Gardens for small country houses
Wood And Garden
Gertrude Jekyll (Shire Library)
Gertrude Jekyll: Essays on the Life of a Working Amateur Pb

The Arts & Crafts Movement and Sustainable Consumption

Illustration: Ernest Gimson. Embroidery design.

Ernest William Gimson is probably best known for either his hand produced furniture design or his architecture. The English designer is particularly well-known and valued today as an important innovator within the later English Arts & Crafts movement. His work within the realms of sustainability, localised accountability and longevity has given his creative design work a particular contemporary emphasis. With our need to find other solutions to replace the troubled and ultimately unsustainable economic framework that had become relentless by the mid-twentieth century, one that needs to position itself outside of the realms of consumer inspired fashion and consumption, Gimson seems an ideal candidate.

Placing design and decorative work outside of the context of the fashion market, is often difficult to maintain, particularly when considering the general buying public and their misconceptions when dealing with hand production. Many see hand produced furniture design to be prohibitively priced and only available to those with enough economic power to indulge their preferences. Although this is true on a surface level, it is also true that one piece of hand produced furniture could well outlast a single lifetime and would indeed probably be sturdy enough to last generations beyond that. A typical mass produced piece of furniture would be lucky to last a decade, many last a lot less than ten years. To count up the investment made in paying for repeatable furniture every decade and the initial investment made in hand produced furniture does tend to reveal the fabrication of the cheapness of mass production, along with its perceived economic necessity.

An interesting example of decorative work that could be considered as outside of the fashion remit, and could therefore be termed timeless, is the example illustrating this article. It is a decorative patterned piece meant for embroidery and was produced by Gimson. Although it is within the realm of the English Arts & Crafts movement, the design could have been produced in the sixteenth century or indeed the twenty first. It has no emotional bond with any particular era and no means of tying it to a fashion statement. 

However, it is by no means a pastiche as it genuinely appears to be an observational record of plant and floral life used within the context of decorative pattern work produced by an individual creative. While it is always tempting to presume that all decorative and design work is fashion led, and while that is true of a proportion of work produced in Europe over the centuries, it will always be true of only a proportion. 

To understand Gimson in particular and the Arts & Crafts movement in general, is to understand the potential of other systems of working, particularly within the context of hand and machine production. To see the machine and its replacement of hand production as a struggle between man and monster is largely missing the point. It was only ever one issue of many that were endemic to England. Many in the Arts & Crafts movement in England in particular, used the popular movement as a platform for a range of ideas concerning the dismantling of the economic, financial and social structure of England, much of which is still largely in place and still as unequal as it was in the last half of the nineteenth century when the English Arts & Crafts movement was at its most influential. 

The dismantling of consumer led fashion through the introduction of design and decoration that was meant to be cross-generational, proved particularly difficult for the movement. Fashion, by its very nature, appeals to and relies on divisions in society, whether they are led by age, finance or even geographical area. To persuade a customer that an expensive non-fashion led item is infinitely superior to that of the cheaper fashion-led one goes against many of the tenets of modern society, particularly those concerned with capitalism. 

Capitalism uses choice as its marker of success as well as its tool of seduction. However, as we are all aware, fifty choices of nearly the exact same item is not really a choice, it is a matter of small increments of variation, often too small to matter. This is not to say that choice in its own right is a crime. However, truly creative and individual choices are perhaps infinitely preferable to that of the feeling of endless similarity that is often found in mass production consumer led fashion.

Perhaps it is time to see the work of contemporary design and decoration as that between a choice of creative individuals, some of whom work within mass production, some in hand production, some in both. By making informed choices from the standpoint of individual creativity, rather than those produced through pressured company advertising, a semblance of balance between what we admire creatively and what we need to consume, can be achieved. It is better to buy and cherish an individual well-balanced and harmoniously creative piece of work, whether that be practical or non-practical, than to be compelled through a combination of advertising and consumer led fashion into purchasing half a dozen instantly regretted items that bear no real connection to the individual or their real character.

Further reading links:
Ernest Gimson and the Cotswold Group of Craftsmen: A Catalogue of Works by Ernest Gimson, Ernest and Sidney Barnsley, and Peter Waals, in the Collecti (1978 Leicestershire Museums Publication; No. 14)
Gimson and the Barnsleys: Wonderful Furniture of a Commonplace Kind (Art/architecture)
GIMSON AND BARNSLEY: A CATALOGUE OF DRAWINGS BY ERNEST GIMSON, SIDNEY BARNSLEY AND OTHER DESIGNERS OF THE ARTS AND CRAFTS MOVEMENT.
Ernest Gimson
The Crafts in Britain in the Twentieth Century
The Arts & Crafts Companion
The Arts & Crafts Movement
The Arts and crafts movement
The Arts and Crafts Movement (World of Art)
Arts & Crafts Design
Textiles of the Arts and Crafts Movement
The Arts and Crafts Movement in Europe and America: Design for the Modern World 1880-1920
The Arts and Crafts Movement in the Pacific Northwest
Gustav Stickley and the American Arts & Crafts Movement (Dallas Museum of Art Publications)
Stickley Style: Arts and Crafts Homes in the Craftsman Tradition
Beautiful Necessity, The
The Arts and Crafts Movement in America 1876-1916

Embroidered Artwork of Florence Jessie Hosel

Illustration: Florence Jessie Hosel. Hand embroidered artwork, c1908.

Florence Jessie Hosel was in many respects part of a new breed of embroiderer. She was able to take a domestic craft and engineer it through various innovative means into one that was considered by many throughout Europe and beyond, as bordering on a fine art medium. Although Hosel was by no means the first individual to be seen as an art embroiderer and the designation art embroidery itself had been used relatively extensively throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century. She was a practitioner that highlighted the potential of needlecraft to be much more than the domestic craft it was often associated with.

Hosel considered herself an art embroiderer; in fact, she would know doubt have been happy with the modern designation of textile artist. She produced work that became famous and highly lucrative not only in her native Germany, but also throughout Europe, North America and beyond. Her work inspired others and was in some ways at least a foundation for which the reputations of later generations of textile and mixed artists were built.

Illustration: Florence Jessie Hosel. Hand embroidered artwork, c1906.

Hosel worked entirely in freestyle, meaning that she did not plan or use any form of cartoon or preliminary drawing. In fact, she worked on a blank, usually linen background, with no guide, which was considered at the time to be extraordinary. She also quickly came to the conclusion that her use of bought threads severely limited her work and more importantly her creative expression. Therefore, she took to dyeing her own threads whereby she could arrange colours and tones in a variety that suited her own needs, particularly when it came to expressing the colour tones of the natural world.

Although only one of the five illustrations of Hosel's work is in colour, the subtlety of tone approached in that colour example gives ample evidence of the artists light touch. She had an innate understanding not just of the practicalities of nature but as many quoted at the time, an understanding of the spirit of nature. Although, as also noted at the time, Hosel lacked the correct artistic training so that her use of perspective was imaginative and her general compositional style bordered on the immature at times, she was however, placed firmly into the mould of the primitive artist of the fourteenth century and was therefore considered to be producing a unique contemporary rendering of an antique style. Many German critics even saw her work as being that of the original fine art as they theorised that tapestry and embroidery had been crafts long before the development of fine art painting in Europe.

Illustration: Florence Jessie Hosel. Hand embroidered artwork, c1908.

She was considered unique in other ways, particularly in her use of materials, but also in the fact that she took a decidedly different route within embroidery to other names that had made the craft one of the leading areas of contemporary decoration. Jessie King, Jessie Newbery and Ann Macbeth were considered leaders in their day of contemporary embroidery and other textile based crafts. However, much of their work was pattern led, with very little being produced in the vein of Hosel. It was in fact Hosel that popularised the concept of embroidery moving beyond the bounds of the traditions of pattern work. She was accepted by many critics in Germany as a fine artist, rather than a form of creative artist limited to a craft level.

Illustration: Florence Jessie Hosel. Hand embroidered artwork, c1908.

Hosel's work was shown extensively in galleries and museums across Germany and she was fated as one of Germany's most innovative textile artists. Her work was considered innovative and spontaneous because of the lack of pre-planning in any stage of production. Her needle was both her pencil and artists brush. It is perhaps the delicacy of that needle that is the most obvious example that links all five illustrations of her work shown in this article. Hosel had a keen interest in all forms of Japanese art, decoration and craft and this is evident in some of her more ethereal landscapes. However, Hosel was by no means a pastiche artist who copied Japanese themes with little or no evidence of her creativity. Her landscapes are those of Germany, not Japan and she obviously had an intimate and innate understanding of those landscapes, which is why they proved so effective and popular throughout Germany.

Illustration: Florence Jessie Hosel. Hand embroidered artwork, c1908.

Hosel's work seems largely forgotten in our contemporary world. Considering that these five examples of her work were produced within the first decade of the twentieth century, her unique understanding of the power of embroidery is all the more astounding. Her innovations within the realm of embroidery have been lost within the larger twentieth century textile art world. However, it seems as if Hosel could be seen as a link between the traditions of embroidery and textile craft in general and the more liberalising world of fine art and its sensibilities. That she paved the way for at least a limited broadening of the parameters of both fine art and textiles, is perhaps her legacy.

Reference links:
The Art of Embroidery: Inspirational Stitches, Textures, and Surfaces
Freestyle Machine Embroidery: Techniques and Inspiration for Fiber Art
The Art & Embroidery of Jane Hall: Reflections of Nature
Creative Art of Embroidery
Painting with a Needle: Learning the Art of Silk Embroidery with Young Yang Chung
The Art of Oriental Embroidery
Art of Embroidery: History of Style and Technique
The Timeless Art of Embroidery (Helen Stevens' Masterclass Embroidery)
Art in Needlework: A Book About Embroidery
Painted with Thread: The Art of American Embroidery
Drawn to Stitch: Line, Drawing, and Mark-Making in Textile Art
The New Crewel: Exquisite Designs in Contemporary Embroidery
Celebrating the Stitch: Contemporary Embroidery of North America
Contemporary Embroidery: Exciting and Innovative Textile Art
The Encyclopedia of Embroidery Techniques: A Comprehensive Visual Guide to Traditional and Contemporary Techniques