The talk is part of a 6-part Gardens Trust online lecture series, exploring how flowers and gardens have inspired textile artists, begins Mondays at 18:00 BST, equivalent to 2 pm Eastern time. Here in their latest series of talks they are taking a sideways view by exploring how gardens and flowers have influenced and inspired other arts and crafts. This first series of 6 will focus on textiles and explore some of the historical and technical aspects of embroidering, weaving and printing using floral designs on fabric. You will look at textiles from Elizabethan crowns to Edwardian table linen to see how flowers provided inspiration, taking in the prolific art embroiderers of the Arts and Crafts Movement. Then you will be brought bang up to date with two contemporary embroiderers with very different approaches to floral imagery who will share their design processes with us.
The development of the English cottage garden in the hands of the Irish horticulturalist and journalist William Robinson (1838-1935) had a marked effect on the textile arts during the final decades of the nineteenth century. His revolutionary approach was reflected in the choice of botanical imagery featured in the work of many Arts and Crafts designers, including two of the leading exponents of art embroidery: Gertrude Jekyll (1843-1932) and May Morris (1862-1938).
Jekyll’s reputation as an artist and craftswoman has been eclipsed by her contribution to garden history. Few of her admirers today are aware that her skills as an interior designer were much sought after by the Victorian elite. In 1874, she was commissioned by the Royal School of Needlework to design a suite of sixteen wall hangings, twelve of which have recently come to light, for the great drawing room at Eaton Hall in Cheshire, home of the Duke of Westminster (1825-1899). Jekyll’s elaborate, floriated pattern reveals her indebtedness to the designer Christopher Dresser (1834-1904), with whom she studied botanical drawing and ornament at the National Art Training School in South Kensington.
A constant theme in the work of May Morris is her love of English meadow plants and cottage garden flowers. Throughout her life, she made detailed studies of plant life to familiarize herself ‘with all the possible peculiarities and diversities of such things.’ But like many other writers on art embroidery, she recognized that the designer’s work ‘should merely recall nature, not absolutely copy it’ (Decorative Needlework, 1893). Morris’s approach to conventional design will be examined through her work for the embroidery department at Morris & Co. and her special commissions and gifts for family and friends.
This ticket (purchase HERE) is for this individual session and costs £5, and you may purchase tickets for other individual sessions, or you may purchase a ticket for the entire course of 6 sessions at a cost of £24 via the link here.
Attendees will be sent a Zoom link 2 days prior to the start of the talk, and again a few hours before the talk. A link to the recorded session (available for 1 week) will be sent shortly afterwards.
Former Archivist at the Royal School of Needlework, Dr Lynn Hulse is a Fellow of both the Royal Historical Society and the Society of Antiquaries of London. She is also co-founder of Ornamental Embroidery, which specialises in the teaching and designing of historic hand stitch through workshops in museums, art galleries and historic houses across the UK. Recent exhibitions include The Needle’s Excellency: contemporary raised work at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (2017) and the Knitting and Stitching Show (2018), and The Needle’s Art: contemporary hand embroidery inspired by an early Tudor pattern book at the Bodleian Library, Oxford (2021-2022). Lynn has published widely on the development of art embroidery and is the editor of May Morris: Art and Life (2017), long listed for the 2018 William M. B. Berger prize in British Art History, and The Needle’s Excellency: English raised embroidery (2108). She is currently completing a book on Lady Victoria Welby and the founding of the Royal School of Needlework, which celebrates its 150th anniversary this year.
