Pictorial Embroidery in England: A Critical History of Needlepainting and Berlin Work: Rosika Desnoyers: Bloomsbury Visual Arts

Pictorial Embroidery in England

A Critical History of Needlepainting and Berlin Work

Pictorial Embroidery in England

A Critical History of Needlepainting and Berlin Work

Description

The little-known art of Berlin Work was once the most commonly practiced art form among European women. Pictorial Embroidery in England is the first academic study of both pictorial Berlin Work and its precursor, needlepainting, exploring their cultural status in the 18th and 19th centuries.

From enlightenment practices of copying to the development of an industrial aesthetic and the making of the modern amateur, Berlin Work developed as an official knowledge associated with notions of cultural and scientific progress. However, with the advent of the Arts and Crafts movement and modernist aesthetics, Berlin Work was gradually demoted to a craft hobby. Delving into the social, cultural and economic context of English pictorial embroidery, Pictorial Embroidery in England recovers Berlin Work as an art form, and demonstrates how this overlooked practice was once at the centre of cultural life.

List of Illustrations

Introduction
The Invention of Needlepoint
Berlin Work and the Question of Domestic Craft
Outline of the Book

1. Needlepainting in Great Britain
Women Artists and Art Institutions in Eighteenth-Century England
Mary Linwood and the Needlepainters
Professionals and Amateurs

2. Imitation and Innovation in the Late Eighteenth Century
Between Art and Industry
Science and the Tasteful Person
Copying and Luxury Goods

3. Towards an Industrial Aesthetic
Proximity of Artistic and Scientific Invention
Guidebooks and the Making of the Modern Amateur
The Jacquard Loom and Its Curious Commemoration

4. The Writing of Pictorial Berlin Work
Contemporary Embroidery Histories
Nineteenth-Century Accounts: Berlin Work as Official Knowledge
Twentieth-Century Accounts: Berlin Work as Submerged Knowledge

Conclusion

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Product details

Published	21 Feb 2019
Format	Ebook (Epub & Mobi)
Edition	1st
Extent	184
ISBN	9781350071773
Imprint	Bloomsbury Visual Arts
Illustrations	19 color and 41 bw illus
Publisher	Bloomsbury Publishing

Author

Rosika Desnoyers

Brilliantly situating embroidery in the paradoxical age of industry, Desnoyers encourages us to rethink assumptions about elite and amateur practices … A necessary read for anyone concerned with questions of gender, capitalism and aesthetics in the emergence of modern disciplines.

T'ai Smith, University of British Columbia, Canada
This cogently-argued reassessment of 19th-century pictorial embroidery, fine art and commerce reveals how the art of needlepainting and the subsequent practice of Berlin work involved issues of image production, industrial manufacture, education, cultural value and social mobility. Desnoyers enables us to view this history of embroidery with new understanding.

Victoria Mitchell, Norwich University of the Arts, UK