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Fig. 59.—Purl and Applied Embroidery. Lady with a Rabbit. About 1630.
Formerly in the Author’s Collection.

An illustration of purl work, the whole of the smaller decorations being in tarnished silver thread sewn upon the original satin. The figure in the centre with a rabbit on her knees, as well as the other flowers and birds, are appliquéd, and are in very fine coloured silks. The date of the piece is, judging from the costume, the early part of the reign of Charles I.

In the embroideries we see repeated again and again the hold that Italian gardening had obtained in this country at the time when they were produced, owing to the grafting of ideas carried from the age of mediæval Art. Note, for instance, the importance attached to the fountain, which Hertzner, a German, who travelled through England at the end of the sixteenth century, remarked upon as being such a feature in gardens. The many columns and pyramids of marble and fountains of springing water to which he alludes are repeated again and again in tapestry pictures. The pools of fish which are also found in embroideries of the time were a common feature of the gardens. We read that “A fayre garden always contained a poole of fysshe if the poole be clene kept.” ([Plate XVIII.], [Fig. 64], and Fig. [68].) The garden also had green galleries or pergolas formed of light poles overgrown with roses red and white. These are illustrated in [Plate XIV.] The little Noah’s Ark trees did not originate in the brain of the sampler designer, but were actualities which he saw in the garden of the time, being as old as the Romans, who employed a topiarius or pleacher, whose sole business was the cutting of trees into fantastic shapes. This practice was in full swing in Italy in the fifteenth century, and was familiarised in England by the “Hyperotomachia Poliphili,” published in 1592, although this book did not introduce it, for Bacon in his essay on “Gardens” says that the art of pleaching was already well known and practised in England. They are quite common objects on the samplers of the eighteenth century, when the cult was increasingly fostered, William and Mary having brought over the Dutch fashion of cutting everything into queer little trifles. An illustration in Worlidge’s “Art of Gardening” might almost be a reproduction of the sampler of 1760 ([Plate IX.]) with its trees all set in absolutely similar order and size. This style, it may be remembered, was doomed upon the advent of Capability Brown with his attempts at chastening and polishing, but not reforming, the living landscape.

The embroidered pictures are also interesting as showing the flowers which found a place in the parterres of English gardens. A nosegay garden at the beginning of the seventeenth century consisted, we read, of “gillyflowers, marigolds, lilies, and daffodils, with such strange flowers as hyacinths, narcissus, also the red, damaske, velvet, and double province rose, double and single white rose, the fair and sweet scenting woodbind, double and single, the violet nothing behind the rose for smelling sweetly.”

[Figs. 59] and [60] show many of these flowers naturally disposed, as an examination of the samplers of the period displays almost all of them in a decorative form.

A curious feature of these little pictures is the fondness of their makers for introducing grubs of all kinds. This was not altogether fortuitous, or done simply to fill a void, for some of them were certainly as much emblems as the lion and unicorn. The caterpillar, for instance, was a badge of Charles I.

It speaks somewhat for the difficulty of imitating these little pictures, that although their price has increased since this book was first published, from a moderate to a high figure, there are as yet few spurious or much restored pieces on the market, and the same remark may apply to samplers.