RUSSIA.
After his visit to Paris early in the eighteenth century, Peter the Great founded a manufacture of silk lace at Novgorod, which in the time of the Empress Elizabeth fell into decay. In the reign of Catherine II. there were twelve gold lace-makers at St. Petersburg, who were scarcely able to supply the demand. In Russia lace-making and embroidery go hand in hand, as in our early examples of embroidery, drawn-work, and cut-work combined. Lace-making was not a distinct industry; the peasants, especially in Eastern Russia, made it in their houses to decorate, in conjunction with embroidery, towels, table-linen, shirts, and even the household linen, for which purpose it was purchased direct from the peasants by the inhabitants of the towns. Many will have seen the Russian towels in the International Exhibition of 1874, and have admired their quaint design and bright colours, with the curious line of red and blue thread running through the pattern of the lace. Darned netting and drawn-work appear, as elsewhere, to have been their earliest productions. The lace is loosely wrought on the pillow, the work simple, and requiring few bobbins to execute the vermiculated pattern which is its characteristic (Fig. 119, and Plates LXXII.-IV.).
The specimens vary very much in quality, but the patterns closely resemble one another, and are all of an oriental and barbaric character (Fig. 119).
In Nardendal, near Abo, in Finland, the natives offer to strangers small petticoats and toys of lace—a relic of the time when a nunnery of Cistercians flourished in the place.
Much of a simple design and coarse quality is made in Belev, Vologda, Riazan, Mzeresk. At Vologda a lace resembling torchon is made, with colours introduced, red, blue, and écru and white.[[751]] In some laces silks of various colours are employed. Pillow-lace has only been known in Russia for over a hundred years, and although the lace produced is effective, it is coarse in texture and crude in pattern. Late in the nineteenth century the Czarina gave her patronage to a school founded at Moscow, where Venetian needle-point laces have been copied, using the finest English thread, and needle-laces made after old Russian designs of the sixteenth century,[[752]] called Point de Moscou.
Fig. 119.
Russia.—Bobbin-made nineteenth century.
To face page 284.