[Detail from the 2006 Cora Ginsburg catalog. 18th-century British Crewelwork Bed Curtains made by Elizabeth Newman.]
This month there's been a theme running through a lot of my blog posts: basically a focus on creative women from different centuries and far-flung parts of the globe who made (or currently make) things for the home. (Two examples include The Embroidered Quilts of Bengal and the women behind Newcomb Pottery.) Keeping that in mind, I thought I'd end April with this detailed view of embroiderer Elizabeth Newman's bed curtains dated 1709.
The crewelwork was seen in Cora Ginsburg's 2006 catalog and Newman is said to have incorporated her own distinctive design choices into the very fashionable Eastern-inspired Tree of Life motif.
While the iconic birds and flowers are definitely there, she also composed hillocks of wide, "fresh and exuberant" yellow and green bands. Newman worked-in three dimensional grapes and added unorthodox horses in different colors -- blue on one bed curtain; white on another. Finding the inscription still intact on the image at top makes it easier to connect one individual, and her hours of intricate work, with a type of textile we're now accustomed to studying in art history books or seeing reproduced at the fabric center.
Fast forward three hundred years and yellow with green still feels clean and bright. I asked Angela Clinton, founder of Parlor Textiles, for a sample of Indian Deco Floral, in yellow, that really shows off that terrific border. Can you picture it used for curtains? That's what I'm doing right now.
Here's a globe-trekker inspiration board pairing Indian Deco Floral with Pratt and Lambert's Fennel; Peter Beard books courtesy Christine Bell and Taschen; an architect's table via Emperic; North African circa 1910 lap desk from Jefferson West; and a vintage Turkish copper bowl, for floating camellias cut from the bush just outside the French doors, via The Loaded Trunk.
Read about Beard and the 2010 Elephant Parade, here.
Miniature replicas of other participating artists' sculptures are available here.