Workshop to the World
By NEVILE WALLIS ONE evening in Paris years ago I looked round the Cluny Museum, and saw some fragments of heral- dic embroidery worked in
It is a marvel at the Victoria and Albert to survey this Opus Anglicanuni, mainly re- ligious vestments which have survived our Reformation scourge or been cherished in Catho- lic Europe, spread out now like fantastically ornamented butterflies. In this first international loan exhibition ever held (assembled by the Arts Council until November 24) the links with illuminated holy figures and architectural styles of the times are evident in the harmonies of colour and interlacing line wrought in these apparels. Merchants in the City of London, where many English embroiderers had their pro- fessional workshops in the Middle Ages, were glad to provide capital as a shrewd investment in craftsmanship as valuable as jewellery.
Excusably, vis:.ing art students are departing
from thc strict arrangement of examples opening with the Norman Conquest, rising to the splendours of early fourteenth-century em- broidery coinciding with the Decorated architec- tural style, and declining around the Reforma- tion. Artists are drawn away to pounce on the almost surrealist devices of a blood-speckled Christ surrounded by curious emblems of the Passion worked on a banner for St. Giles's, Edinburgh, about 1518. Elsewhere a prophet's beard traverses his chin with the thatched strokes of a Van Gogh portrait. The embroidery work- shops relied on painters to provide their de- signs, translating them in techniques which might be gloriously plundered in painting today. Very adaptable to the modern artist's studio is the technique of or nue, in which the coloured strands are worked with varying density over a gold ground for the light to catch its glint.
But this is to wander from the historic imagery to which all the mediaeval crafts con- tributed. On a fragile mitre the martyrdom of Thomas of Canterbury is rendered with jerky Anglo-Saxon animation at a period already changing to the aloof solemnities of the Romanesque. A sumptuous example of the suc- ceeding Gothic naturalism is one of the English copes from the Vatican, where the religious motifs contained in eight-pointed stars call to mind the late thirteenth-century painted retable in Westminster Abbey. Among the richest and best preserved are copes and chasubles from the times of Edward II and Edward III (1307-77), producing such intricate delicacy of execution and expressive characterisations as in a Tree of Jesse embroidered in silver-gilt thread and coloured silks on an English orphrey from Lyons.
The Black Death and the crippling wars of the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries had their economic effect on the English embroidery workshops, which resorted to labour-saving methods. Henry VII turned away from London to Florentine weavers for the vestments he left to Westminster Abbey, and by the end of the fifteenth century the supremacy of Opus Angli- eattunt had passed to Flanders. But in the procession of rare survivals at South Kensing- ton one is conscious far more of the stylistic changes than of any native deterioration.
I fancy Professor Waterhouse has somewhere remarked nicely that with Joshua Reynolds familiarity breeds respect. Johnson's large- hearted crony with his ear-trumpet seems at one's elbow at the exhibition of 'Treasures of the Royal Academy', which evokes in pictures, sculp- ture, silver, manuscripts and personal relics at Burlington House the early associations up to around 1850. It is a variously noble, endearing, at times grotesque miscellany inherited through bequest or diploma contribution. Noble'- cer- tainly are Reynolds's portrait of himself in homage to • Rembrandt, and his unrealised ideal of the Academy's perpetuating the grand style in the European tradition.
There were loyalists who at least for a troubled time aspired to this High Art, besides individu- alists such as Gainsborough who broke with the institution (to which he felt no loyalty) when his work was hung too high in the clutter at Somerset House, its early home. It always seems strange that the solitary' Turner (whose water- colour box, cakes of pigment and palette are here just as he left them) should have been so fanatically attached to his ideal of the mem- bers' solidarity. Constable's relations with the Academy were not of the happiest, but it is he who dominates this collection with the almost ominous romanticism of The Leaping Horse and A Boat Passing a Lock, and a series of oil sketches trapping every nuance of thundery light and the tremulous movements on river or heath.
I may spare myself an inventory of posses- sions of which incomparably the greatest, the only Renaissance treasure now, is Michelangelo's marble relief. What needs attention is the num- ber of dusky paintings like Gainsborough's romantic landscape, which looks as if it had never had a sponge since the artist's daughter handed it over in 1799. In Schomberg House there must be a feverish ghost.
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