Tuesday, February 14, 2017

An Embroidered Pop-Up

I think this is my favorite description ever of a piece of stumpwork: "like an exquisite 17th century pop-up book".  This piece has been offered by our friends at Witney Antiques and is quite a spectacular piece of stumpwork embroidery.

Witney Antiques

It was recently chosen as LAPADA's object of the week and a second image was posted which really shows how over the top the raised work of this piece is:


What is really exciting to me is that this piece has cousins where the choice of techniques for each motif match, design drawings are the same and execution is closely similar.  The most obvious of them is the piece at the MET called "Touch and Taste".  

MET panel 64.101.1337

It becomes really obvious when you take a look at some of the details, as shown here in the castle and fruit trees.

MET panel 64.101.1337 with its unusual high peaked towers


A similar castle with this strange peaked castle and the fruit tree in the Witney panel
There are so many parallels it would take a few blog posts to compare them all.  But very exciting to see and that brings this workshop or school up to six or more pieces in my database!

On a personal note, I really liked the treatment of the iris on this piece - how amazing that was!

Tricia

Witney Antiques

1 comment:

  1. Hi Tricia,
    Any idea how the veins are achieved in the Iris? I can think of 3 possibilities. Do you think your friends at Witney could send a better image?
    It is an amazing piece.
    Janet

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