The threads of history

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The afterlife of ecclesiastical embroideries has been decidedly secular, as Rachel Boak’s fascinating account reveals

Sacred Stitches by Rachel Boak

Although Jewish themselves, several generations of the Rothschild family had a great love of Christian ecclesiastical embroidery. They valued it  for its decorative, sumptuous qualities and hence were happy to use embroideries from  vestments and other items as cushion covers and other domestic furnishings., and adapted as clothing and accessories for adults and children.

Religious, political and social changes from the 16th century on resulted in the removal of many religious textiles from churches and their transfer to the market.  Whereas 14th-century vestments and altar hangings were embroidered directly, by 1400 this expensive process had tended to be replaced by panel embroidery. These panels were pre-prepared and sewn onto whatever item had been ordered. This process is easy to reverse, of course, hence it was convenient for later generations to reuse the panels.

Throughout the 19th century, the practice of reusing these textiles became common – Sir William Burrell, creator of Glasgow’s Burrell Collection – was another wealthy collector and re-user. Other items entered museum collections. There are no actual church vestments in the Waddesdon collection because the piece the Rothschilds purchased had already been detached from such items by the time they acquired them.

As Rachel Boak makes clear in her concise and informative text, little can be known of the early history of these pieces. In at least one case any provenance information that had been present on receipts and bills was destroyed years ago. Her story centres on the members of the Rothschild family who collected and re-used a wide variety of wonderful pieces. They were predominantly Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild, his sister Alice and their niece, Baroness Edmond de Rothschild (married to another cousin). Their silk textiles are intricately embroidered with threads of silk, silver and gold; as curator of the Collection, Boak is intimately familiar with all the items she describes and discusses. The embroidered images vary from episodes from the Bible and other religious texts to motifs derived from nature.

Boak speculates about the appeal of Christian religious imagery to a Jewish family, although the beauty of these articles may have seemed reason enough to acquire them. Their great age also seems to have been attractive to a family that had only relatively recently established its wealth and power.

Many items are now too delicate for permanent display, and the current exhibition, ‘Sacred Stitches: Ecclesiastical Textiles in the Rothschild Collection at Waddesdon Manor’ (until 27 October 2013) is the first time that some of them have been shown for 20 years.

The greater part of this short text is devoted to numerous photographs – some in extreme close-up – of the Waddesdon textiles, accompanied by Boak’s descriptions, interpretations and other information. In some cases, for instance, very similar textiles are known from other collections and it is possible to surmise how pieces now hundreds or thousands of miles apart might once have been sewn together. Boak also details some of the restoration work that has been done at Waddesdon. Removing protective backings added in the 19th century has allowed the original colours of threads to be seen in some cases. The close-up images allow one to see the details of individual stitches.

Details are given of the stories illustrated in the embroideries. It can no longer be taken for granted that every reader will be familiar with, say, the story of John the Baptist and Salome, or that of the Annunciation. One embroidery of the latter  seems to have missing threads, and Boak gives examples of contemporary paintings in which rays of gold light stream down from a dove (symbol of the Holy Spirit) on to the Virgin. She surmises that the marks left by the missing stitches are the tracks of lost gold threads that formed similar light rays.

Not all items in the collection came from ecclesiastical sources. Textiles such as 16th-century bed hangings might combine religious and secular subject matter. One valance at Waddesdon combines biblical inscriptions with images of knights and ladies, surrounded by ‘grotesk’ decoration of the type that became fashionable after the discovery of Nero’s ‘Golden House’ in Rome. Because the excavated house was below ground level, the decorated rooms were known as a ‘grotto’,  hence ‘grotesk’. The Waddesdon panel seems to be related to others in Lyon and New York.

Boak tells us that young women in the 16th and 17th centuries were encouraged to embroider biblical stories featuring virtuous women such as Esther, who saved the Jewish people from a plot to destroy them by interceding with her husband, a gentile king. Contemplating virtuous women as they worked was supposed to encourage virtue in them. Political content could also be included, with biblical kings of the 17th century often resembling Charles I or Charles II in British embroideries. This small books is full of fascinating information of this sort. Boak uses the embroideries to give us glimpses of life in the past – that ‘foreign country’ where ‘people do things differently’, as L.P. Hartley wrote. That also applies to the afterlife of the embroideries, in the hands of their most recent owners.

Sacred Stiches: Ecclesiastical Textiles in the Rothschild Collection at Waddesdon Manor by Rachel Boak is published by The Rothschild Foundation, Waddesdon Manor/National Trust, 2013; distributed by Paul Holberton Publishing. 80pp. Fully illustrated, mostly in colour, £15 ppb. ISBN 978 0 9547310 3 8