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Legends of Lacemaking: Argentan Point Lace

On 16th December 2019

In French lacemakers, Lacemakers and Religion, Lacemakers in Drama, Lacemakers in Music, Lacemakers in the Past, Lacemakers' folklore

Gaston La Touche, ‘The Legend of Argentan Point Lace’, 1884. Musée des Beaux-arts et de la Dentelle, Alençon

The Virgin Mary finishes the task of a young lacemaker, too exhausted to continue the work herself. This painting, first exhibited in 1884, now adorns the walls of the Museum of Fine Art and Lace in Alençon in the Orne Department of Normandy. The painter, Gaston La Touche (1854-1913), was of Norman descent and retained links to the Orne region throughout his life. Although better known as a painter of society pleasures (he’s the man buying a drink in Edouard Manet’s ‘A Bar at the Folies Bergères’), La Touche sometimes liked to mix fantasy with the social realist eye for detail that he had employed as an illustrator of Émile Zola’s L’Assommoir.[1]

The painting is called ‘The Legend of Argentan Point Lace’ (‘La légende du point d’Argentan’). The story goes that a young lacemaker living on the rue de la Vicomte, Argentan, was the sole provider for her two aged grandparents. But when her grandfather fell ill, her efforts were not enough. Working late into the night, she fell asleep even as she implored the aid of the Virgin Mary. The Virgin descended from heaven and continued her work while the lacemaker slept. She returned night after night, until the lacemaker had the means to support her grandparents; when the latter died, she entered the Convent of Saint Claire. The best examples of Argentan lace are supposed to date from this period. In another version of the same story, the Virgin appeared as if in a dream to the poor lacemaker, who closely observed her work and so, the following day, was able to recreate this novel lace: and thus Argentan point lace was born.

Our hunch is that this legend was, like Caroline Popp’s legend of Bruges lace, an entirely literary creation. At least there is no evidence that the story was in circulation before it first appeared in print a decade before La Touche’s painting as a short story in the magazine La fantaisie Parisienne.[2] The author was the marquis Eugène de Lonlay (1815-1886), a dandy poet and songwriter originally from Argentan. He had already brought out a small volume of legends about his home-town in 1873. He further developed ‘The Legend of Argentan Point Lace’ in a little pamphlet in 1874, asserting the divine origin of this lace. Although this pamphlet seems like an afterthought, our supposition is that it was part of a more ambitious project to revive lacemaking in this part of Normandy. Despite Lonlay’s claims, we doubt he heard this tale first from lacemakers.

The illustration accompanying Lonlay’s ‘Légende du point d’Argentan’ from the journal La fantaisie Parisienne (1874)

Although you wouldn’t know it from the illustration to Lonlay’s story, Argentan lace is a needle lace, similar to that of nearby Alençon, and like Alençon laces its success owed much to the mercantilist policies of Louis XIV’s minister of finances, Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1618-1686), who objected to French aristocrats spending their money on foreign luxuries and thus enriching other princes. If equally fine manufactures could be established in France, money would stay at home. Particular suppliers in designated towns were granted royal privileges, including Argentan in 1665. Tastes changed and Argentan lacemakers suffered numerous ups-and-downs: it was, apparently favoured by Madame du Barry, Louis XV’s ‘maîtresse en titre’, but not by Marie-Antoinette, known to prefer less heavily decorated laces. Even so, in the last decade before the French Revolution, more than 1000 women were employed in lacemaking in Argentan and the surrounding countryside.[3]

The Revolution effectively destroyed the trade: needle lace is an even more expensive luxury than bobbin lace, and with aristocrats’ emigration, the Terror, war and ruin, there was simply no market for it. Despite attempts to revive it under Napoleon I, all manufacture had effectively ceased by the first decade of the nineteenth century. And with its demise grew the legend of a lost stitch, the ‘bride picotée’. Over time the two legends — of divine intervention and the lost stitch — would fuse.

In January 1874 the sub-prefect of the arrondissement, Alphonse Béchard, in conjunction with the mayor of Argentan, Emmanuel Lebouc, launched a campaign to revive needle-lace in the town, primarily as an economic venture to support poor women and girls. Béchard approached Ernest Lefébure whose family ran a lace business in Bayeux which had a reputation for revitalising old lace techniques. Lefébure explained that, to discover the secret of making Argentan lace, he needed not only examples of old lace but also the patterns on which lacemakers worked. As it happened, a few years before, the nuns of the Hospice de Saint-Thomas had discovered a load of old laces and patterns, at least one with some threads still attached, in an attic. Lefébure passed these on to one of his most skilful employees, Désirée Hamel. Once she had worked out the technique, Hamel was brought to Argentan to set up a lace workshop in the Benedictine convent. The nuns also ran an orphanage and Hamel taught Argentan point both to the nuns and to the orphan girls.[4] By 1878, when Hamel won a silver medal at the Paris World Fair, there were about forty lacemakers employed in the manufacture of Argentan lace, and the business survived, thanks to the active support of the chaplain of the order, abbé Leboulanger, until the First World War. The Benedictine nuns of Notre Dame Abbey still maintain the tradition.[5] Although we have no definite proof of this, we suspect Lonlay’s story was part of a deliberate campaign to generate interest in this venture.

As a response to female unemployment the project can only be viewed as a partial success; even before 1914 young women had turned their back on lacemaking as too poorly remunerated. But the stories concerning Argentan lace took on a life of their own and were repeated in many different forms. In 1883 a British writer with a penchant for stories about artistic French women, Margaret Roberts (1833-1919), brought out a novel Bride Picotée, named for the famous lost stitch. Set in Burgundy during the French Second Empire (1852-1870), the story turns on the ardent desire of a young, disabled, orphan lacemaker Else to acquire the knowledge of this stitch from an elderly neighbour, La Brisarde, the last practitioner of Argentan point, who is equally determined never to give up her family’s birthright: ‘when engaged with those points of her craft which were her special secret she locked the door, and even stopped up the keyhole with jealous care.’[6] She had already resisted the blandishments of one would-be aristocratic patron who had hoped to revive the manufacture. We may return in another post to this lace-obsessed novel which, despite many implausibilities, does at least explain how a particular technique could become a family secret. Because needle lace is so time consuming, individual makers only worked on their own particular part of the pattern, as a ‘réseleuse’ or ‘remplisseuse’ or other specialist. There were few ‘assembleuses’ who could put the whole together.

The aged lacemaker La Brisarde refuses to teach Argentan point to the orphan Lise, an illustration from Margaret Roberts’ novel Bride Picotée (1883)

In 1904 the legend of the Virgin’s intervention was revived in musical form. Léon Boschet’s two act play combined the story with another Argentan legend, about a Parisian merchant who had come to the town to buy laces, and made a vow to build a clock-tower for the church of Saint-Germain (at the end of the rue de la Vicomte) if he should escape brigands on his return journey to Paris.[7] Boschet was from the region, and this was not his only musical celebration of the lacemakers of Normandy.[8]

Boschet’s operetta does not appear to have taken off, but perhaps it inspired an altogether more successful work, the one act operetta ‘La légende du point d’Argentan’, which was first performed in December 1906 at the Opéra-Comique in Paris. The composer was Félix Fourdrain (1880-1923) and the librettists Arthur Bernède and Henri Cain. Although in a romantic idiom that was passing out of fashion, it remained part of the repertoire of the Opéra-Comique for many years afterwards, as well as being regularly performed around the country.[9] Oddly, the piece is set not in Argentan but in a hovel near Granville on the Normandy coast where a desperate young lacemaker, Rose-Marie, is nursing a sick, indeed dying child through a storm. Her sailor husband, luckless in his search for work and so incapable of buying the necessary medicine or even food, threatens murder-suicide as the only resolution to their plight. Rose-Marie, however, puts her trust in the Virgin and her hope that she can rediscover the ‘magic stitch’, the secret of Argentan point lace. The cardinal de Rohan has promised 1000 gold écus to the person who can make the lace he wants to present to the queen (there is a vague echo here of the ‘Diamond Necklace Affair’). Although her eyesight is failing, Rose-Marie hopes to win the prize, and vows to cover the steps to the Virgin’s altar with her bobbins if she succeeds (Fourdrain, like Lonlay, was under the impression that Argentan point is a bobbin lace). An old beggar woman comes to her door and Rose-Marie, despite her poverty, offers her food and shelter from the storm. The old woman tells her the miraculous origin of Argentan lace: three centuries before spiders’ threads had woven themselves into a diadem that adorned a statue of Mary. But Rose-Marie is exhausted and falls to sleep over her pillow. Then the stranger reveals herself as the Virgin: while the lacemaker sleeps, angels come and take threads from Mary’s headdress to weave into celestial lace, singing an ‘Ave Maria’ while they work.

Marcel Mültzer’s costume design for Rose-Marie in Fourdrain’s ‘La légende du point d’Argentan’, available on the BNF Gallica website

Regular visitors to this site will recognize many of the motifs in this representation of a lacemaker. Lacemakers’ special relationship with the Virgin has already been explored in the poetry of Guido Gezelle and the legend of Serena of Bruges. Rose-Marie sings a lullaby to her sick child not unlike Desrousseaux’s ‘le p’tit quinquin’. That lacemakers’ suffering and sacrifice can redeem men is a motif in much nineteenth century literature, such as Dickens’ ‘Mugby Junction’.

Some of the same themes were picked up in two French silent films which seem to have some connection to Fourdrain’s operetta, though both are set in the Middle Ages rather than the pre-revolutionary period. In the film ‘La légende du point d’Argentan’ (Radio, 1907), a poor girl must complete her lace for the grand lady Anne d’Argentan before the morning or she will not have the money to find food for her grandmother. When she is too exhausted to continue, a statue of the Virgin comes to life to finish the work for her.[10] ‘Le rêve de la dentellière’ (Lux, 1910) offers a very similar narrative in which a lacemaker falls asleep and is replaced at her pillow by the Virgin, who then carries the product to the castle herself, and returns with the money while the girl is still sleeping.[11] (We have not been able to view either of them in their entirety: we’re relying on summaries, but some scenes from the latter film can be found here.)

A still from ‘Le rêve de la dentellière’ (Lux, 1910), Centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée, catalogue des Films restaurés et numérisés

There are many lace legends, but to date the legend of Argentan point lace is the only one we’ve discovered that inspired painters, musicians and film-makers, alongside writers.

[1] Selina Baring Maclennan, Gaston La Touche: A Painter of Belle Epoque Dreams (Woodbridge, 2009).

[2] Marquis Eugène de Lonlay, ‘Légende du point d’Argentan’, La fantaisie parisienne 6:16 (September 1874): 7-8.

[3] Jean Moulinet, La Dentelle à l’aiguille en Basse Normandie (Argentan, 1912), p. 97.

[4] Ernest Lefébure, ‘Point d’Argentan. Se fait-il par les anciens procédés? Est-il aussi beau que celui d’autrefois? A-t-il conservé une grande valeur?’, Annuaire normand 46 (1880): 145-154. To understand precisely what it was that Hamel recreated, consult Brigitte Tambrun and Veronique Thomazo, ‘La technique du “ point d’Argentan ” dévoilée’ (2019).

[5] Danièle Foury, ‘Les bénédictines, garantes de la tradition de la dentelle d’Argentan’, Ouest-France (22 July, 2019). See https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x7du7v5

[6] Margaret Roberts, Bride Picotée (London, 1883), p. 18.

[7] We have not yet tracked down a copy of this text, we are relying on a short summary in Bulletin de la Société historique et archéologique de l’Orne 23 (April 1904), p. 230. It was performed in April 1904 at the Theatre Athénée-Saint-Germain in Paris.

[8] See his ‘Les Dentelles de l’Orne’ (Argentan, 1902).

[9] Félix Fourdrain (music), Henri Cain and Arthur Bernède (lyrics), La légende du point d’Argentan (Paris, 1906). Fourdrain also set André Alexandre’s poem ‘La dentellière de Bayeux’ to music in 1914.

[10] Christel Tailllebert, ‘Collection Alan Roberts (II): Films primitifs et messages religieux. Regards sur différentes strategies cinématographiques’, 1895, revue d’histoire du cinema 19 (1995): 59.

[11] François Amy de la Bretèque, ‘Présence de la littérature française du Moyen Âge dans le cinéma français’, Cahiers de recherches médiévales et humanistes 2 (1996): 157.

Lacemakers’ Songs: A Short Film, Mostly in French

By admin

On 12th October 2015

In French lacemakers, Lacemakers in Music, Lacemakers in the Past, Lacemakers' songs

Although we asserted a link between lacemaking and singing in our last post, we don’t have any audio of English lacemakers singing while working which we can share with you (though we’re always hopeful of finding some). In Belgium and France, and especially the Velay region of the Auvergne, the connection between lacemaking and singing is even better attested, and you can listen as well as read some songs from these regions.

Images: A panorama of Le-Puy-en-Velay, dominated by its statue of the Virgin Mary. (Licensed under CC BY-SA 1.0 via Wikipedia Commons)

The Velay (Haute-Loire) was the predominant region for lacemaking in France in the nineteenth century, and outposts of handmade lace manufacture, largely aimed at the tourist trade in Le Puy, could still be found right up to the 1990s (perhaps still). In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it was also a very important region for folksong collecting. In the 1860s and ‘70s, Victor Smith, a judge from Saint-Etienne, transcribed hundreds of songs from lacemakers as they worked in groups in the street or under the shade of a tree (en couvige in dialect). In the years running up to the First World War, the novelist Henri Pourrat would collect dozens more songs around his home town of Ambert (not in the Velay but in Puy-de-Dôme, but it might be considered an extension of the Velay lacemaking industry). Later still, after the Second World War, the teacher Jean Dumas would tape hundreds of songs from lacemakers. And there are many other audio recordings from the likes of Claudie Marcel-Dubois, Maguy Pichonnet-Andral, Pierre Chapuis and Didier Perre. We may return to some of these in future posts.

However, in one case we have video as well as audio. A short film, ‘Les dentellières de Montusclat’, was made for the French Institut national de l’audiovisuel (INA) in 1978, which you can see for yourself by clicking on the link. It depicts three lacemakers, aged 75, 78 and 85, two of them sisters, chatting and singing while making lace in the mountain village of Montusclat, about thirty kilometres east of Le-Puy-en-Velay. They tell the story of the village, its church, the passage of the plague through the region, and the legend of Notre-Dame de la Salette (a vision of the Virgin Mary who appeared to two children in 1846). They also talk about lacemaking; they started at the trade when they very young, when earnings from lace were necessary to put clothes on their backs and food on the table. Having become habituated to constant work they cannot sit idle; whenever they have a moment they are back at their pillows. And they are still earning a bit of money (one franc an hour!). When talking to each other at the beginning of the film (when the eldest is seen urging the others on to “Work! Work!”) the women speak in the Occitan dialect of the region, but when talking to the filmmaker they speak in French. They also sing in French. Even when Victor Smith was collecting songs in the region over a hundred years previously, at a time when Occitan was far more dominant, lacemakers would often sing in French. Singing was a cultural activity, and so deserved the ‘cultural’ rather than the ‘everyday’ language.

A French popular lithograph of Saint François Régis. (Image from the Wellcome Trust via Wikipedia Commons.)

Lacemakers’ songs from the Velay share some of the characteristics of those discussed in our post on ‘Sir Hugh’ and ‘Long Lankin’. There is a marked taste for long narrative songs, often with rather grisly content. In addition, in the Velay religious songs make up a substantial proportion of lacemakers’ repertoire. However, the song in this video is a bit cheerier, even though we only get to hear the first verse and the chorus. We provide the text of the full song below and a (rough) translation:

Sur mon carreau, je fais de la dentelle,
Dés le matin jusqu’à la fin du jour.
De mon carreau, la garniture est belle;
Rubans, velours le bordent tout autour.
Petit fuseau,
Babille,
Sautille
Petit fuseau:
Autour de mon carreau.Sur le devant, sous une blanche écaille,
De Saint Régis, on peut voir le portrait;
C’est grâce à lui, dit-on, que je travaille,
Sous d’autres saints le pourtour disparaît.Tous les fuseaux, comme des militaires,
Sont alignés autour de nos carreaux;
Puis les meneurs viennent prendre les paires,
Les dirigeant comme des caporaux.

Et, vrais pantins pendus à leur ficelle,
Tous ces fuseaux sautillent en chantant,
Sous les dix doigts de dame ou demoiselle,
Courant toujours, sans perdre un seul instant.

C’est tout autour d’une roue à fortune,
Que le dessin s’enroule et se maintient;
Et chaque fil, de couleur blonde ou brune,
Y vient trouver l’épingle qui le tient.

De ses deux mains, l’agile dentellière
Fait manoeuvrer l’épingle ou le fuseau;
Et lentement, une journée entière,
Voit s’allonger le bout de son réseau.

Mais que ce soit du lin ou de la laine,
L’or ou l’argent, la soie ou le coton,
Tout s’assouplit, se débrouille sans peine,
Et reproduit le dessin du carton.

Et l’on obtient guipure ou valenciennes,
Russe, alençon, torchon, trenne ou cluny,
Les fonds nouveaux et les mailles anciennes,
Tout est possible en dentelle du Puy.

Avec les mains, la langue, aussi, travaille,
On prie, on chante, on dit son petit mot,
Sur l’oeil voisin, dont on cherche la paille,
Et du pied droit, on berce le marmot.

On my pillow I make lace
From morning till the end of the day.
The decoration of my pillow is beautiful;
It is bordered on all sides by ribbons and velvet.
Little bobbin
chatter, skip
Little bobbin
Around my pillow.On the front, under a white slip
You can see the portrait of Saint Régis;
They say it’s thanks to him that I can work
The surround disappears under other saints.All the bobbins, like soldiers,
Are lined up around our pillows;
Then the leaders come and take each pair
And direct them like corporals.

And just like puppets on a string,
All the bobbins dance while singing
Under the ten fingers of a lady or a girl
Always moving, never losing an instant.

It’s all around a wheel of fortune
That the design unfurls and is held up;
And each thread, whether light or dark,
There finds the pin that will fix it.

With her two hands the agile lacemaker
manages the pin or the bobbin;
And slowly, over the whole day
You’ll see the end of her net increase.

Whether it’s of linen or wool
Gold or silver, silk or cotton,
Everything softens, is handled without difficulty,
And reproduces the design on the card.

And thus one obtains guipure or valenciennes
Russian, alençon, torchon, trenne or cluny,
Whether new collections or old stitches
Everything is possible in Le Puy lace.

While the hands work, so does the tongue,
We pray, we sing, we each say our piece,
We look for the mote in our neighbour’s eye
And with the right foot, we rock the baby.

The words were composed sometime before 1904 by ‘A. de la Demi-Aune’ (a demi-aune is a measure 60 centimetres in length used for lace), the pseudonym of Hippolyte Achard (born 1842), one of the leading lace manufacturers of Le Puy: a manuscript memoir of his life and the lace business is preserved in the Municipal Library of the city. The music was by Marius Versepuy (1882-1972). At the beginning of the century Achard was very active in the defence of home-made (or to use the contemporary term, ‘true’ lace) against machine-made ‘false’ lace. Given the impossibility of competing on price, manufacturers and patrons emphasized the moral virtues of home-made lace, which kept women at home, under the eyes of the Catholic Church (even though Achard himself was somewhat anticlerical in his politics) while looking after their children, in comparison to the urban depravity and promiscuity that faced women moving into the factories. Thus home-made lace repelled the twin fears of rural depopulation and racial degeneracy. These themes are lightly invoked in the song.

Lacemakers working together ‘en couvige’ near Goudet (Haute-Loire). (From Wikipedia Commons.)

Essentially, then, this is a propaganda piece. Yet it quite rapidly spread among lacemakers themselves, so that even by the First World War its origins had been forgotten and it became part of lacemakers’ repertoire. Perhaps the reason is that it was clearly by someone who knew the trade. Lacemakers in the Velay did decorate their pillows with images of saints, especially the patron saint of the Le Puy lace industry, Saint François Régis; the design was pinned to a roller; réseau is the word used for net… But in addition it articulates something which is often denied by historians of labour to such women — isolated in their homes and working at piece-rates — which is a sense of a collective, occupational identity and pride in their craft.

Envisioning Lace at the Ashmolean

By admin

On 1st October 2015

In Lacemakers in the Museum

In a corner of the Ashmolean’s Textile exhibit hangs a rare portrait of a working lacemaker by the Danish painter Bernhard Keilhau (1624 – 1687). Dressed simply in a white shirt, plain open bodice, skirt and apron, she is depicted as working a large bolster pillow balanced on her lap, a scarf hastily tied around her head. Unusually for a portrait of a lacemaker, she is neither looking down at her work, nor at the viewer, but seems momentarily distracted by something or someone beyond the frame. A pupil of Rembrandt, Keilhau depicted the lacemaker as part of a larger composition of genre scenes which epitomised the five senses. Within this composition, the lacemaker is thought to be an allegory of sight[1].

The Lacemaker. Berhard Keilhau (1624 – 1687) WA1966.65 (c) The Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology; Supplied by The Public Catalogue Foundation.

Good eyesight is, of course, essential for any artisan. And yet, lace is profoundly connected to the visual in other way, too. First of all, it relies on the visual for its impact: what gives lace its particular material resonance is the manner in which it plays and manipulates the notion of surface, always begging the question whether it is the weave or the spaces in between which constitute the pattern. Lace is always partially concealing and partially revealing the surfaces it edges or covers. Secondly, because lace is such a delicate textile, visual sources are often the only way in which can study historical pieces. Along with pattern books, looking at paintings and portraits is our primary way to understand how fashions for lace changed over time, how lace was worn, and its visual impact as part of historical costume. Identifying and dating lace from visual sources, however, is never straightforward. Not only because painters often took some artistic license when portraying lace on garments, but because lace was often collected, inherited, and re-used on garments over time – even by the wealthy and the nobility. Seen through the subsequent fussiness of Victorian styles and 20th century machine-made laces, it is easy to forget that until well into the 18th century such fine laces were considered a form of transferable wealth on par with gold or gems.

As part of the Lace in Context project, David Hopkin and I became interested in understanding how lace is identified from visual materials, and what challenges this poses to scholars and collectors of lace. By bringing lace makers into the museum, we wanted to start a dialogue amongst practitioners, artists, and academics about how lace is portrayed in the visual arts, and how it might be ‘read’ back for purposes of identification. On the 7^th of June, we invited Oxford’s Isis Lacemakers, as well as Gwynedd Roberts (Honorary Curator at the Lace Guild Museum) to view the Ashmolean’s collection of portraits. We were lucky enough to recruit the artist Teresa Whitfield to come and speak to us briefly about her work rendering lace in pen and ink, as well as to accompany us around the gallery. Tracing the way lace had been portrayed in portraiture across the European continent, we found not only varying approaches to depicting laces, but also a great difference in the importance artists from different countries and period gave lace in their portraits.

The British tradition of wearing and making bobbin lace can be traced back as far as the mid-16^th century and was well-established by the reign of Elizabeth the First (Yallop 1992). The technique, however, is even older: the earliest known pattern books Le Pompe (1557) and Nüw Modelbuch, allerly Gattungen Däntelschnür (1561) were printed in Venice and Zürich, respectively, and point to Italy as the origin of the technique (Sciama 1992). From there, both the fashion for lace and the knowledge of its manufacture spread along trade routes from modern-day Switzerland to France, Flanders, and then across the channel to Britain. The fashion for large ruffs – well known from contemporary portraits of Queen Elizabeth – and then for copious amounts of lace neckties, collars, and cuffs worn by both men and women until the early 19^th century, led to a real expansion in the production of lace throughout Europe. A beautiful example of lace from this early period can be seen in the portraits of the Tradescant family housed in the ‘Ark to Ashmolean’ exhibit in the Museum’s new lower ground floor. Painted over a number of years between 1630-1650s, they depict Hester Tradescant, the second wife of John Tradescant the Younger, and her stepchildren. A family of gardeners and garden designers to the nobility, the Tradescants amassed the collection of rarities which would later form the basis of the Ashmolean. Housed in their residence at Lambeth, affectionately known as the ‘Ark’, their cabinet of curiosities was open to the public for a fee[2].

Hester Tradescant and Stepson. Attributed to Thomas de Critz (1607-1653) WA1898.14

Frances Tradescant. British Artist (c. 1638) WA 1898.17

Equally impressive are the lace ruffs and cuffs are found on two Dutch portraits from the same period exhibited as part of the Museum’s Dutch Art collection on the second floor. In one portrait by Jan Cornelisz Verspronck (1606-1662), a young woman in rich, black brocade is depicted wearing lace cuffs, a lace-lined ‘bertha’ covering her square décolletage, and an enormous ‘millstone’ ruff. Her hair is covered by a delicate matron’s cap edged with more lace. Standing out against the stark, black background of her dress, the abundance of lace not only framed and highlighted the only visible parts of her body (the hands, the face, and her chest), but – along with her fine gloves and massive gold bracelet – also underscored her high social standing. Even more striking is the neighbouring portrait of a wealthy middle-class woman from Haarlem. The portraits of the Tradescant family and this portrait from the Dutch Golden Age belong to a period when fashions for heavy, dark textiles, as well as standing collars and ruffs, demanded bold, often geometric needle and bobbin laces. Indeed, until the 18th century, it was the richer forms of Italian laces such as Venetian needlepoint and Milanese bobbin lace which dominated fashions until lighter needle laces from Argentan and Alençon in France, and bobbin laces from Binche, Valenciennes, and Mechlin in Fanders gained popularity both in Britain and on the Continent.

Portrait of a Lady. Jan Cornelisz Verspronck. (c.1606/9-1662) WA.2004.102

Two portraits in the Ashmolean reflect this change in fashions. The first is a portrait of woman by the French painter Jean-Francois de Troy (1679-1752). One of the leading history painters of the day, Le Troy is new best known for the series tableaux de modes, in which he accurately depicted the fashions and pastimes of the aristocracy (Casely et. al. 2004). The second is a portrait of a gentleman by the French painter Etienne Aubry (1745-17881) made in about the year 1777. Dressed in a dark, slim-cut coat fashionable for its time, and a scarlet waistcoat, the gentleman wears a wig and a simple cravat augmented by a slim lace frill. Both portraits show not only how radically fashions for laces changed, but also a fundamentally different approach to the visual depiction of lace by portrait artists: while the painters of the Dutch Golden Age took produced meticulous depictions of fat lace collars, cuffs, and ruffs, French painters of the 17th and 18th century preferred a far more impressionistic approach, using a few, light brushstrokes. This probably reflected both the different material nature of 18^th century styles of lace, as well as a move towards intimacy, narrative, and sentimentalism in French art.

Portrait of a Gentleman. Etienne Aubry (1745-1781) WA 1986.76

For the people portrayed in these pictures, however, the choice of what to lace to wear was not solely dictated by fashion. Bans on the import of foreign laces in England, France, Spain and other countries, show that even in the Early Modern period cloth, clothing, and fashion were seen as having the ‘power to materially articulate national identity’, leading anxieties about the economy to be ‘written over as a narrative of uncertainty and anxiety about national distinctions’ (Hentschell 2002:546). As a precious commodity, the trade and manufacture of lace was a subject of interest to parliament throughout the Early Modern period and the Restoration. Dealers of English lace competing with fine lace made in France, Belgium and Italy for customers appealed to consumers to buy with their patrimony in mind. Indeed, lace and lace manufacture became linked to civic patriotism precisely through appeals to the consumption habits of the nobility and the growing bourgeoisie. Thus, a Mrs. Dorothy Holt appealed to the ‘Ladies of Great Britain’ in a pamphlet of 1757 to ‘help circulate and distribute to the best Advantage, that Money which will arise from this their Native, English, Valuable and most Ornamental Manufacture; which will wear better than French point, Brussels lace, or Minonette’ (Holt 1757, emphasis in the original). Believing that the control of foreign trade was paramount to ensuring national prosperity, the Parliament imposed heavy import duties were imposed on foreign made lace in the 17th century and only lifted in 1860.

By the start of the 18^th Century, lace making had become a major rural industry in England. The fortunes of artisans and lace traders were not only determined by changing fashions and the fluctuating trade policies of Parliament, but also larger questions of foreign policy and power-shifts on the Continent itself. Characteristically, lace makers in England saw their wages rise when the French went to war: Lace makers in the East Midlands, for example, enjoyed relative prosperity during and after the Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815) and the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871). Even in such periods of commercial success, however, only a minute portion of the overall profits of the trade ever made it into the hands of the lace makers themselves. From 19^th century sources, we know that the reality of a lace maker’s life was often harsh: Working from home, women were often forced to work for 8 to 10 hours daily, as well as running the household. It was during this time, that earlier calls for the patriotic consumption of English lace and civic philanthropy towards lace makers were joined by the socialism of William Morris and Ruskinian celebrations of craft, which advocated the preservation of handicrafts believed to be disappearing under the pressures of industrial manufacturing. Both Morris and Ruskin shared what Peter Mandler (1997) has called an anti-establishment, ‘rural nostalgic’ view of Englishness, and sought to protect rural crafts from the encroachment of urban, industrial.

This passion for the simple authenticity of craft was shared by another mid-19^th century artistic movement, namely the Pre-Raphaelites. In the Ashmolean’s Pre-Raphaelites gallery hangs a portrait of Mrs Coventry Patmore from about 1856. A wide band of lace graces her low neckline, gracefully accenting her pale, sloping shoulders which would have been highly fashionable at the time. Mrs Patmore was the wife of essayist and poet Coventry Patmore, an influential friend of the Pre-Raphaelites. Their marriage was the subject of Patmore’s popular series of poems ‘The Angel in the House’; a phrase which has now come to encapsulate the cultural ideals of domestic femininity to which Victorian women were expected to aspire. Lace and lacemaking were often extolled as offering women a virtuous way out of poverty by members of the establishment. Yet, it is difficult to determine what kind of lace Mrs Patmore is wearing in the portrait. It is painted rather clumsily and does not seem have any discernible rhythmic pattern. What is certain, is that it does not resemble any kind of lace made in Britain at the time. In the 19th century, a widespread passion for antique lace meant copies of old laces were made, as well as much older pieces taken apart and re-fashioned to contemporary tastes (Leader 2010). This means it could very well have been a piece of antique lace. Or simply a phantasy put together by an artist not very familiar with the material itself. Regardless, it perhaps best illustrates the problems of trying to read and identify lace from visual sources.

Mrs Coventry Patmore. John Brett (1831-1902) WA1998.217

Sources:

Caseley, Catherine. 2004. Ashmolean Museum: Complete Illustrated Catalogue of Paintings. Oxford: The Asmolean Museum.

Hentschell, R. 2002. Treasonous Textiles: Foreign Cloth and the Construction of Englishness. Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 32(2): 543-570.

Holt, D. 1757. An Address Humbly Offers to the Ladies of Great Britain Relating to the Most valuable Part of Ornamental Manufacture in their Dress. London: A.Millar, J.Whiston and B. White, and R. and J. Dodsley.

Leader, Jane. 2010. Identifying Lace. DATS in partnership with the Victoria and Albert Museum. Available at http://www.dressandtextilespecialists.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Identifying-Handmade-lace.pdf.

Sciama, L. 1992. Lacemaking in Venetian Culture, in Dress and Gender: Making and Meaning, R. Barnes and J.B. Eicher (eds). Oxford and New York: Berg.

Yallop, H.J. 1992. The History of the Honiton Lace Industry. Exeter: University of Exeter Press.

[1]

[2] http://www.ashmolean.org/ash/amulets/tradescant/tradescant00.html

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