. Art crafts for amateurs . beautiful works, and yet are farremoved from the pictorial in the modern sense. I have a coverlet, about a century old, worked in crewelson linen. The design is almost rude in its unsophistication?a wave-like series of scrolls doing duty for stems, from whichgrow, in a quite childish way, leaves, fruits and flowers No. 123.—Border adapted from sixteenth-century German work. that bear no resemblance to any individual plant. At thebottom is a rude representation of ground, with animalsskipping over the hills, the animals about as well drawn as achild might do them. Th
. Art crafts for amateurs . beautiful works, and yet are farremoved from the pictorial in the modern sense. I have a coverlet, about a century old, worked in crewelson linen. The design is almost rude in its unsophistication?a wave-like series of scrolls doing duty for stems, from whichgrow, in a quite childish way, leaves, fruits and flowers No. 123.—Border adapted from sixteenth-century German work. that bear no resemblance to any individual plant. At thebottom is a rude representation of ground, with animalsskipping over the hills, the animals about as well drawn as achild might do them. The colours of the crewels are allgood, and though age may have mellowed them theharmony must always have been pleasant. This old pieceof needlework is doubtless one of the counterpanes workedby our great-great-grandmothers, and is universally admiredby those who see it, and if one analyses why this is so Ithink the answer is that it makes no pretence to be schoolof art, but is simply a piece of needlework in nice-coloured. i8o ART CRAFTS FOR AMATEURS. crewels. Its very archaicness, naievte, like the art of primi-tive peoples, is a great charm, and in a self-conscious, analytical age any formof ////consciousness isrefreshing. Some of these quali-ties are seen in the ex-ample No. 120, which ap-pears to be a reproduc-tion of an old piece ofwork. Here we havethe archaicness I men-tioned, and, looked atcritically, it is very weakin design, the curvesbeing very feeble andthe whole panel wantingin logical coherence;yet I dare say manywould prefer this ex-ample to those in which a much greater effort had beenmade to evolve a high-class design. It will be gathered that I am an opponent of prettiness inthe crafts, especially in that of the needle, for the stitchesthemselves, if cunningly ^done and with nice-colouredthreads, will give us all the prettiness we need. We mustthink of those other qualities, character, individuality,naivete, the adaptation of means to end. Such a work asthe C
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1900, bookdecade1900, booksubjectdecorat, bookyear1901
