An early 19th century English embroidered picture, with an allegorical figure of Ireland, and incorporating scenes from the story of Jack and the Beanstalk

Worked in silk floss thread by Margret Williams

On a fine linen gauze ground with two female figures - a falconer in an Empire gown, and a harpist trailing sheets of musical staves and standing with boxes and barrels - beside a palm tree in a broad landscape before distant hills and beneath stars and a crescent moon, in a variety of stitches including satin, long and short, chain, back, and stem, and with a blue glass bead for the bird’s eye.

The source of the figure to the right is a mezzotint depicting England and Ireland that was issued in 1800 by P. Gally, a printer and publisher based in Holborn. A copy of the mezzotint may be found in the collection of the British Museum, museum no. 2010,7081.574, with the harpist there described as an ‘allegorical female figure (..of..) Ireland, holding a lyre and a sheet of music, with bales, barrels, a plinth with a relief of a female head crowned in laurel’. The other figure, which would have been taken from another, as yet unidentified print, may be a version of Minerva, or Wisdom, with the bird her attendant owl. Both the mezzotint and this embroidery were made with the ‘Act for the Union of Great Britain and Ireland’, which was given Royal Assent on 2nd July 1800 and was brought into force as the year turned, a matter of then current argument and reflection.

The figure of ‘Wales’ in the pendant print of Scotland and Wales was the original of an embroidery now in the National Museum of Wales, item no. 15.2, and of another, similar, in the Cooper Hewitt.

Below these, together with the inscription Margret Williams / her Work, are embroidered vignettes copied from two of the three copper-plate engravings that illustrated The History of Jack and the Bean-Stalk, published in 1807 by Benjamin Tabart at The Juvenile and School Library, No. 157, New Bond Street. Copies of both engravings are shown here, and are taken from the edition of the book held in the Hockliffe Collection (see the Hockliffe Project https://hockliffe.dmu.ac.uk/items/0019.html).

Benjamin Tabart (1767/8-1833) published editions of moralising children’s literature from his premises on New Bond Street between 1801 and 1820 (many which were either written or rewritten by him) and employed as his editor Mary Jane Godwin, the second wife of William Godwin. Tabart’s version of Jack and the Beanstalk was influenced by much earlier oral traditions, and at least one 18th century published edition of a related tale, but his was the first in which the story assumed its standard form and is the one from which all later versions derive.

The textile 42.5cm (16¾”) high and 38cm (15”) wide.

In a frame 53.3cm (21”) high and 47.3cm (18⅝”) wide.