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 an allegory of England and Ireland that was issued on 10th October 1800, the ‘Act for the Union of Great Britain and Ireland’ having been given Royal Assent on 2nd July of the same year and then brought into force as the year turned. A copy of the mezzotint, issued by P. Gally, a printer and publisher based at the time at 7 Beauchamp's Street, Brook’s Market, in Holborn, 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.
The figure of ‘Wales’ in the pendant print of Scotland and Wales that was published by Gally in the same year, and of which the British Museum also holds a copy, museum no. 2010,7081.575, became the original of an embroidery now in the National Museum of Wales, item no. 15.2, and of another, similar, in the Cooper Hewitt, New York, acc. no. 1941-69-7, both of which were made in 1804.
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 presence of the episodes from ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’ at the bottom of the embroidery, together with the juxtaposition of the two larger figures also derived from separate sources, is a wonderful example of the custom in domestic embroidery of combining figures and motifs from several sources to create a composite image.
The textile 42.5cm (16¾”) high and 38cm (15”) wide.
In a frame 53.3cm (21”) high and 47.3cm (18⅝”) wide.
