A few days ago we bade farewell to a stunning exhibition at Cumberland Lodge of needlework, all created through the use of metal work, especially gold and silver. Items of national importance, such as the Lord Chancellor’s Purse, from which The Queen’s speech to Parliament is handed to her, were displayed alongside exquisite recent works by students. A delicate early eighteenth-century embroidered trinket box was shown beside two delicate hand-stitched ladies’ gloves, one twice the size of the other because fashion in the mid 1850s determined that only one was actually worn. Highlights of the exhibition included the sampler of the eighteen different golds which went into decorating Her Majesty’s velvet Coronation train in 1953. For most people the highlight of the show was the stunning six panels of the Liturgy of Loreto, framed religious depictions in pre-Raphaelite mode where every tress of hair, every fold of a robe, every skin tone, every architectural detail was the result of minute stitching of incomparable fastidiousness and beauty. These pictures were created anonymously by nuns as an act of simple devotion. It has been an honour, privilege and joy to house this exhibition, which was put together for us by the Royal School of Needlework, now housed in Hampton Court but linked to Cumberland Lodge through its first President, Princess Helena, who lived here in the 1870s.
Needlework conjures up for many people an image of little old ladies. It could hardly be less true. For a start, it was once an almost exclusively male preserve. Over the centuries so many of its uses have been for the community – altar cloths and kneelers in churches, cushions and curtains in social spaces, dresses and vestments for public ceremonies, banners for activist organisations. Needlework can, of course, be a solitary undertaking, and there is nothing wrong with that. It is as good a way to relax creatively as any I can think of, but it is a past-time which can be shared by many. A whole team worked on the Coronation robes, in the same demanding secrecy that was recently required of those at the RSN who worked on Kate Middleton’s wedding dress. There is something inspiring about the community values inherent in all craft work. We praise the excellence of the individual artist, in whatever genre they work, but the sharing that lies behind so many achievements in the field of needlework is a cause for wonder and celebration.
Cumberland Lodge is now opening an exhibition of heraldry, prepared for us by the College of Arms. Needlework and heraldry must be two of the most ancient art forms in Europe, but inherent in both is subtle design put to the service of the community. When we talk of the Big Society, as our last two Cumberland Lodge blogs have done, we could do worse than explain it by reference to the stitching and embroidery seen in our last exhibition and the witty, allusive, scholarly representations seen in our present one.
Alastair Niven
Principal
