Addison Embroidery
at the
Vicarage

Bloomsbury bedside chest: detail of top

Duncan Grant died in 1978 and the Charleston Trust was set up in 1980 in order to try to save his former home which he shared for many years with Vanessa Bell as well as other permanent and semi-permanent guests.  From the outside Charleston appears a typical Sussex farmhouse of melting warmth and charm. Within, the charm is multiplied ten fold, which is a considerable achievement for today its domestic spaces are usually overrun within jostling and chattering admirers who’ve come to admire the decor and furnishings.

Bloomsbury style bedside chest: left side

I think my  fascination with Charleston came from a television documentary in the 1980s. (A recording was on sale at Charleston for may years, but I can find no mention of it now.) The dry rot, wet rot, damp, etc., could be seen to be causing devastation. Hand stencilled walls had become patchy, the textiles limp and stained and painted furniture looked dirty and rather tatty. Restoration went ahead and the farmhouse opened to visitors in 1986. It took me a few years of longing from afar before I made my first visit but after that a friend and I used to go almost yearly in June to celebrate our mutual  birthdays – then the house, garden and countryside was/is at its loveliest. It quickly became the wonderful sort of place to which we took foreign visitors – somewhere you could trust to speak for itself of the beauty of England while you sat back  glowing quietly in reflected glory, very good cake and tea to hand.

Bloomsbury bedside chest: front

One time we had a wonderful guide, all twin set and pearls, neatly coiffed grey hair, polished vowels and a wicked  way with words, who livened things up a bit by saying that there had been a great deal of feeding and frolicking, fiddling and faddling going on –  and an awful lot of other things too that also began with f. We laugh about it now but the Bloomburyites were not as free living and loving as we sometimes assume from our C21st vantage point.

Bloomsbury bedside chest: detail of side panel showing handpainted flowers

For many years poor Angelica believed herself to be  the child of  Vanessa and her husband Clive until, aged 17, Vanessa took her on one side, in the drawing room at Charleston nd told her that Duncan was her father. Afterwards, alone,  Angelica felt exulted, describes gloating about it to herself  but succinctly states that she never spoke of it to Duncan. She felt not that she had two fathers but none. The emotional inertia she suffered was to have a long lasting effect. Through wise eyes she tried to understand both men, for whom she had much sympathy, and Vanessa, whom she came to resent. These complexities Angelica chronicled in her agonisingly named biography ‘Deceived with Kindness’. Exquisitely written, full of wisdom and perception it is one of those books for the boudoir shelf  overwhelming in honesty and  poignancy  – if not an antidote to Bloomsbury, it is at the least a reminder that Charleston was no earthly paradise.  (Angelica died this year, 4 May 2012, aged 93.)

Bloomsbury style bedside chest; hand painted detail (under electric light)

Vanessa Bell, her two sons, Duncan Grant and David Garnett had moved to Charleston in 1916 so that Grant and David Garnett, who were both concientious objectors (and lovers at the time), could work on the land  They had little money to spare and did as much work on the house that they could themselves. David Garnett  describes Vanessa and Duncan scouring Lewes for furniture which, “with rare exceptions were astounding objects, bargains which attracted Duncan or Vanessa because of their strange shapes or low prices… Both Duncan and Vanessa appeared to believe that the inherent horror of any badly damaged and constructed piece of furniture could be banished for ever by decoration. The strange blend of  hideous objects of furniture, painted with delightful works of art, gives to the rooms at Charleston a character which is unique and astonishing..” 

Vanessa Bell: Charleston cupboard 1917
Picture taken from Gillian Naylor’s ‘Bloomsbury’ 1990 Octopus (pub.)

Both Vanessa and Duncan had been greatly influenced by Roger Fry who had introduced English artists to what had been happening in France. Fry’s theories shocked many in the art world, especially when he found much in common between the newly fashionable frescoes of the Italian Renaissance and the much reviled paintings of the Post-Impressionists. Fry believed in being bold with his ideas. In 1910 he mounted  the exhibition, ‘Manet and the Post-Impressionists’ with paintings by Van Gogh, Gaugin, Vlaminck, Derain, Rouault, Picasso and Cézanne and it created a real stir. This was soon followed by the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition in 1912. The painters he championed were, he believed, rebelling against the photographic vision of the C19th as seen in the exact meticulous art of the Pre-Raphaelites (and their medieval-loving successors) and what Fry described as “the exact and literal imitation of nature” which inspired the Impressionists. For Fry the formal values of a painting were more important than subject matter or ‘truth to nature’. In the extreme this led to complete abstraction. However, Fry, Bell and Grant only ever toyed with and never wholly embraced this extreme. Form and colour became primary once more.

For Vanessa, the exhilaration of the exhibition was simple – now she felt free to paint as she wanted to, with attention to form and colour  and with no concern for telling a story or showing things as they really were. Duncan Grant experimented more and his work had anyway been moving towards a simplification of form and content. He continued in this vein and is often criticised for being too changeable and having no signature style. I suppose that they had just enough money to paint to please themselves and their friends and hadn’t got the sort of personalities to promote their work to the world at large. There seems no indication that they took their painted furniture especially seriously, but you have to wonder whether they realised that it would be in their decorating rather than in their easel work that fame would lie.

The cupboard is to be found in Vanessa’s bedroom  near her bath. (Strangely, it is not photographed in most of the books about Bloomsbury.)  The painting is a wonderful  mix of geometric shapes and sinuous lines; colours are both uncompromising yet harmonious. My version was great fun to do and I leaned a lot by trying to copy Vanessa’s. I decided that ‘less is more’ and opted out of a more detailed background.  I used matt spray paints for the background and matt stencil paints for the painted panel and decoration. Gold spots were done in Humbrol enamels. One day I shall paint the other side which I left unpainted as it was up against a bed. 

Linen cushion hand embroidered in white embroidery cotton (Whitework)

Linen cushion hand embroidered in white embroidery cotton (Whitework)

Embroidered cushions have become my wedding present stalwarts and here are two I made for a couple about a year ago. Of course, it goes without saying to anyone who knows me that they were delivered a year after the wedding but at least the couple got them before the first baby arrived.  I always try to make the 2 cushions different, yet related and hope that they appeal to the individuals. I probably did more than 10 sketches for the ‘B’ cushion, several along William Morris lines, with complicated interweaving of stems and leaves, but somehow I kept coming back to something much simpler  as shown above. The letters H ad B are William Morris in style.

Detail of embroidered B

I often hum and ha about colour but usually go for white embroidery cotton on white linen which has the great merit of going with anything. I was brought up to call this sort of sewing ‘whitework’ but I was surprised to see that my needlework bible, “Encyclopedia of Needlework” by the fragrantly named Thérèse de Dillmont (produced as part of the DMC Library) has no patience with the term and prefers the longer “embroidery upon white materials” on the basis that nowadays we are more likely to embroider in coloured thread. Well, that was more than 100 years ago and I think since then white on white has pushed itself right back into the forefront of fashion, so I shall continue to talk about whitework. Equally, I continue to love Madame de Dillmont’s book and suggest secondhand copies should be snapped up with joy. Measuring about 5 inches by 3 inches and about 1 & a half  inches deep, it is a tiny treasure with lots of information and clear pictures and instuctions on all sorts of things from darning to tatting and macramé.

Although white is in many ways an easy option for a wedding present, the practicalities have caused me a great deal of trouble. There are, I think, 4 main ‘colours’ of white that I use:

DMC B5200, DMC 3865, 

Anchor 1 & 2

I now know to have a notebook in my sewing basket in which I WRITE DOWN the details of the particular thread that I’m using. Even with daylight sewing lights it is IMPOSSIBLE to match the threads once daylight has gone. I have spent far too much time unpicking far too much stitching to ever trust visual identification alone. I made these cushions before neuroticism set in and I haven’t a clue which white I used. As the cushions (along with their owners) are now in Canada, I doubt I shall ever find out.

I also like to use Anchor Ecru & DMC 3866 (which is pretty much ecru) if the linen is on the unbleached side of white.

Detail from ‘H’ cushion

Of course you can’t ‘dye’ anything white, you have to bleach colour out of  it and this will only work on natural fibres, like cotton, linen or silk, but not wool. I have bleached very pale pink linen to white by adding half a cup of bleach to the soap dispenser of the washing machine, putting damp fabric (2 metres in this case) into the drum and running it on a cold cycle. After you take the fabric out, run a washing cycle again to clear out the last of the bleach and wipe round the rubber seal and door in a front loading machine. Too little bleach is better than too much which could cause the fabric to go yellow,or even start to disintegrate.

Detail of H cushion

In painting, artists have used highlights of white to great effect. John Constable produced  enormous oil ‘sketches’  for his ‘six-footers’ (the big paintings which were exhibited at the Royal Academy’s summer exhibitions). These were painted quickly with sweeping  swirling jiggled strokes and lots of white was used – much more than in the finished painting. It is said that those Impressionists who saw these sketches (and they were never meant to be seen) were stunned and regarded themselves as much in artistic debt to Constable as to Turner. And this is the 1830s. The first time the term Impressionist was used about a painting was 1877. So modern looking are some of Constable’s sketches that the catalogue for the Tate’s exhibition of 2006, Constable: The Great Landscapes, even says they, “have earned him the title ‘Jackson Pollock of the 1830s’ for the wild use of thick impasto and flecks of pure colour”. 

To go further into what painters make into white paint (and all the other colours) have a look at Victoria Finlay’s book ‘Colour’. A mixture of travelogue, detective stories and quests she goes all over the world to find the sources for the natural pigments in common use until the C19th. Many are highly poisonous and exemplify the idea that beauty often came with a heavy cost. Now we are all  fully aware of the dangers of lead paint and since 1994 it can only be bought under special conditions, “Winsor and Newton say it is only ‘available in selected sizes, in selected countries, in childproof tins from either a locked display area or from behind the counter”. Titanium white is suggested instead. Victoria Finlay spoke to the porcelain hand painters at Spode in 2001 just 3 months after they were told they could no longer use lead-based paint and they quite literally rubbished the replacements which they criticised as not being, ” as vibrant and nothing near as sharp”. These artists would have been happy to use the lead based paint and acknowledged the risk involved. They took great care and had regular blood tests (so no chewing the end of the paint brush for inspiration). One of the team had just retired in full health after 52 years of painting, 5 days a week and others had been in the job for years. For them the end result was worth the small risk. Thank goodness thread isn’t anything like as dangerous.