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Miss M. A. Honeywell […] Fine Cutting and Embroidery, on Paper, Executed by Herself, without Hands
Martha Ann Honeywell was one of dozens of atypically figured itinerant artists and performers in the early nineteenth century. She was born with truncated arms and legs, no hands, and only one small foot with three toes. She learned to make paper cutouts and silhouettes, embroider, create waxwork, and write in miniature. Honeywell was a savvy businesswoman who for most of her career traveled alone on national and international tours earning her own living. She exhibited her works in a beautiful traveling pavilion at parades and fairs. -
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[Cover art for vellucent binding]
Dorothy Carlton Smyth, one of the esteemed “Glasgow Girls,” taught design at the Glasgow School of Art along with Jessie M. King and Frances Macdonald. She was noted for her costume design and book decoration. Smyth also worked for Chivers’ bindery in Bath as a book designer and illuminator. She created this design for a vellucent binding for Tennyson’s Poetical Works. In this technique, the design is painted on the underside of transparent vellum. Smyth was appointed the first female director of the Glasgow School of Art in 1933, but died before taking up the post. -
The Passionate Pilgrim & the Songs in Shakespeare's Plays
The Royal School of Art Needlework was founded in 1872 to create employment for women and to restore ornamental needlework to the significant place it once held among the decorative arts. The school did make embroidered bindings, but more frequently created painted vellum bindings. Blank vellum bindings were made by either Zaehnsdorf or Morrell’s trade binderies and were painted by the women workers at the Royal School of Art Needlework to be sold. Often the painted designs were of themes, characters, or scenes not at all related to the book’s text. The woman who painted this illuminated vellum binding is not identified, as was often the case for RSAN bindings. The school produced painted vellum bindings between 1888 and 1898. They are often fragile. This painted vellum binding is reminiscent of eighteenth-century crewelwork: Tudor roses and stylized carnations inhabit raised tree branches; flying (!) and grazing deer are three-dimensional, composed of gold leaf applied over gesso, as is the lettering. A paper ticket is present inside the lower cover: “Royal School of Art Needlework. Exhibition Road, South Kensington.” -
Of the Friendship of Amis and Amile
May Morris was an artist, embroiderer, designer, socialist, and suffragist. A daughter of Jane and William Morris, she lived much of her life at Kelmscott House, a major center of the Arts and Crafts movement in England. She managed the embroidery division of Morris and Company, founded by her father. In 1907 she co-founded the Women’s Guild of Arts in response to the exclusion of women from the Art Worker’s Guild. In 1909, while on a lecture tour of the United States, she met New York lawyer and collector John Quinn, with whom she had a short romantic relationship. She presented him with a Kelmscott edition of Amis and Amile, held in her own designed and hand-stitched silk pouch. The book was bound by Katharine Adams in gold-tooled green pigskin in 1894. Adams, her close childhood friend, trained as a binder under Sarah T. Prideaux and established the Eadburgha Bindery in Broadway, Worcestershire. -
Goblin Market
Laurence Housman’s illustrations of Christina Rossetti’s poem were engraved by his sister Clemence Housman. Both Housmans were socialists, writers, and artists. Together they founded the Suffrage Atelier and worked closely with the Women’s Social and Political Union. Gloria Cardew, whose label is on the front pastedown, was a prolific hand-colorist of book illustration, often working for the Guild of Women-Binders, as well as the Kelmscott and Vale Presses. Little is known of her. It is thought that her name is a pseudonym, though her photograph was published in the 1898 exhibition catalogue of the Guild of Women-Binders (also present in the collection). -
In Memoriam
Irish-born artist, muralist, bookbinder, embroiderer, enamelist, and designer Phoebe Anna Traquair was a stellar figure of the Arts and Crafts movement in Scotland. In the 1880s, Traquair developed an interest in medieval book illumination and corresponded with John Ruskin, who loaned her manuscripts from his personal library. In her illuminated In Memoriam, Traquair marries the influences of William Blake and medieval illumination. This manuscript provides evidence of the connections between the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the Arts and Crafts movement. Henry Cunynghame, who commissioned the manuscript, inscribed its story on one of the front end-leaves of the book, noting that he met Traquair through the artist William Holman Hunt, a prominent member of the Pre-Raphaelites. Cunynghame also recounts the history of Tennyson’s signature, noting that Tennyson was initially reluctant to sign, but after some time with the manuscript, he returned it with his name on the title page. Although Traquair previously completed other works of illumination, art historian Elizabeth Cumming describes In Memoriam as “[her] first true test of dedication to this craft.” -
Te Deum Laudamus
The medieval-inspired illuminations by printer Emily Faithfull’s sister Esther Faithfull Fleet are dazzling. This is one of two books published by Faithfull’s Victoria Press that are printed using chromolithography. Both are illuminated by Fleet. The other, 38 Texts, is also in the collection. The Victoria Press maintained a reputation for excellent work, and Faithfull was appointed Printer and Publisher in Ordinary to the Queen. Te Deum Laudamus was dedicated to Queen Victoria, with her permission. -
[Flowers]
The collection contains a significant gathering of materials written by and relating to Charlotte, Ann, and Emily Brontë. Charlotte used the newly fashionable style of embroidery known as “Berlin woolwork” to create this needlework in wool yarn on canvas. The style was being promoted at a time when a greater number of women had leisure time that might be devoted to decorative needlework. The single sheet patterns were inexpensive and easy to translate to the canvas. The design relates to a watercolor by Charlotte Brontë, circa 1831–1832, now in the Brontë Parsonage Museum. -
Plates Illustrating the Geology & Scenery of Massachusetts
Orra White Hitchcock’s geological and botanical illustrations were published to accompany her husband Edward Hitchcock’s Report on the Geology, Mineralogy, Botany, and Zoology of Massachusetts, the first state geology published. She began her career teaching young women at Deerfield Academy, where she met Edward, who became a leading geologist and president of Amherst College. Orra’s work was integral to that of her husband, who atypically always gave her credit for her work. As a scientist herself, she observed and drew hundreds of specimens of native plants, mushrooms, and lichen. She was one of the most important American scientific illustrators of the time. -
Floriana or the Method of Constructing Artificial Flowers
This carefully written and illustrated manuscript teaches in minute detail the methods taught to Matilda St. Clair, now Madame de Rhinfeld, for constructing artificial flowers. Growing up in a convent in France, she was instructed by the nuns in each aspect of creating the flowers: dyeing silks, cutting muslin, and forming each individual petal and leaf. She used this skill to earn her living in England. Her watercolors individually dissect twenty-four different artificial flowers; included is a drawn foldout plate of her tools. The pages of delicately embellished instructions, in floral borders, are accompanied by poetry and commentary related to each flower. -
L'entrée de l'Empereur Sigismond a Mantouë: gravé en vingt cinq feuilles, d'après une longue frise exécutée en stuc dans le palais du T. de la même ville, sur un dessin de Jules Romain
Antoinette Bouzonette Stella was born into a family of goldsmiths and engravers. She and her sister Claudine trained with their uncle Jacques Stella, a painter and engraver, who had an atelier in the Palais de Louvre. This series of her engravings is after sculpture in the Palazzo del Te in Mantua by Gulio Romano and Primaticcio depicting the Emperor Sigismund's entry into Mantua in 1432. They were first published in 1675. These are impressions from the original plates, published sometime after 1787. -
Erucarum ortus, alimentum et paradoxa metamorphosis: in qua origo, pabulum, transformatio, nec non tempus, locus & proprietates erucarum, vermium, papilionum, phalaenarum, muscarum, aliorumque hujusmodi exsanguium animalculorum exhibentur: in favorem, atque insectorum, herbarum, florum, & plantarum amatorum, tùm etiam pictorum, limbolariorum, aliorumque commodum exactè inquisita, ad vivum delineata, typis excusa, compendiosèque descripta
Keenly observant entomologist and artist Maria Sibylla Merian was the first to study and depict the metamorphosis of insects in the field. She taught girls botanical drawing and sold her specimens, prints, and books to earn a living. Her first work, Der raupen wunderbare verwandlung, was published in Nuremberg between 1679 and 1683. Erucarum ortus is a reworking of Der raupen, translated into Latin by her daughter Dorothea. This copy includes many counterproofs, printed from a wet impression, to create a print in reverse. The collection also includes Merian’s De europische insecten (Amsterdam, 1730). -
Villa Benedetta
Elpidio Benedetti’s villa near Porta San Pancrazio was designed by the Roman architect, sculptor and painter Plautilla Bricci, who was the only female architect of her time. Though Benedetti claimed that Plautilla only assisted her brother Basilio, the surviving building contract and drawings attribute the design of the villa solely to Plautilla. Benedetti subsequently commissioned Plautilla Bricci to design another work, the chapel in San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome for which she also carved reliefs and sculpture. Villa Benedetta was completed in 1665. It was destroyed in 1849 during the bombing of the Roman Republic. -
Flora, ouero, Cultura di fiori
Jesuit botanist Giovanni Battista Ferrari’s book on cultivating and planning gardens is one of the loveliest books to be produced in seventeenth-century Rome. It is filled with inventive engravings of complex garden designs along with stunningly drawn plates of individual flowers and plants; the plant names are heralded in beribboned banners. Many well-known artists collaborated to illustrate the production, including the Florentine painter and printmaker Anna Maria Vaiani, who designed and engraved a number of the plates. Vaiani, commissioned to paint a fresco in one of the Vatican chapels, was a member of the circles of Galileo and the noted collector and patron of the arts Cassiano dal Pozzo. -
Letter to Cassiano dal Pozzo
Artemesia Gentileschi was one of the most accomplished artists of the seventeenth century and the first woman to become a member of Florence’s Accademia e Compagnia delle Arti del Disegno. Her Susannah and the Elders, painted when she was sixteen and working in her father Orazio’s studio, is likely the first nude painted by a women artist. Gentileschi’s powerful depictions of women, memorably her Judith and Holofernes and Mary Magdalen, brought her notice. This letter to the scholar, and her great patron, Cassiano dal Pozzo requests permission for her assistant to carry arms as she is now living in Naples, a more dangerous city. She promises that she is sending “my portrait, which you once requested.” -
Corona delle nobili et virtuose donne. Fatti da Lugretia Romana
This series of four lace-pattern books published by Italian engraver and painter Cesare Vecellio first appeared from 1591-1596. At the time, lace was used extravagantly on both male and female clothing, as well as on linens. This series was the most extensive collection of lace patterns published to that point, and it was frequently reprinted. The dedication page of the fourth volume (dated 1616) is signed by Isabetta Alberti, who writes, “I came upon them [the lace designs] by chance and by means of my prints may works invented with such exquisiteness and diligence not remain in the shadows.” -
Dialoghi di Don Antonio Agostini arciuescouo di Tarracona intorno alle medaglie, inscrittioni et altre antichità
This handsome folio of Agustín’s work on antiquities is considered the first book to contain illustrations by a woman artist, Geronima Parasole. The powerful Athena on the title page and the large woodcuts of triumphal arches bear various versions of her initials, “P. M.” and “G. A. P.” The knife next to her signature, boldly centered in the image, indicates that she cut as well as drew the blocks. The print shop where she worked was a family enterprise of the Parasole and Norsini families. Her sister-in-law, artist Elisabetta Catanea Parasole, made a number of extraordinarily beautiful, and extremely rare, lace model books.
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