English embroidery.(Metropolitan Museum of Art collection)

This month an exhibition of some eighty of the finest examples of English embroidery from the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art opens in the galleries at the Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture in New York. The embroidered objects were created and used during the late Tudor and Stuart eras English gentry for personal adornment and to decorate their houses. As such, they often feature designs and patterns that reflect contemporary trends such as religious ideals, educational concepts, and fashionable motifs. The aim of the exhibition, which also includes comparative supplemental material from the Metropolitan Museum and other lenders, is to contextualize the embroideries in a way that has not been done before.

The box illustrated on page 20, for example, is embroidered with personifications of the five senses and fitted for writing implements. Its decoration reflects the popularity of sets of allegorical prints, which began to be produced and sold in England in the 1620s and reflected, in turn, a fashion for similar kinds of prints on the Continent. Along with the senses, series of the seven liberal arts and the four seasons were produced in innumerable versions at varying levels of quality.

The convention of the senses personified by women with the particular attribute of each ...