A fine 17th century needlework picture

With various Biblical vignettes among an array of flora and fauna, worked in silk and metal thread in tent stitch, stem stitch, couching stitch and French knots. Although the design and techniques used in the creation of this panel are typical of mid 17th century English needlework, the subject, which consists of various unrelated Old Testament figures combined in the same setting, is not. At the centre King Solomon stands on a richly carpeted dais beneath an exquisitely draped and decorated canopy as he would in depictions of his Judgement, but with no supplicants upon which to exercise his wisdom; to the left, Ishmael walks hand in hand with his mother Hagar, but without the figure of Abraham to banish them from his home; while to the right Pharoah’s daughter retrieves Moses from the Nile as her handmaidens rush to aid her. A panel in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (acc. no. 64.101.1304), dated ‘1669’ and worked in wool rather than silk, presents a similar agglomeration of scenes and is described thus by Melinda Watt in the catalogue ‘English Embroidery from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1580-1700 – ’Twixt Art and Nature’, (publ. Yale, 2008, cat. no. 25), ‘…a small compendium of religious imagery, each story rendered in a kind of shorthand with only the key scene in the narrative nestled within the pictorial landscape conventions of this type’.
Origin: England
Size: 40 x 51 cm
Date: Circa 1660
Ref: 77

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