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Miss Elizabeth Allen – Introduction
Miss Elizabeth Allen – Catalogue Raisonné
Miss Elizabeth Allen – Exhibitions & Press
Reproduced by kind permission of the author, Hazel Conway, and The British Quilt Study Group, who initially published this essay in ‘Quilt Studies’, the Journal of The British Quilt Study Group, Issue 18, 2017.
Queen’s Pictures: The Life & Work Of The Artist Elizabeth Allen
Introduction
The artist, Elizabeth Allen (1883-1967), also known by her childhood nickname of ‘Queen’,[i] received acclaim for her pictures from fellow artists, critics and the public alike, during a brief period in the 1960s. She was a seamstress who had learnt her trade from an early age in her father’s tailoring workshop and she used the medium of fabric to create colourful, highly imaginative and symbolic pictures; many had a religious theme, reflecting her deep interest in the Bible and, in particular, prophecies concerning the end of the world; others were quirky comments on aspects of modern life, from her own, very particular, world view. She produced a fabric book, which she called her, ‘Autobiraggraphy’, a unique work of art telling her life story in a series of vivid pictures. Her work was exhibited throughout the U.K. and abroad during the two years prior to her death but is now largely unknown.
How The Pictures Were Discovered
The pictures might have remained hidden from public view forever, if it had not been for the intervention, late in Queen’s life, of a young woman named Bridget Poole, then an eighteen year-old student at Ravensbourne College of Art. In 1964, following their mother’s example of looking out for their elderly neighbours, Bridget and her sister first began visiting Queen in her tiny shack in the woods, on the Aperfield Estate,[ii] in Biggin Hill, Kent. Bridget was fascinated by the charismatic woman who had such strong religious views and she soon made regular visits to the hut where she and Queen talked for hours. The two developed a close friendship and after a while Bridget left her family home and went to live with Queen, staying for three years, until the artist’s death, caring for her and helping her with her pictures in small ways. They lived a simple life, with just Queen’s old-age pension as income. The hut in the woods had only an outside tap and they relied on oil for cooking and heating.
One evening in autumn of 1965, the painter, Trevor Bell[iii] and the sculptor, Kit Twyford,[iv] at that time tutors at Ravensbourne College of Art, drove along a remote, muddy track on the Aperfield Estate until they arrived at the small corrugated iron shack, surrounded by thick foliage and brambles. Intrigued by descriptions of the pictures from two of Bridget’s fellow students and concerned for Bridget, who had, by now, stopped attending college, they had decided to investigate for themselves; but they had no idea of the remarkable situation they were about to find. Bridget opened the door and they had their first glimpse of Queen (who was then 81 years old), a moment clearly recalled by Trevor Bell, almost 50 years later; he remembered,
‘A little old lady, reclining on a vivid green sofa, and wearing a dress the same shade of green. With her club foot in its enormous shoe she was an extraordinary sight. Piled up against the wall and in a second room were what seemed to be hundreds of pictures made of fabric and mounted on hardboard’.[v]
Excited by the unexpected discovery of these works of art, which he and Twyford immediately recognised as being very special, Bell lost no time in urging his friend, the painter, Patrick Heron,[vi] to accompany himself and Twyford next time they visited Queen. And so in December that year, the three of them, together with another painter, Michael Kidner,[vii] made a second trip to the little shack in the woods.
Patrick Heron described his feelings on seeing the pictures: ‘So it was. . .that I was utterly carried away by the magical beauty and profundity of her pictures, and, after being shown perhaps fifty works, suggested that we ask Queen’s permission to borrow twenty of them to take back with us to London that very night.’[viii]
The four artists enlisted the help of two more colleagues; the painter Justin Knowles,[ix] and art historian Professor Norbert Lynton,[x] and the six formed a trust to oversee the management of Queen’s pictures. Within two days, Twyford and Knowles had met Andreas Kalman,[xi] the director of the Crane Kalman Gallery, and arranged for Elizabeth Allen’s first exhibition at his gallery in Brompton Road in London. The exhibition, held from 18th February to 12th March, 1966, was a huge success and received favourable reviews in both local and national newspapers. Norbert Lynton, writing in the Guardian suggested that Klee and Matisse would have been impressed by Elizabeth Allen’s use of colour.[xii] After the First Exhibition a large number of the pictures were sold to individuals and purchases were made on behalf of the Arts Council and the Museum of Sao Paulo, Brazil. A travelling exhibition of over fifty pictures, mostly lent by their new owners, was toured to Art Galleries throughout the British Isles during the remainder of 1966 and into 1967.[xiii]
Elizabeth Allen’s Early Life
Elizabeth Allen was born in 1883, above a baker’s shop in Tottenham, east London. She was one of the 17 children of John Koch, a tailor, who had emigrated from Germany at the age of 16 and his Irish wife, Mary Anne Allen.[xiv] By the time that Elizabeth was seven years old the family had moved to south Islington, and on the census for 1891, John Koch is described as a ‘journeyman tailor’ and Mary Anne as a ‘tailoress’. The eldest son, also John, aged 16, is a ‘tailor’s apprentice’.[xv] Elizabeth learnt to sew in the family workshop and ten years later, the 1901 census has her, aged 17, listed as a ‘tailoress’, working at home; her brother, Arthur, aged 15, is a ‘trouser presser’.[xvi] By the time of the 1911 census, John and Mary had both died and Elizabeth is found in Church Street, Islington, together with her older brother, James(30) and younger sister, Ruth(20), all three being described as ‘trouser makers’, working at home’.[xvii] Another 14 year old sister, Evangeline, living at the same address, is described as a ‘shop girl’. The Koch family changed their name to Allen in the early years of the 20th century, when it was not advisable to advertise one’s German origins.
Elizabeth was born with one leg shorter than the other and with curvature of the spine; throughout her life she wore a built up shoe on her right foot and used a crutch.[xviii] However, she seems to have been compensated for her disabilities with an independent and inquiring mind and a strong sense of self.
In an interview with an Evening Standard journalist in 1967 she recounted how, as a child, she had questioned her mother about why she had been born this way; unhappy with the reply she received her reaction was typically forthright and defiant: ‘I asked her, (her mother), why I had got this body and she said, “It’s the sins of the fathers falling on the children”, so I said, “I’m not going to have that God, why should he curse a harmless little baby in your womb?”’ [xix]
Doubtless there were other instances of Elizabeth expressing views which clashed with her mother’s, as she further asserted that her mother had condemned her as an atheist and eventually threw her out of the family home.[xx] These early experiences led Elizabeth to search for the true God and she began to study the Bible, especially the Old Testament prophecies concerning the end of the world. She arrived at her own very individual Christian beliefs which were to inspire many of her pictures and which she adhered to throughout her life.
It is not known when she began making pictures from scraps of material but it is likely to have been during her early years in her parents’ workshop, when she had access to the cut off pieces of fabric discarded during the tailoring process. Because of her disability, she was unable to lead the normal life of a young woman at that time, enjoying activities such as dancing and other forms of socialising. She also recalled, ‘We had a big tailoring workshop and I learnt to sew. I wanted to be independent. I couldn’t go out to amuse myself like everyone else but I had a whole sackful of pieces of cloth and I thought they would make a lovely scene. A picture dawns as soon as I see a lovely piece of cloth’.[xxi]
Bridget Poole
The most important person in Queen’s life during her final years was Bridget Poole, the young art student who had become her companion and devoted carer. As Bridget was instrumental in bringing Queen’s pictures to public view,[xxii] I realised that my research would be far from complete without her input and consequently, having managed to contact her, I was delighted that she felt able to share with me her memories of Queen and their life together; she provided her unique insight into Queen’s personality, both as an individual and as an artist and gave me fascinating information about the way the pictures were made. When we met Bridget talked about her daily life with Queen and I was also able to view a number of pictures, which had remained unsold after the exhibitions.[xxiii]
Bridget told me that all the fabrics Queen used were recycled from old clothing, apart from Vilene,[xxiv] which was the only material she ever bought; a useful fabric which had the advantages of not fraying and of taking dye well. Vilene featured frequently in her pictures, and sometimes she dyed it in Dylon before drying it on top of the oil heater.[xxv] Bridget described how Queen sat on the couch, which served as her bed at night, and made the pictures on her knees, cutting a shape straight out, without using a template. As she worked Bridget would read to her from the newspaper and they listened to the Home Service on the radio.
She recalled how she and her sister had threaded needles with black thread for Queen as she was unable to see the thread, although other colours did not seem to be a problem. Queen used a tailor’s thimble, which is one without a top. This enables the sewer to make the stitch and push it through the fabric with the side of the thimble, all in one movement. Bridget explained that she had only helped with the pictures in small ways, such as finding drawings of eagles for Queen to copy for the picture she called ‘The Three-Headed Eagle of Prophecy’, a title which refers to a vision in the Second Book of Esdras, an apocryphal text. She thought that she had probably contributed to some of the sewing in later pictures when Queen’s eyesight was failing but that this would have been only hemming the bindings which framed the pictures. She was clear that the designs were all Queen’s own work; the colours and composition of the pictures was all the more remarkable, she felt, because they were made at such close quarters and never viewed from a distance. Although she was an art student Bridget said that she had brought nothing from her training which would have had an influence on the pictures in any way and that Queen’s use of colour, her method of composition and of creating atmosphere were innate and were all her own.[xxvi]
Queen was an expert needlewoman and worked non-stop almost until the day she died. Some of her pictures are very simple but beautiful compositions of vases of flowers or a figure in a garden. These, Queen called her ‘pot-boilers’, pictures which she made when she was not working on one of her more important projects. The flowers had a characteristic shape; they were usually small, gathered rosettes, often with a sequin at the centre and reminiscent of the ‘Suffolk Puffs’ used for quilts in the 1950s and 60s. Her female figures, too, had a recognisable, slim, 1920s or 30s narrow silhouette and often wore a hat of the period.[xxvii] An integral part of all the pictures is a fabric frame which complements and completes the work.
Bridget recalled one day seeing an advertisement in a Sunday newspaper, headed ‘BUNCE!’[xxviii] It was from a textile warehouse offering bankrupt stock at a bargain price. Queen eagerly sent away for some of the ribbons, beads, braid and other trimmings. She had often used sequins in her pictures but these newly-acquired decorative items must have given her added inspiration for her subsequent work.
Queen’s Inspiration
Queen’s religious faith was her principal inspiration, particularly the prophetic and apocalyptic texts of the Old Testament,[xxix] which she read assiduously, trying to work out the meaning of the prophecies. She also studied The Apocrypha, a collection of fifteen books which are outside the canon of the Hebrew scriptures and so were not included in the Old Testament. The word ‘Apocrypha’ means ‘the hidden things’ and was taken by some to mean that the works could not be understood by the general reader.[xxx] Queen believed that she was able to understand messages in the Bible, which, until that time, had not been discovered by priests or scholars. The book of The Revelation of St John the Divine, in the New Testament, apocalyptic literature which foretold the Second Coming of Christ and the Last Judgement, was another favourite work and visions of the end of the world are often referenced in the pictures and in the ‘Autobiraggraphy’. Bridget described Queen’s religious beliefs as ‘exclusive’; she told me that Queen saw herself as being present at the Last Trump but was certain that there would be very few other people there with her! Her mission was to deliver a strong message to the world about its wickedness; she was sure that the world was against her and was trying to suppress that message.[xxxi]
These beliefs form the narrative for many of her pictures but she was also influenced by topical events of the time, filtered through the medium of the radio and newspapers, by literature and music and perhaps, most of all, by the events of her own life which was, in the main, one of hardship and deprivation. Her remarkable imagination transformed these stories and events into wondrous evocations of a fairy-tale nature, full of colour and rich visual imagery.
Although embroidery and textile art were at the forefront of the cultural changes taking place in the mid-1960s,[xxxii] there is no evidence to suggest that Queen’s work was influenced by that of another artist and it is extremely unlikely that she had ever visited an art gallery or come into contact with any other artists before she met Heron, Twyford and Bell.[xxxiii]
The First Exhibition of Patchwork Pictures by Miss Elizabeth Allen
18th February – 12th March 1966
The First Exhibition featured a range of pictures, of both a religious and secular nature. In some of the earliest of these, Queen used fairly muted colours[xxxiv]. ‘Alice in Jungle-land’, an early example of her work, is largely done in such colours and also demonstrates Queen’s extensive use of Vilene; a letter, written by Queen to its purchaser sheds an interesting light on this picture.
She wrote: ‘So pleased to know you have bought the “Three-Headed Eagle” and “Alice in Jungle-land” because I am Alice and this world of wars and strife and thugs and poverty is the Jungle-land in which Bridgie and I are living. And I have lived in it for 83 years and I ought to know.’ [xxxv]
‘Alice in Jungle-land’ conveyed Queen’s feelings about her alienation from the modern world which for her had always been a place of suffering. These feelings were intensified by her belief in the importance of the day of judgement and the second coming of Christ; this was the world in which she looked forward to living and which was, in many ways, more real to her than her day-to-day existence in mid-20th century Britain.
In his introduction to the catalogue of the First Exhibition Patrick Heron commented on a stylistic progression within the pictures[xxxvi]; ‘Babylon riding on the Great Red Dragon’, gives an idea of this development. The title of the picture refers to a passage in the apocalyptic book of the New Testament, The Revelation of St John the Divine, which describes the harlot, Babylon, later thought to represent Rome, riding on the back of the Great Red Dragon.[xxxvii] The scarlet beast is described as having seven heads and ten horns; the harlot is said to be ‘clothed in purple and scarlet and bedizened with gold and jewels and pearls.’ This picture demonstrates Queen’s remarkable use of colour and her natural ability with composition. She used mainly red, orange and black fabrics to represent this scene which is dominated by the image of a richly robed harlot and a truly fantastical, many-toothed dragon; sequins and beads decorate the harlot’s long hair and her dress and she wears jewellery around her neck and arms. In the foreground a group of people representing the faithful of all the nations of the world, dressed in their national costumes are being received by Christ, the King, into his kingdom. Christ, robed in red and with a crown on his head, stands before his sumptuous palace with its many stained-glass windows.
Another powerful picture from the First Exhibition which was used for the cover of the catalogue is ‘The Fish that Swallowed Jonah’ (shown above). This shows Jonah in colourful, embroidered robes, having fallen from the equally brightly-coloured boat, about to be swallowed by the huge whale, while other sea creatures swim around them. The city of Ninevah and its wicked inhabitants are darkly present in the background.[xxxviii] This picture, with its bold composition has a total disregard for perspective, with Jonah, the boat and the whale being of more or less equal size. It has a wonderfully naïve and dream-like quality to it.
‘The Black Feet are Kicking’ is a striking picture which Queen made in response to news reports of African countries gaining their independence from Britain during the 1950s and 60s.[xxxix] It is executed entirely in black fabric on a creamy-white ground, apart from the sequins on the heads of the figures and the tinsel thread around their necks. A sequin eye looks down on the moving figures and a large brick or stone is descending from the top of the picture. Queen would have seen this loss of British colonial territory as fulfilling the prophecy that a large stone would fall upon a succession of different empires,[xl] from the apocalyptic writing in the book of Daniel. This is an extremely powerful picture and it demonstrates how Queen, while actually living in the 20th century, was also deeply immersed in the prophetic world of the Bible.[xli]
‘Population Explosion’, which is in the Folk Art collection at the Compton Verney Art Gallery shows a woman lying in a hospital bed attended by a nurse. Seven babies lie next to her in cots. The gallery guide states that this picture was made following a news item Queen had heard on the radio about a woman in South America who had taken a fertility drug and subsequently gave birth to seven stillborn babies.[xlii] The picture carries a subtle message about the consequences of interfering with divine laws.[xliii]
A humorous picture about the pop group, the Beatles, prompted by John Lennon’s celebrated remark about their being more popular than Christ shows the famous four in church as small beetles crawling up the altar cloth. At the altar itself stands Christ in Majesty, looking down at one of the insects. The picture is entitled, ‘Beetles come and go but Christ remains forever’.[xliv]
The Second Exhibition of Patchwork Pictures by Miss Elizabeth Allen
April 1967
Following the First Exhibition Elizabeth Allen made over forty new pictures which formed the core of the Second Exhibition held in the Crane Kalman Gallery in April 1967. These pictures were then shown in October of that year at an exhibition at the Fleischer Anhalt Gallery in Los Angeles and she received an invitation to show at the Salon Internacional De Arte in Barcelona. There was a great deal of critical attention in the press, in the U.K and on the Continent and both the BBC and ITV devoted television broadcasts to her and her work.[xlv]
Once again Patrick Heron wrote the Preface to the catalogue with no less enthusiasm than he had shown for the earlier pictures. He also expressed his astonishment at Queen’s achievement in creating so many new works, considering both her age and her state of health.[xlvi]
After the success of the First Exhibition Queen received several parcels of cloth from people who had visited the exhibition or had read about her in magazine articles. This may have inspired her work as there was a noticeable change in her style at this time. Her designs became simpler and the content had more of a symbolic nature, while her use of colour was more subtle, with some pictures consisting almost entirely of closely related colours, such as reds and pinks and oranges or blacks and greys. The picture of a large bird or swan (Untitled), a composition which uses a variety of black fabrics, including velvet, illustrates this change.
The Autobiraggraphy
This unique work of art, dated 1961, is Queen’s own celebration of her life; portrayed in vivid pictures, and accompanied by biblical references it is, perhaps, the pinnacle of her achievements. The book does not follow a straightforward narrative, rather, incidents of affliction or persecution she has undergone are depicted and show how, through her suffering, she has fulfilled certain prophecies. Queen must have made the book as individual pages and put them together later, as each picture has an explanation in her own handwriting on the reverse, much of it in the form of biblical texts. Thus the book gives a fascinating glimpse into Queen’s mind and goes some way to explaining her very singular world view. The first page reads: ‘The Autobiraggraphy of her called Elizabeth Allen, In the Year of Grace 1961.’ The accompanying picture is of a female figure dressed in Victorian costume, walking towards a house or hut, carrying a dish of food. In the sky a small angel seems to glide among the stars and a crescent moon, adorned with sequins shines down. In this annunciation scene, the angel visits Elizabeth’s mother, Mary-Ann and announces the birth of her daughter. The following left-hand page reads: ‘To John and Mary-Ann Koch a Daughter – Elizabeth 1883.’
A page (above) which shows a picture of Queen (identified by her built up shoe) working out a sum on a piece of paper, while an angel holds up a scroll with prophecy on it, has the explanation that ‘Elizabeth found the answer to the sum’. The answer was 1996; she believed that she had worked out the date of the last days when the world would end.
Another page depicts the incident when Queen was evicted from her cottage (above), showing her with her belongings, on the grass outside. Policemen are present and her furniture is being removed. The text on the reverse of this picture reads: ‘1934. She is wrongfully evicted from her cottage in Suffolk which she rented from the vicar’s wife. And being made homeless she fled back to London having lost her home. Vengeance is mine saith the Lord and I will repay.’
A picture of Queen with her crutch and built up shoe and also wearing wings, appears next, together with an image of a magnificent red dragon (below). The reference for this section of the book is Revelation Chapter 12, in which the writer has a vision of a woman robed with the sun and on her head a crown of twelve stars. He then sees a war in heaven between Michael and the dragon (Satan). The accompanying text reads: ‘And voices saying to her, Come out you old witch. We will dig you a deep grave and put a stake through your heart so that you will never rise again. And the sounds of digging the grave = the floods poured from the mouth of the dragon threatening to destroy the woman. And a great voice saying, over the air, “Now we have got you we will never let you go.” These voices were heard in 1930.’
Queen told friends that she heard voices coming to her through the radio.[xlvii] It also seems as if she suffered harassment from neighbours or children at some point in her life, either because of her disability, her eccentric lifestyle or perhaps her biblical utterances. What is clear is that she saw every instance of cruelty or rejection as a fulfilment of the suffering which a Christian must go through before coming into the Kingdom of God. And whatever the source of the voices she heard, they, too, were all part of God’s plan for her.
This book is a wonderful object and it is to be hoped that it will eventually be placed in a museum as the trustees of Queen’s pictures expected that it would be.[xlviii] It is a moving testimony to Elizabeth Allen’s life and gives the strongest statement of her message to the world. In spite of her inauspicious start in life and the suffering and poverty she endured until the end, her determination and self-belief are evident in the Autobiraggraphy. I was told that Queen felt that the exhibitions of her work were her right and no more than what was due to her; they must have seemed to her a vindication of all that she had been trying to achieve throughout her life and that finally she was able to get her message out into the world.
Sadly, she herself was unable to attend any of the exhibitions of her work, because of poor health and limited mobility. In the summer of 1967 illness forced her to retire to bed; she refused all medical help and so it fell to Bridget to nurse her. A house had been bought for her with the money from the pictures but she was never able to move into it and she died on 6th July that year in the small shack in the woods.
Elizabeth Allen’s Work In Context:
Folk Art
A tradition of pictures created from fabric, wool or thread, exists within the field referred to as ‘folk art’, or ‘English popular art’ a broad genre covering numerous different crafts including samplers, embroidered pictures and patchwork and quilting. [xlix] The Folk Art exhibition held at the Tate Gallery in 2014 showed examples of sailors’ woolwork pictures, samplers and the intricate ‘needle-paintings’ of Mary Linwood as well as pictures by the tailor, George Smart, who combined drawing with fabric appliqué.[l] Ruth Kenny in her catalogue essay for the exhibition quotes Jane Kallir’s definition of folk art as ‘a catchall category for misfits – wallflowers at the dance of Western civilisation’[li]. This is, perhaps, a little unkind as, although difficult to categorise, folk art covers the vast range of artefacts made from time immemorial by ordinary people, craftsmen and women for use or ornamentation in their everyday lives. Folk Art does, however, show a degree of individuality, a definite quality of Elizabeth Allen’s work. Kenny also references John Craske, a fisherman from Norfolk, who embroidered pictures of boats and the sea as an escape from his mental health problems.[lii] Craske was similarly ‘discovered’ in 1927 but his work remains more ‘mainstream’ than that of Elizabeth Allen.[liii]
Often overlooked in the past, folk art is now widely regarded and valued for the unique insight it gives into the occupations and recreation of our forbears,[liv] and as such constitutes an important visual connection to the social fabric of the past.
Vases and baskets of fruit were favourite subjects for fabric pictures during the Regency period and the embroiderer, Thomasina Beck thinks that the similarity of the flowers in some of these designs suggests that applique versions may have been available as kits with the felt already cut out.[lv] She also notes that ‘scissors with blades strong and sharp enough to cut firm, closely-woven woollen materials such as broadcloth and felt into the most delicate flower petals were available at the time’.[lvi]
Naïve Art
Elizabeth Allen has sometimes been described as a ‘naïve’ artist[lvii] and her work compared to that of the Cornish painter, Alfred Wallis, (1855-1942). A former fisherman, with no artistic training, Alfred Wallis began painting after the death of his wife in the mid-1920s when he was over 70 years of age.[lviii] His simple but striking compositions of boats, the sea and the town of St Ives in Cornwall were painted with household or boat paint on pieces of wooden board or cardboard.
Naïve or ‘primitive’ art is characterised by an essentially child-like quality which disregards accepted artistic conventions such as awareness of human anatomy and the use of perspective. It has an uninhibited, non-intellectual quality and a direct, emotional response to the object depicted.[lix]
Both Elizabeth Allen and Alfred Wallis created from an inner certainty of vision, using whatever materials were to hand and both were seemingly oblivious to contemporary artistic trends and movements. There are striking similarities in their chosen liftestyles of comparative isolation from and rejection of the modern world and in their fervent espousal of fundamentalist Christian beliefs. Wallis’s work was discovered by the artists Ben Nicholson and Christopher Wood in 1928 and after his death he became an iconic figure for artists of the ‘St Ives School’.[lx]
A posthumous joint exhibition of the work of Elizabeth Allen with Alfred Wallis, was mounted at the Fleischer Anhalt Gallery in Los Angeles in 1968 and at La Boetie Gallery, New York in 1969.[lxi] This exhibition was shown again in November and December, 1973 at Crane Arts in Kings Road, London and in Germany in February 1976.[lxii]
Tailors & Inlay Patchwork
As a child Elizabeth Allen learnt her needlework skills from her parents in their tailoring workshop. Similar workshops in the nineteenth century were often the source of pictorial quilts, or pictures, produced from suiting samples or offcuts of fabric, using the technique of ‘inlay’ or ‘intarsia’ patchwork. This technique involved placing motifs onto a background fabric and cutting the two together so that there was an exact fit; the edges were then butted together and oversewn.[lxiii]
Clare Rose, in an article for the Victoria and Albert Museum,[lxiv] describes a small panel of intarsia patchwork, which was shown at the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London. Measuring only 43cm by 46cm, it depicts a naïve farmyard scene with men, animals and farm buildings made of wool fabric, embellished with silk embroidery. Rose notes that this nineteenth century panel forms part of a group of patchworks, made by male professionals, which were exhibited for personal profit and to promote social causes such as Temperance and Electoral Reform.[lxv]
Queen’s Legacy
The textile artist Janet Bolton, whose own fabric pictures are widely sought after works of art, generously acknowledges her debt to Queen.[lxvi] Janet recalled that when she began making her own fabric pictures she was unaware of any other artists working in this way. Then, a visit to one of the exhibitions of Queen’s pictures which made a big impression on her helped her to look at different ways of working with fabric. Although Janet’s style is very different, Queen remains an inspiration for her to this day and she makes references to Queen’s pictures both in her books and in her workshop teaching.[lxvii]
Janet’s enthusiastic endorsement of Queen’s work is welcome, especially given that it is a rarity; in researching this paper I was unable to identify any other textile artists who cited her as an influence, indeed, who even knew of her work and I could trace only two other textual references to her.[lxviii] It is instructive to compare the reputation of Elizabeth Allen with that of Alfred Wallis, with whom she once shared an exhibition. While her name has faded into obscurity, his is well-known and his work continues to grow in value.[lxix] It is also noteworthy that no examples of her work were included in the Folk Art Exhibition at Tate Britain in 2014.
Concluding Remarks
It is difficult to reconcile the esteem in which Elizabeth Allen’s work was held by prominent artists of the 1960s with the lack of recognition of her name today [in 2017], just over 50 years later. Ironically the success of the exhibitions may be partly responsible for this situation, as the vast majority of her pictures were sold to private individuals, and, once the exhibitions were over, there was no opportunity for the public to view her work.[lxx] In addition, the flame of publicity generated by her pictures burnt for just two years before it was extinguished by her death in 1967.
The issue of gender may also be relevant here; Alfred Wallis’s art is still very much in the public eye and it is not unknown for the work of female artists in the past to have been overshadowed by that of their male partners or peers.[lxxi] Additionally, how much significance can be attributed to the fact that Elizabeth Allen’s chosen medium was fabric rather than paint or clay? Has her work, in fact, been perceived as ‘craft’ or ‘folk art’, admired but undervalued?
Rozsika Parker in ‘The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine’, links the development of an ideology of femininity with the historical emergence of a clearly defined separation of art and craft.
She suggests that the real differences between art made with thread and art made with paint are in terms of where they were made and who made them and she traces the changing status of embroidery from the Middle Ages, when it was engaged in by both men and women and was considered the equal of painting and sculpture, through to the Renaissance and the emergence of an art/craft divide which led to a hierarchy of art forms. By this time, she notes that :
Embroidery was made in the domestic sphere, usually by women for ‘love’. Painting was produced predominantly, though not only, by men, in the public sphere, for money. The professional branch of embroidery, unlike that of painting, was, from the end of the seventeenth century to the end of the nineteenth century, largely in the hands of working-class women or disadvantaged middle-class women.[lxxii]
Later, in the Victorian era, historians of embroidery obscured its past and instead suggested that embroidery had always been an inherently female activity, a quintessentially feminine craft.[lxxiii] Eventually a total identification was effected between embroidery and the Victorian feminine ideal.[lxxiv] I suggest that this identification of embroidery with women and the domestic sphere has grown to encompass other types of work using fabric and thread, e.g. quilting, patchwork, collage and fabric pictures, and thus these endeavours are more likely to have been viewed as inferior to crafts using other media such as paint or clay.
A 1982 catalogue for an exhibition of quilting, patchwork and applique considers reasons for the work of women in these fields being undervalued. Stating that she believes the best examples of quilting deserve the sort of attention given to the work of artists such as William Morris and Charles Rennie Mackintosh, the author points out the anonymity of the female quilters, women who ‘lived, with few exceptions, far outside the world of high culture which is where the means of establishing artists’ names beyond parochial and family circles have been developed.’[lxxv] This anonymity was ensured, she states, because they were predominantly women and working-class.[lxxvi]
Another perspective on this debate is offered by Phyllis Platt in an article in Embroidery Magazine.[lxxvii] Platt defines a craft as ‘a technique used to produce things for use’ and an art as ‘a technique to express an idea’. She maintains that embroidery has always been both an art and a craft. ‘The two’, she continues ‘are inextricably interwoven in actual practice; they overlap so continually that it is impossible to say where one ends and the other begins; but it is necessary to get clearly in our minds that there is a real difference.’[lxxviii]
A quotation from Roger Fry, near the end of the article underlines this difference: ‘It is not nearly so important whether an artist himself invents a motif as what he makes out of it’.[lxxix]
The artist, Henri Matisse employed just one movement of the scissors when creating his famous paper cut-outs, as did Elizabeth Allen when she cut fabric for her pictures. Matisse remarked that, ‘Scissors can acquire more feeling for line than pencil or charcoal’.[lxxx] In the 21st century textile art is achieving a higher artistic profile than ever before through the work of many talented practitioners who use fabric in new and exciting ways. It is to be hoped that today’s textile artists will succeed in freeing fabric art from its perceived ‘domestic’ associations and that they will bridge the often false divide between ‘art’ and ‘craft’. Elizabeth Allen’s fabric pictures are testament to her unique artistic talent. I hope that in the future they, and she, will achieve the recognition they have, until now, been denied.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the following people for their help in the writing of this paper: firstly, Bridget Poole, for generously agreeing to share with me her memories of Queen and allowing me to reproduce her slides of Queen’s work, also her husband for helpful information; Kit and Jacqui Twyford and Trevor Bell for invaluable conversations and for donating newspaper articles and catalogues; Ronnie Duncan, for allowing me access to his correspondence with Queen, to articles about her life and to his collection of pictures. And to all of the above, many thanks for their generous hospitality and supportive interest. Also, thanks to Janet Bolton for talking to me about Queen’s influence on her work and for magazine pictures.
A BQSG member, Margaret Tucker, first conceived the idea of researching Elizabeth Allen’s work but sadly she died before she was able to proceed very far with her project. I inherited her notes about her initial enquiries.
I am grateful to Carolyn Ferguson for her careful reading of the paper, for many helpful suggestions, for her welcome hospitality and ongoing support.
Finally, thanks to my husband, Michael, for his help and support in so many different ways.
Hazel Conway, 2016
All text with thanks to and © copyright Hazel Conway. Some images as indicated with thanks to and copyright © Michael Conway. With thanks to the author and The British Quilt Study Group for allowing me to reproduce this text and these images here.
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Miss Elizabeth Allen – Introduction
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FOOTNOTES
[i]Anne Sharpley ,’In this shack in the woods Bridget discovered a genius’, Evening Standard (13th April 1967), 7. Recalling her childhood in an interview with the journalist in 1967, Elizabeth Allen said that although her siblings had called her ‘Liz’ she insisted that her name was ‘Elizabeth’. Teasingly they then gave her the title ‘Queen Elizabeth’, later shortened to ‘Queen’. For the rest of her life she called herself ‘Queen’ and was always known to others by this name.
[ii]John Nelson, Grandfather’s Biggin Hill (Bromley Libraries, 2010), 15-18.The Aperfield Estate, 502 acres of pasture, arable and woodland, was sold by auction in 1895; its new owner, F.H. Dougal divided the land into plots and sold them off cheaply to anyone who wished to buy them for whatever purpose, since the land at that time was not subject to any building regulations. Many people who bought plots used them only for picnics on summer weekends and bank holidays. ‘Gradually the landscape became interspersed with summer houses, sheds and temporary buildings of all shapes, colours and sizes.’ Nelson, ibid., 17-18. Queen had lived alone in her shack on the Aperfield Estate for about 30 years before Bridget went to live with her.
[iii] Virginia Button, St. Ives Artists, A Companion, (London: Tate Publishing, 2009), 60. The abstract painter, Trevor Bell, (b. 1930) was one of a group of artists living and working in St. Ives, Cornwall during the 1950s, St. Ives being the epicentre for British abstract art at that time. In1960 he was given the Gregory Fellowship in Painting at the University of Leeds and had major exhibitions in the U.K and the U.S.A during the following three decades. In 1976 he became Professor for Master Painting at Florida State University. He returned to Cornwall in 1996 and had a solo exhibition in 2004 at the Millennium Gallery in St. Ives with which he maintains a long-term relationship. In 2011 The Tate Gallery acquired a further 14 of his works for their permanent collection.
[iv] Christopher (Kit) Twyford (1936-2016) was a constructivist sculptor who studied at the Slade School (1957-60) and won a post-graduate year in Italy. He has exhibited a various galleries including the Redfern Gallery and the Roche Court Sculpture Garden.
[v] Pers. comm., 30th July, 2013, Trevor Bell, Penzance, in conversation.
[vi] Michael McNay, Patrick Heron, St. Ives Artists (London: Tate Publishing, 2002). Patrick Heron, (1920-1999), a leading post-war British painter and member of the ‘St.Ives School’, of abstract painting, was also a textile designer and an art critic.
[vii] www.michaelkidner.com. (Accessed 10th February 2015). Michael Kidner, R.A. (1917-2009), an influential abstract painter and sculptor, was a pioneer of ‘Op Art’ in the mid-1960s. Many important collections, including the Tate Gallery, have examples of his work.
[viii] Patrick Heron, ‘Elizabeth Allen (Queen)’ First Exhibition of Patchwork Pictures by Miss Elizabeth Allen, 18th February – 12th March 1966, (London: Crane Kalman Gallery,1966).
[ix]www.independent.co.uk/obituaries, (Accessed 10th February 2015). Justin Knowles (1935-2004) was an abstract painter and sculptor who had no formal training and only began painting at the age of 30. After initial success with several exhibitions and work in important collections he stopped exhibiting in 1973 following a fire in which his uninsured studio and most of his work was destroyed. A visit from Patrick Heron in 1991 sparked his return to painting and sculpture.
[x] www.theguardian.com/tone/obituaries. (Accessed 10th February 2015). Norbert Lynton (1927-2007) was Professor of the History of Art at Sussex University. He was also art critic for the Guardian newspaper from 1965-1970.
[xi]www.theguardian.com/news/2007/sep14/guardianobituaries. (Accessed 10th February 2015). Andras Kalman (1919-2007) was a Hungarian Jew whose family all perished in the Holocaust. He set up the Crane Kalman Gallery in 1957 at 178 Brompton Road, London where he staged exhibitions of work by artists such as LS Lowry, Ben Nicholson and Graham Sutherland. He was interested in naïve British paintings and had a collection of work by self-taught painters which is on public display in the attic galleries at Compton Verney in Warwickshire.
[xii] Norbert Lynton ‘The Art of an Old Lady’, The Guardian, 19th February 1966). ‘Miss Allen’s pictures have that great virtue found in the best primitive art, a faultless sense of two-dimensional design that enables the artist to concentrate on the clear presentation of quite complex images while questions of space, scale and formal relationships appear to look after themselves. She is also a remarkable colourist, capable of composing a picture out of areas of vivid colour without any hint of strain or violence and also of using low tones with extraordinary subtlety. Klee and Matisse would undoubtedly have been impressed by that’.
[xiii] Patrick Heron, ‘Elizabeth Allen’, First American Exhibition of Patchwork Pictures by Miss Elizabeth Allen, October 1st-19th 1967 (Los Angeles, California: Fleischer Anhalt Gallery, 1967). The travelling exhibition visited the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, the Graves Art Gallery, Sheffield, Bradford City Art Gallery, the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, the Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Kendal and Winchester School of Art.
[xiv] Heron, op. cit., 1966.
[xv] www.interactive.ancestry.co.uk, (Accessed 21st July 2014) 1891 England Census.
[xvi] www.interactive.ancestry.co.uk , (Accessed 21st July 2014) 1901 England Census.
[xvii] www.interactive.ancestry.co.uk (Accessed 21st July 2014) 1911 England Census.
[xviii] Heron, op. cit., 1966.
[xix] Sharpley, op.cit.
[xx] Sharpley, op.cit.
[xxi] Sharpley, op.cit.
[xxii] Heron, op. cit., 1966 ‘But for her (Bridget Poole’s) devoted care, Elizabeth Allen, now eighty-two, would not still be living and working (so brilliantly) in this little isolated wooden house in which she has dwelt since 1935 . .. . ‘
[xxiii]Pers. comm., 20th March 2014. Bridget Poole in conversation.
[xxiv] Vilene is the brand name for a non-woven fabric used as an extra layer (interfacing) in a garment to provide shape and support. It is also widely used by patchworkers and quilters.
[xxv] www.dylon.co.uk. (Accessed 11th February 2015). Dylon (Dyes of London) was introduced in 1946 and became popular in ‘make-do-and-mend’ post war Britain, providing a quick and cheap way to brighten up homes and wardrobes. During the 1960s the company invented cold-water and machine dyes.
[xxvi] Pers. comm., 20th March, 2014. Bridget Poole in conversation.
[xxvii] An example of Queen’s ‘1920s-style’ woman and also some of her distinctive style of flowers with a sequin in the middle may be seen in the picture entitled ‘I’ve Seen That Girl Before’.
[xxviii] Bunce: money, profit. Shorter Oxford English Dictionary.
[xxix] H.H. Rowley, ‘Apocalyptic Literature’,in Matthew Black and H.H. Rowley (eds.), Peake’s Commentary on the Bible, (Nelson, 1964). Apocalyptic literature, especially the Book of Daniel in the Old Testament and the Revelation of St. John the Divine in the New Testament is concerned with the end of time when God’s purpose will be fulfilled.
[xxx] W. D. McHardy, ‘Introduction to the Apocrypha’ in The New English Bible, (OUP & CUP, 1970) The author describes the apocryphal writings as follows: ‘Works which were so important and precious that they must be hidden from the general public and reserved for the initiates, the inner circle of believers’.
[xxxi] Pers. comm. 20th March, 2014. Bridget Poole in conversation.
[xxxii] Margaret Nicholson, ‘A New Approach to Embroidery’, Embroidery Magazine, (Summer 1961, Vol.12, No.2) 42-43. ‘All over the country, there is a sincere desire that embroidery should not merely survive but should take its rightful place in our artistic life just as it did in mediaeval times. Exciting ideas come from the art colleges (Hammersmith under Dorothy Allsopp, with a specialised course in church work by Beryl Dean and the Goldsmiths College under Constance Howard to mention only two.)’ as quoted in article ‘Embroidery: The Journal of the Embroiderers’ Guild’, Embroidery Magazine (May/June 2013), 38.
Eugenie Alexander who both trained and taught at Goldsmith’s College of Art was one of several artists making fabric pictures during the 1950s and 1960s. Eugenie Alexander, Fabric Pictures, (London: Mills and Boon Ltd., 1967).
[xxxiii] Pers. comm. 20th March, 2014. Bridget Poole in conversation.
[xxxiv] Heron, op.cit., 1967. ‘The earlier works were altogether browner, more biscuity and ochreish in colour (and this not only because some had discoloured in the paraffin fumes of her room)’.
[xxxv] Letter from Elizabeth Allen to Ronnie Duncan, 13th October, 1966. Letters were dictated by Queen to Bridget who handwrote them. They were then signed by Queen.
[xxxvi] Patrick Heron also noted a progression within the pictures from the First Exhibition. ‘…in her most recent works she has evolved an amazingly precise language of spatial colour: interlocking segments of the design are strongly varied in colour and texture and their recession in space is fantastically controlled’. Heron, op. cit. 1966.
[xxxvii] N. Turner, ‘Revelation’, in Matthew Black and H.H. Rowley (eds.), Peake’s Commentary on the Bible (Nelson, London 1964) .‘The Prophecy of the Fall of Babylon (Rome). The end of the world draws near. The great enemy is probably Rome and the Caesar-worship associated with it according to most interpreters. The final vision is a dramatic attempt to encourage Christians who are faced with martyrdom. Rome, the (‘great harlot’) will perish. Her tormentor, (‘the scarlet beast’) will appear from out of the East and then this tormentor of Rome will himself be destroyed by God.’ Commentary on ‘The Revelation of John’ (The New English Bible OUP and CUP, 1970) Chap. 17, vv.3-4.
[xxxviii] Jonah (The New English Bible OUP and CUP, 1970), chap. 1.
[xxxix] Pers. comm. 20th March, 2014. Bridget Poole in conversation.
[xl] This is likely to refer to the Book of Daniel, chapter 2, in which Daniel interprets King Nebuchadnezzar’s dream of a large stone smashing a huge statue to pieces. J.Barr, ‘Daniel,’ in Black and Rowley (eds.) Peake’s Commentary on the Bible, (Nelson, London 1964) ‘To the author and his first readers, in the Greek period, it is a sketch of history from the Babylonian down to the Greek empires; they now therefore stand in the last period, awaiting the next stage of the appearance of God’s kingdom’.
[xli] This picture is one of several owned by the art collector Ronnie Duncan who visited Queen in Biggin Hill. I met Ronnie Duncan at his house in February 2014 and was able to view his pictures and photograph them. He also very generously gave me access to a file of material about Queen including his correspondence with her.
[xlii] Tina Ryan, in ‘The Art of the Matter’, Bath City Life, (October 1990), attributes this story to Andreas Kalman.
[xliii] When I saw this picture at the Compton Verney Art Gallery in April 2014 I was disappointed to find that the colours had faded from the original image which is reproduced in colour on the cover of the catalogue for the First American Exhibition of Patchwork Pictures and which I take to be an accurate representation of the true colours.
[xliv] Ronnie Duncan, ‘The Patchwork Picture-Maker’, Yorkshire Post, (13th February 1967), recalled one of the visits he and his wife made to Queen:’ She described to us a picture she had done about the Beatles, prompted by John Lennon’s celebrated remark about their being more popular than Christ. She had shown them in church as small beetles crawling up the altar cloth. At the altar itself stood Christ in Majesty, looking down at one of the insects. Queen cupped one hand and glared down into it. “You puny little thing.” Her voice filled the room. “That’s what you are – puny.” But at the same time her eyes were creased with amusement’.
[xlv] There were articles and reviews in national newspapers, including The Daily Mail and The Guardian in the U.K and The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times and The Los Angeles Herald in the U.S.A. Various women’s magazines also carried articles about Queen and Bridget, including Woman’s Own and the Australian Woman’s Weekly, as well as Time and Life magazines, some copies of which I received from Ronnie Duncan. Unfortunately I have been unable to trace any television programmes but the following extract from a letter sent by Queen describes a visit from a TV film crew: ‘We had quite a surprise on Wednesday when ITV (Southern) came to film an interview for showing on TV of my exhibition of pictures at Winchester College of Art.’ Letter from Queen to Ronnie Duncan, 23rd January 1967.
[xlvi] Heron, op. cit., 1967. ‘Since that first exhibition last year Elizabeth Allen has made over forty new pictures – and these form the core of the present exhibition. That someone of Miss Allen’s age, and suffering her infirmities, should thus be spurred on to create new works of such aesthetic intensity is utterly remarkable. Less complex in design than even the most recent of her previously exhibited pictures, the new works continue the logic of that progress I drew attention to before, in that their colour is purer and stronger yet again, their planes flatter and larger, their figurative content more symbolic, less anecdotal, their use of colour as an end in itself more pronounced and their choice of colours altogether more abstract – notice those pictures which consist almost entirely of closely related reds or pinks or oranges or blacks and greys’.
[xlvii] Pers. comm. 20th March 2014. Bridget Poole in conversation.
[xlviii] Bridget Poole told me that she intends to consult Kit Twyford and Trevor Bell before deciding where the Autobiraggraphy might be placed.
[xlix] An exhibition, ‘British Folk Art’, held at Tate Britain, London in summer 2014, included objects as varied as patchwork quilts, painted and carved shop and trade signs, embroidered samplers, fabric pictures, sailors’ woolwork pictures, straw work, bone work and ships’ figureheads; there are many other categories. Ruth Kenny, Jeff McMillan and Martin Myrone, British Folk Art, (Tate Publishing, 2014).
[l] Kenny, McMillan and Myrone, ibid. (2014), 42-7,
[li] Jane Kallir, The Folk Art Tradition: Naïve Paintings in Europe and the United States, (New York, 1981), in Kenny, McMillan and Myrone, op. cit. (2014),126.
[lii] Kenny, McMillan and Myrone, op. cit. (2014), 132.
[liii] Julia Blackburn, Threads: The Delicate Life of John Craske (London: Jonathan Cape, 2015) is an account of the life of John Craske and his ‘discovery’ by Valentine Ackland and Sylvia Townsend Warner. Threads, an exhibition of his embroidery, was shown at the Norwich University of the Arts Gallery and as part of the Aldeburgh Festival in May and June, 2015.
[liv] Margaret Lambert and Enid Marx, English Popular Art (London: The Merlin Press Ltd., 1989).
[lv] Thomasina Beck, The Embroiderer’s Story: Needlework from the Renaissance to the Present Day, (David and Charles, 1995), 96.
[lvi] Thomasina Beck, op cit.
[lvii] The Daily Mail (18th February 1966), described her as ‘the Grandma Moses of Biggin Hill’. This refers to the American artist, Anna Mary Robertson Moses (1860-1961), better known as “Grandma Moses”. She had a lifelong interest in quilting and embroidery but when arthritis made these pursuits impossible, at the age of 76, she began a career in painting and achieved great acclaim for her pictures of bygone rural life, which she executed without regard to the rules of perspective and with all features of modern life omitted.
[lviii] Elizabeth Fisher and Andrew Nairne et. al., Alfred Wallis, Ships and Boats (Kettle’s Yard, University of Cambridge, 2012).
[lix] Eric Lister and Sheldon Williams, Twentieth-century British Naïve and Primitive Artists, (Astragal Books, 1977).
[lx] Virginia Button, ‘Alfred Wallis’, in St. Ives Artists, A Companion (Tate Publishing, 2009), 32. Examples of Wallis’s work belonging to the Tate Gallery were included in the exhibition ‘British Folk Art’, Tate Britain, London, 2014. See Kenny, McMillan and Myrone, op. cit., 60.
[lxi] A review of this exhibition by Hilton Kramer in The New York Times, ‘Art: Fallen From Fashion, Primitives Still Appeal’, (1st February 1969), is enthusiastic about Alfred Wallis’s paintings but rather patronising about Elizabeth Allen’s pictures; he wrote. .’.Elizabeth Allen’s works are quite interesting, too, if not exactly in the same class’.
[lxii] Antony Ashby, ‘Introduction’ Alfred Wallis and Elizabeth Allen, Two British Naïve Artists, 28th November – 22nd December, 1973, (Crane Arts, 321 Kings Road, London, SW3). In his introduction to the catalogue Antony Ashby wrote: ‘The work of both Elizabeth Allen and Alfred Wallis was the product of a certain isolation from the world they lived in, an isolation partly enforced by the hardships of infirmity and old age, but partly a voluntary one. Both artists were inspired by a simple devout puritanism and by a feeling of nostalgia which reflects a lack of sympathy for modern life.’
[lxiii] Janet Rae, ‘Pictures in Cloth’in Quilts of the British Isles, (E.P Dutton, New York 1987), 95. This chapter also contains descriptions and photographs of some notable tailors’ quilts and hangings using the technique of ‘inlay patchwork’. See also, Linda Parry, ‘Complexity and context: nineteenth-century British quilts’, in Sue Pritchard, (Ed.), Quilts 1700-2010, Hidden Histories, Untold Stories, (V&A Publishing, 2010),58. For more examples of tailors’ quilts and inlay patchwork see Debbie Evans, ‘A North Wales Tradition? A Preliminary Study of the Patchwork and Quilting of North Wales’ in Quilt Studies 12, (The British Quilt Study Group and The Quilters Guild of the British Isles, York, 2011),7, for a detailed study of the Wrexham Tailor’s Quilt, made by James Williams and of the Machynlleth Table Cover. Annette Gero, Inlaid Patchwork in Europe 1500 to the Present, (Schnell/Steiner: Berlin, 2009) gives a comprehensive historical account of this type of work.
[lxiv] Clare Rose, ‘A Patchwork Panel shown at the Great Exhibition’, www.vam.ac.uk/content/journals/research-journal/issue-03/a-patchwork-panel. (Accessed 20th June, 2014). Rose comments on the surprising fact that this object was displayed alongside the best of manufactured products such as textile machinery, porcelain vases and carved furniture and that many of the items in the ‘Tapestry, Lace and Embroidery’ section were submitted by individuals who described themselves as ‘Inventor and Manufacturer’, including thirty soldiers or policemen. Also on display at the exhibition were five pieces described as table-covers or counterpanes, made from wool cloth in the technique of ‘mosaic needlework’.
[lxv] A remarkable example of such patchwork which promoted the Temperance cause, was the ‘Royal Clothograph’, a hanging or table cover made by a tailor from Paisley, John Monro, between 1830-1840, from felted tailor’s broadcloth. This complex work is composed of seven panels with ships, figures and landscapes surrounded by geometric borders; an outer border of plain fabric is embroidered with hundreds of names of writers, scientists, theologians and jurists. The message, embroidered at the bottom of the picture, extolled patience, perseverance and abstention from alcohol. See Janet Rae, op. cit., 95-98.
[lxvi] Pers. comm. 11th March 2014. Telephone conversation with Janet Bolton.
[lxvii] Janet Bolton, Patchwork Folk Art, (London: Octopus Publishing Group Ltd., 2009) and Janet Bolton, Fabric Pictures: A workshop with Janet Bolton, (London: Jacqui Small LLP, 2015).
[lxviii] The following books have short articles about Elizabeth Allen: Constance Howard, Twentieth-Century Embroidery in Great Britain, 1964-1977, Vol.3 (London:B.T. Batsford, 1984), 19. Also, Eugenie Alexander, Fabric Pictures (London: Mills and Boon, 1959), 80.
[lxix] There are permanent exhibitions of Alfred Wallis’s work at Tate St. Ives and at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge. Other recent exhibitions which showed his paintings are the Folk Art Exhibition at Tate Britain and an exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, both in 2014. On a recent broadcast of the television programme ‘The Antiques Road Show’, May 31st 2015, one of his paintings was valued at £50,000. He is the subject of several books.
[lxx] I believe that ‘Population Explosion’ is the only one of Queen’s pictures which is part of a permanent collection, (the Folk Art collection at the Compton Verney Art Gallery). The Arts Council owns one of her flower pictures.
[lxxi] Examples include, Margaret MacDonald and Charles Rennie Mackintosh; Winifred Nicholson and Ben Nicholson and Sonia Delauney and Robert Delauney; doubtless there are many more.
[lxxii] Rozsika Parker, The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine, (London: The Women’s Press, 1984),5.
[lxxiii] Rozsika Parker, ibid.11.
[lxxiv] Rozsika Parker, ibid.39.
[lxxv] June Freeman, Quilting, Patchwork and Applique, 1700-1982: Sewing as a Woman’s Art. (A Minories Touring Exhibition, Abbey Quilting Ltd., 1982), 8.
[lxxvi]June Freeman, Ibid. 8.
[lxxvii] Phyllis M. Platt, ‘Wherefrom and Whereto’ Embroidery: the Journal of the Embroiderers’ Guild (December 1935), 7-15.
[lxxviii]Phyllis M. Platt, Ibid. 8.
[lxxix] Roger Fry, in Phyllis M. Platt, op.cit. 15.
[lxxx]www.issuu.com/artsfblog1/docs/matisse_on_art_art_ebook. (Accessed 18th March, 2015). Jack Flam, ‘Interview with Andre Verdet,1952’ in ‘Matisse on Art’, (University of California Press Ltd., London 1995)144.
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