… in the office, as I was the other day (there are BIG attractions about working at the Guardian), a name came up that I hadn’t previous encountered – Anna Maria Garthwaite (1690–1763).
She was “the pre-eminent silk designer of her period”. Spitalfields-based, her work was mainly based on botanical, painting-style patterns, which the V&A are still making money out of. A whole dress by her, with a well-documented history has also survived, as has a fancy waistcoat (which in 1747 still had sleeves).
She also did cut-paper landscapes and some of her pattern books have survived,
From the ONDB:
“…her father was a well-connected Anglican clergyman with family associations with the City of London. After his death in 1719 it is probable that she went to live with her elder sister, Mary, the wife of Robert Dannye, rector of Spofforth, Yorkshire… In 1729 or 1730 Dannye died, and both sisters then went to London, where they eventually settled in Princes Street (now 2 Princelet Street) in the parish of Christ Church, Spitalfields …
Her interest in textile design was apparent by 1726, when she collected and annotated a series of textile designs, ‘by diverse hands’, which included technically innovative and high-quality French work. Her first drawing, inscribed ‘sent to London before I left York’, was competent but simple. The largest series of her work, comprising many hundreds of drawings of silk designs and patterns, some of which are still enrolled in their contemporary arrangement covering the period from 1726 to 1756, has survived and is in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. It is clear that, at a time when the English silk industry vied with French manufacturers for the quality home and export market, she was one of the foremost designers of ‘flowered’, or brocaded, silks.
…She displayed a noteworthy grasp of textile technique, including technical direction as necessary. Surviving silks show how well her designs adapt to form and function. Garthwaite point paper, imprinted with squares for drafting designs in the early nineteenth century, may be a retrospective tribute to her expertise. The basis for her technical knowledge can only be conjectured, though Robert Campart, a Spitalfields ribbon weaver of Huguenot extraction, is named as a beneficiary, together with his wife, in Garthwaite’s will.
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