Hello. I'm Marianna Siciliano and I'm an educator in Public Programs and Creative Practice at The
Met. I'm delighted to welcome you to our series Insider Insights, which offers a closer look at
objects across The Met's collection and special exhibitions with Museum experts.
Today we'll be joined by Elena Kanagy-Loux, a collection specialist in the Ratti Textile Center.
Elena will be sharing more about lace in The Met's collection,
which was actually the first textile to be collected by the Museum in 1879.
In addition to being a lace historian, she's also a lacemaker herself, so it's very exciting to have
her with us and to have a chance to hear her perspectives. Elena, thank you so much and I'll
hand things over to you.
Thank you so much for the introduction, Marianna. I also want to thank Sarah
Lawrence and Elizabeth Cleland of the European Sculpture and Decorative Arts Department as well
as the Ratti Textile Center's supervising curator Amelia Peck for supporting this presentation.
Today I'm going to talk to you about the origins of the lace collection at
The Met as well as introduce lace history and some lacemaking techniques. Although it may come as a
surprise, lace was one of the foundations of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's textile collection
in the early decades of the Museum and now numbers over 5,000 pieces. Members of New York high
society, such as Mrs. John Jacob Astor and Mrs. J. Pierpont Morgan, were avid collectors of lace,
often donating their collections to the Museum. In a 1932 Fortune Magazine article on famous lace
collectors from the previous century proclaimed, "Lace is to his wife what Rembrandts are to the
U.S. financier." In 1906 The Met opened a "Lace Room" to showcase 700 pieces of lace from the
collection. Due to its immense popularity, by 1917 it was reinstalled with all 3,000 pieces
of lace then in the Museum's collection. Frances Morris, then the textiles curator,
wrote in the Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin that the new lace gallery was intended
"not only to give pleasure to the casual visitor but as well to be of service to
those who desire to study the fabrics from a technical or an historical standpoint."
Today the Antonio Ratti Textile Center serves as the study and storage
center for The Met's collection of over 33,000 textiles from 12 curatorial departments
including the European Sculpture and Decorative Arts Department's lace collection.
Although we are currently closed to the public during the pandemic, we typically provide
access to textiles not on view in the Museum's galleries through public research appointments.
The predecessor of the Antonio Ratti Textile Center, the Textile Study Room, opened in 1910
under the direction of Frances Morris, who I will talk about shortly. The Textile Study
Room offered the public unprecedented access to the collection and allowed individualized
study of objects that would otherwise be kept in storage. Like the Ratti Textile Center today,
it welcomed not only established designers and qualified researchers through its doors, but all
members of the general public with an interest in textiles, including some elementary school children.
Textile's curator, Frances Morris, was the first woman to be employed in a professional role at
the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Originally hired to catalog the famed Crosby Brown
Collection of musical instruments in 1869, by 1907 her responsibilities expanded to include
textiles as well. In 1910, she was given the official title of assistant curator
and took charge of the newly opened lace and textile study room, after which her focus would
permanently shift away from musical instruments. Although Miss Morris, as she liked to be called,
had no formal training in textiles, she became a respected expert in the field and published widely
on lace and other textiles.
So what is lace, anyway? Although lace is generally defined as a textile
in which the vacant areas define the pattern, traditional lace can be divided into two types:
bobbin lace and needle lace. Despite their technical differences, both techniques emerged
around the same time period, between 1490 and 1500, and their explosion from simple
narrow edgings to some of the costliest and most desirable accessories ever produced progressed in
tandem. The precursor to needle lace, pictured here, was embroidered lace, wherein a design was traced
onto plain weave linen fabric. Areas of the material were removed via cutwork and drawnwork
and buttonhole stitches were worked back into the voided areas. As the designs grew in complexity,
the voided areas became larger and required an increasing amount of discarded threads. In a period
when making simple linen fabric involved growing flax, processing the fiber, spinning it into yarn,
dressing the loom, and weaving it by hand, wasting any amount of thread was costly.
Frugality is often the force behind creative innovation and eventually the fabric base was
done away with entirely and the stitches were worked directly onto a parchment pattern base,
as you can see here. One early Italian lace technique, punto in aria,
literally translates to "stitches in air" as the stitches do not pierce the pattern base.
To make needle lace, the pattern is traced directly onto the paper base
and the outline threads are laid down around the motifs and tacked down with couching stitches. Then
buttonhole stitches are worked between the outline threads to fill in the pattern. When the work is
complete the pattern can be flipped over and the couching stitches removed to free the lace.
Bobbin lace evolved out of passementerie techniques, a type of braiding that became so
complicated that individual threads were wound around wooden bobbins to keep them organized.
Early bobbin lace is relatively simple, as you can see
in the earliest pattern book for bobbin lace, Le Pompe: Opera Nova, published in Venice in 1557.
Thanks to the proliferation of pattern books during the Renaissance after the invention of
the Gutenberg Press, lacemaking techniques were able to spread quickly across Europe.
Here is a photo of bobbin lace in progress. Bobbin lace is worked in pairs, which are
crossed and twisted to follow the pattern below. A pin is then inserted to secure the
stitches, which can be removed as the lacemaker progresses down the pillow.
given the popularity of collecting lace, it is, perhaps, unsurprising that the first
collection of textiles to enter the Met's collection was predominantly made up of lace.
Combining cutwork, needle lace, and bobbin lace techniques, this piece of lace is part of the
MacCallum Collection which was originally exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1877.
A New York Times article published on April 13, 1879 describes the MacCallum Collection
as "the most complete ever gathered together," which was "begun as a labor
of love" by Mrs. Andrew MacCallum during her travels across Europe with her husband.
Numbering about 300 pieces, the MacCallum lace collection was purchased for the Museum in
1879 by Anna Clinch Cook, the daughter of a wealthy businessman and active member of the New York Arts scene.
In 1938, this piece of lace was included in the exhibition Early Pattern Books, Lace, Embroidery,
and Woven Textiles alongside other Renaissance laces and embroidery pattern books such as
L’Honesto Essempio by the Venetian designer Matteo Pagano from 1550, which features similar patterns.
One lace collection of particular fame is the Blackborne Collection, started by Anthony
Blackborne in 1850 and carried on by his son Arthur Blackborne in London. In 1909, The Metropolitan
Museum purchased 600 pieces from the collection, which was widely considered to be one of the best
lace collections ever assembled, for $20,000. Described in a 1909 article
in the New York Times as "the most important in the collection," the purchase included a panel of
Venetian needle lace depicting the story of Judith and Holofernes. Measuring five feet in length, this
Venetian needle lace panel, which probably dates to around 1600, is a masterful example of punto in
aria, the aforementioned needle lace technique that evolved out of cutwork embroidery. According to
former textiles curator Edith Standen, who worked at The Met in the 1960s, the Portuguese inscription
across the top tells us that the piece illustrates the story of Judith and Holofernes over 13 panels.
As soon as lace techniques emerged in the early 16th century, they became all the rage in
fashion, particularly in the form of collars and cuffs. A variety of lace collars were in
fashion during the 17th century, including this rare example of what is called a standing band.
Collars, such as this one, were starched and worn over a supportasse or wire frame to keep them
upright like you see in the portrait on the right. This particular example includes three different
techniques: whitework embroidery, reticella or cutwork needle lace, and punto in aria needle lace.
Another type of lace collar that came into fashion in the 17th century was a rebato,
in which the supportasse or wire frame of the collar was directly built in.
This rare extant rebato from the Museum's collection is trimmed with bobbin lace
made in metal thread, making it an especially luxurious example.
Perhaps the pinnacle of historic needle lace techniques came in the 17th-century style of
Venetian gros point needle lace. The stitches are built up over many layers, with a smooth surface
that was often compared to carved ivory, and gros point needle lace is often depicted in busts of
the same period as it translates so well into the medium of sculpture. Lace historian Pat Earnshaw
has estimated that the finest gros point lace includes as many as 6,000 stitches per square inch.
As was always the case in the lace world, as needle lace or bobbin lace developed into new
styles and techniques, the other evolved in parallel to remain competitive. This Flemish
bobbin lace apron border would not have been worn for practical purposes like household chores,
but given the romantic motifs of couples, was likely made to be worn at a wedding. This technique
differs from the earlier examples of bobbin lace because, rather than worked continuously
in one set of bobbins, it is worked in parts, with the figures first and the ground stitches last.
Lace of the Low Countries, now Belgium and the Netherlands, was particularly renowned for its
use of very fine linen thread, which was spun by hand. The style of collar pictured on the
left is called a falling band or Van Dyke Collar, after the painter Anthony van Dyke.
In contrast to the earlier standing band collars, falling bands use a softer, denser
type of bobbin lace in a scalloped design often called cauliflower or flowerpot lace.
In the 1660s, the French Minister of State under Louis XIV, Jean Baptiste
Colbert, established the country's first royal lace manufactories to compete with Flanders and Italy.
They paid lace designers from Venice to relocate to France
and teach local lacemakers needle lace-making and design. Named Point de
France under royal decree, this type of needle lace is distinguished by very small motifs in ornate
symmetrical arrangements in flat stitches without the raised outlines typical of Venetian needle lace.
Beginning in around 1689, cravats became a fashionable lace accessory associated with
men's dress, as formerly lace collars had been, for the most part, gender neutral.
This cravat is made using the aforementioned part lace technique in a style called Point d’Angleterre, which is
believed to be named for the country to which it was exported rather than where it was made.
One of the finest pieces of lace in the Met's collection is this spectacular Point d’Angleterre
bobbin lace cravat. In 1926 it was purchased from the Devonshire lace shop in New York City
for $3,700, an astronomical sum for a single piece of lace. In arguing for
its purchase by the Museum, one decorative arts curator wrote that there was "no piece of Brussels
work in any museum that can compare with this in quality and in the charm of its composition."
Although this connection has not been proven, the cravat is said to have been made for the
Austrian empress Maria Theresa, before being given to her daughter the French queen Marie Antoinette.
It was later passed to the marquis de Chabert, a French admiral and astronomer, after which it
descended in his family and ended up at the Devonshire lace shop. The possibility of this
association is supported by the crown at the center, resembling the Austrian archducal crown.
In 1924, the Needle and Bobbin Club, an elite organization of lace collectors founded in New York
in 1916, donated this lace handkerchief to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The use of the royal
monogram of King Leopold II and the repetition of the crown motifs suggests that this handkerchief
was made in celebration of his ascent to the throne in 1865. It may have been a presentation
piece for his wife, Marie Henriette, who was the patroness of both the convent and the Belgian
lace industry. Unlike most handkerchiefs, which have a woven fabric center, this handkerchief is made
entirely in bobbin lace stitches in a spectacular example of the Ghent bobbin lace technique.
This handkerchief is another rare example of 19th-century lace, as the designer is actually named.
It is believed to have been designed by Emma Radford, a prize-winning lacemaker and designer
from Devon, England. Devonshire bobbin lace, commonly known as Honiton lace, comprised of
individual motifs that were later joined together.
The techniques developed to craft three-dimensional effects, such as those
seen in this piece, sometimes called raised work, which were a specialty of Honiton lace workers.
Another important lace collection was the Nuttall Collection of Mrs. Magdalena Nuttall of Tunbridge
Wells, England which was donated to the Museum in 1908 and includes around a thousand pieces.
It is interesting because it includes a number of pieces of lace from Mrs. Nuttall's travels around
the globe to far-flung places such as China and Madagascar, which are not typically considered
lacemaking regions.
By the early 19th century, lace machines such as the Leavers lace machine,
which used Jacquard weaving technology, permanently displaced the handmade lace industries.
However, machine lace design still represented the pinnacle of technical expertise
as is the case with this Leavers lace panel made for the Paris Expo of 1900.
It includes motifs of railroad trains, telegraph poles, electric lights, and hot
air balloons which, alongside the Leavers lace machine itself, represent the peak of technology.
If you're interested in seeing some exquisite pieces of lace in The Met's collection up close,
do check out the 2020 exhibition Making The Met, 1870-2020, which features textiles from departments
across the Museum. Thank you so much for having me and I hope you enjoyed this presentation.