adapted from an article by Nicholas Mander which first appeared in Country Life magazine
The art of painting on textiles, like that of painting on walls or the human body itself, is universal. Examples of decorative painted textiles survive from ancient Egypt to the civilizations of America and the Far East. They are recorded from Antiquity, by Pliny the Elder in Rome, where Nero had a colossal painting of himself put up the Gardens of Maius. In the dark ages they are mentioned by St Aldhelm in Malmesbury (d. 709) and at the baptism of St Remi, for example, in 496. In the medieval period, references become common: for clothing, for banners, flags and sails, for church decoration in the liturgical cycle, for festive ceremonies, state celebrations and pageants, and then increasingly in an interior-decorative context. As more is discovered about them, they become of interest to the cultural historian, offering many insights into the operation of broader social activities.
Painted textiles emerged in late medieval Europe as the dominant interior decorative medium, at first in high-status courtly interiors and churches, then in the houses of merchants and yeomen. They finally became more or less ubiquitous in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, where in England such textiles were usually known as 'painted' or 'stained' cloths, the mural-decorative form of the painted textile. Other terms included 'halling', and 'waterwork'.
| Today survivals of Tudor cloths are rare and the painted cloth is a curiosity. Textiles are always fragile. Many cloths must have been destroyed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when 'improving' and modernizing old houses, especially after the introduction of wallpapers. Some have been found under wallpaper, like those discovered at Knole House in Kent and those now in the museum in Mildenhall, Suffolk, which had as many as 14 coats of wallpaper on top of them. In Ipswich and Oxford cloths were found typically crumpled up behind plaster and panelling. Generally, only fragments are known, and few are in their original condition or decorative context. |
Painted cloths from Mildenhall, found under wallpaper, c. 1700 |
Torn, stained, abraded, faded, after a long and rich history, painted textiles are now the least known of all forms of textile art, confined to specialist museums and remote study collections -- all the more surprisingly in view of how common they must have been. Their presence is recorded not just in domestic settings, but in streets and public places, in the playhouse, on the field of battle, at sea, all over Europe. Today survivals are sporadic and isolated, so that a historical typology is difficult to establish. As Elsie Matley Moore, one of the foremost authorities, wrote in 1944, 'few of us have ever seen a painted cloth'. As a result, caught in a hiatus between art and textile history, very little is known about them.
The medieval period
Painted cloths from Reims, c. 1480 |
In the Franco-Flemish territories of the middle ages, painted cloths are documented from about 1275, associated with complex programmes of iconography in courtly apartments. As they devolved from their lordly origins, they gradually became more purely decorative, more popular in subject matter and treatment, a cheaper substitute for costly tapestry. We find them in the halls, and later the upstairs chambers, of the Tudor manor house, and then, by the mid-sixteenth century, in the living parlours of farm and town houses, and even in the inventories of labourers' and tradesmen's cottages. The late medieval cloths preserved in the Musee des Beaux-Arts in Reims in northern France are the best early series to survive, dated c. 1460-1520. There are 25 cloths in all, originally hung in the Hotel-Dieu, painted in semi-grisaille (rather in the manner of the wall-paintings in Eton College Chapel) on religious themes associated with the drama cycles of the Passion and the Vengeance of Christ. |
Lenten altar covering from Zittau |
In England, we know ecclesiastical decorations on cloth were common. Archives refer to the use of painted cloths as 'rood cloths', tympanum cloths (hung in the space between the rood beam and the chancel arch), ridel cloths, devotional images, vestments and Lenten coverings (a number of late examples of such Lenten cloths are preserved in German-speaking countries, from Saxony to Vaduz); also organ shutters, of which quite a number survive. Liturgical objects, fragments from functional church textiles, made as burse covers or the panels of altar frontals, survive in museums, today often interpreted and displayed as paintings. |
One of the earliest painted textiles of English work is a processional banner depicting St Martin dividing his cloak (c. 1440) in the collection of the Society of Antiquaries at Burlington House, London. Another late medieval survival is the Seneschal Buxton armorial achievement panel in the Castle Museum in Norwich, probably devised as a hatchment about 1470. During the European early modern period, the distinction between the fine and the decorative arts was not sharply drawn. Cloths were prepared by craftsmen working under the organized trade guilds. In London, the Stainers' Company, first mentioned in 1268, amalgamated with the more powerful Painters' Company, as the distinct 'mysteries' of the two trades converged to form the Painter-Stainers' Company in 1502. The workshops of many of the master painters are known to have worked extensively on painted textile decoration, employing the characteristic glue ('collagen') tempera medium for huge mural projects wherever impermanent textile decoration was required. |
Seneschal Buxton Achievement, Norwich, c. 1470 |
The painting on canvas
From the series of the Triumphs by Andrea Mantegna, now in Hampton Court Palace |
In the late middle ages, the technique reached new levels of expression through its synergy pre-eminently with the painting on canvas, which developed in parallel and gradually came to supplant the 'table', or easel painting on panel. The early Netherlandish masters developed the painted cloth tradition in the fifteenth century, when such masters as Dirck Bouts and Quintin Massys (both of whom have cloth paintings represented in the National Gallery in London) began producing striking small-scale works in tempera on finely-woven linen cloth. Perhaps they were inspired by the Dominican cult of poverty to produce items of little intrinsic worth, appropriate for the contemplative devotio moderna. Some painted cloths became smaller, seen in engravings or described in inventories as hanging over fireplaces, then stretched on frames. Others remained large, but become gradually more self-consciously painterly. Andrea Mantegna's Triumphs at Hampton Court, painted in a tempera technique on huge canvases, are the acme of the painted cloth tradition, as it becomes elevated to a new high art of conscious ingegno -- slower, more classical and precise -- under the influence of a recognised master. |
Many of the great master painters are known to have supervised at least the design and production of painted textiles. They include Jan van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden, Melchior Broederlam, Hans Holbein the Younger and Lucas van Leyden in the North, and Raphael and Mantegna in the South. For the late medieval painter, even the court masters, such work must have been a recognised part of his normal training and regimen of work. Domestically, painted and stained cloths were used in furnishings, for 'moveables' ('meubles', 'mobili') from one great house to another, for elaborate upholstered furniture in the context of hangings for beds and chairs of state. As mural decorations, cloths were far from 'poor man's tapestries': there are numerous references to them in contemporary inventories of royal, noble and church dignitaries. Queen Isabella had them already in the mid-fourteenth century. Henry VII had one in the Palace of Westminster in the fifteenth. |
Dierk Bouts, Annunciation, tempera on linen cloth, from the National Gallery, London |
Mural "painted tapestries"
We know that painted cloths became common in the houses of the great Tudor princes and courtiers. Tapestries were objects of the greatest value reserved for the rooms of presence and parade. The rare 'tables', or easel paintings, a few already on cloth, described in Henry VIII's inventories as 'sette in a frame of woode wallnut tre[e] colore', were already beginning to be accumulated in specially-built galleries, to exhibit the taste and magnificence, the ancestry and dynastic alliances, of their princely patrons.
Architecturally, cloths seem to have been employed to define the less important spaces of great houses, where rooms were still arranged in a hierarchy of status and function -- public, privy and service -- or where temporary decoration was required for special banquets or political events, allusive, to impress and entertain. Cloths are recorded on fine supports of silk and sarcenet, executed in work of great detail and richness. Isolated large-scale cloths survive on the Continent in the great palaces of Genoa (a series which probably once belonged to Charles I), Mantua, Cremona (The Story of Job, c. 1500), in the Council Chamber at Cologne (c. 1510). A number are recorded in England in the palaces of Henry VIII, where the inventories taken after his death in 1547 list at least a dozen in Whitehall.
Henry's Lord Chancellor, Sir Thomas More, describes an important series of this date at his father's house in London (1495-6), with mottoes or captions devised by him in his youth with doggerel Latin verses illustrating the Horatian theme of the Seven Ages of Man. Hans Holbein worked extensively on decorative schemes during his stays in England, using painted cloths on a large scale in his interiors for merchants' guilds and at Court.
Panels from parade tents of Henry VIII, now at Loselely Park, Surrey, about 1520 |
The high point of chivalric revival was at the famous 'Field of the Cloth of Gold', where in 1520 the rival courts of Henry VIII and Francois Iier sought to impress with their tents, fluttering banners and parade shields, all employing the crafts of painting on textile surfaces -- more visibly than surfaces of leather and gesso and wood. A late survival in the pageant tradition is the pair of decorative panels (dated about 1543), at Loseley Park in Surrey. Now displayed in the gallery to the Great Hall, they are variously attributed to the Florentine, Toto del Nunziata (1499-1554), or the Modenese, Nicolo Bellin (fl. 1516-68). They are believed to be from the parade or banqueting tents of Henry VIII, executed with delicate Renaissance ornament: grotesques, cartouches containing the royal arms, ciphers and imprese of Henry and Catherine Parr. |
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The Renaissance: theatre, pageants and ceremonies of entry
Scenographic painted textiles came out of the churches in the increasingly secular culture of Reformation humanism. Instead of old uses associated with altar furnishings and seasonal-liturgical dramas and 'holy days', an important use in early modern culture becomes harnessed to the cult of sovereignty, with its ceremonies of entry, revived chivalric displays, triumphs, 'disguisings' and festivals, with an earnest political purpose, to which some of the greatest contemporary artists and intellects contributed. The court painter assumed an increasingly privileged status among craftsmen as the ensemblier, preparing the trappings of the great princely processions, cartoons for tapestries, vast numbers of banners, streamers and 'pencils' deriving from archaic prototypes of the Roman vexillum. Decorations and huge structures of carpentry and canvas were reared up as triumphal arches to mark dynastic marriages and funerals, or the celebrations of diplomatic alliances and truces.
The artists of the painted textile continued into the baroque and mannerist periods in the seventeenth century, where they were particularly successful in a rhetorical and emblematic culture. Techniques continued to be adapted successfully for the creation of ever more extravagant public spectacles, celebrating significant moments in the lives of royal and noble personages, impressing subject peoples with a cult of Princely Magnificence. Immense resources were devoted to providing these huge surfaces -- and importantly recording and promulgating them in the popular imagery of prints and paintings. They were designed to engage the emotional participation of urban audiences, creating their illusions, communicating their messages, by treatment of colour, scale and texture, and always involving the spectator in an urgent and dramatic interface with the elevated courtly realm. The engravings made of the great pomps of baroque Rome and France often bear the legend, 'panni depinti', indicating surfaces of painted canvas which were used on the scale of advertisement hoardings. The usual Italian term for the painted cloth is 'succhi d'erba', referring to the vegetable pigments.
In this realm of spectacle, the Renaissance theatre in England (and also in Spain) is another area which rapidly developed new uses for the craft from the pageant wagons and booth platforms, the adaptations of courtyard inns and great halls, of the improvised early stage to the deployment of painted cloth scenery in a purpose-built playhouse in front of the richly emblematic frons scenae. It is likely that it was concealed behind a painted cloth that Hamlet skewered the prying Polonius like 'a rat, a rat'. Such decorations were in the early seventeenth century to help create a new illusionistic Ovidian drama of neo-Platonist transformation, where the action unfolds behind the familiar proscenium arch. The magician-architect 'rich in inventions' like Inigo Jones assumes a status above the dramatist himself, and Ben Jonson famously curses the 'painted cloth board'. It is of course as stage scenery that the painted cloth tradition endured longest, into modern times.
In this way, painted textiles in their various forms would have been universally familiar, not just where we imagine them, in yeoman houses, but above all in advanced urban and courtly contexts. The cloth-stainer's arts, always at the service of the scenographic arts of display and spectacle, were fundamental to early modern culture at its most vitally propagandist and polemical. The artists of the painted textile were involved in productions which were decorative and often impermanent, relatively cheap and quick to execute and, above all, adaptable. Expressed in powerful, often extravagant, imagery, the techniques they inspired permitted a wide variety of uses, often on a huge scale, wherever textile decoration was required on supports of silk, wool, linen and canvas.
Tudor painted cloths: Shakespearian England
In the domestic interiors of ordinary houses, painted cloths achieved their heyday in the sixteenth- and early seventeenth-centuries, when they are recorded frequently in documents -- wills, inventories and account books -- valued at sixpence to a shilling a yard. Estienne Perlin, a Frenchman describing England in 1558, writes:
The English use many hangings, painted cloths, which are well done, with magnificent crowned roses, or fleurs-de-lis and lions, for you can enter few houses without finding such cloths.
Rare survival of documented Elizabethan cloth from Ipswich in Suffolk, 1580s |
They become widespread in many countries in northern Europe also, where they can be descried in the backgrounds of paintings and engravings, in some cases imitating more expensive forms such as tapestry and other woven textiles. In England, they were probably almost universal in the southern half of the country at all social levels. As a popular decorative medium, they are characteristically 'Shakespearean'. Records suggest that they reached their most widespread distribution during the time of Shakespeare, in the second half of the sixteenth century and the first decades of the seventeenth, and even that they were particularly widespread in the Warwickshire/Worcestershire area of Midland England. The will of Robert Arden, Shakespeare's grandfather, mentions eleven sets of cloths in his house at Wilmcote in 1556, which the poet would undoubtedly have known. The post-mortem inventory of his goods was made on 9 December, 1556. |
They were famously recommended by Shakespeare's Falstaff to Mistress Quickly as fashionable and cheaper substitutes for tapestry, so she should pawn her plate and 'fly-bitten tapestry' (and extend him more credit):
Mistress Quickly: I must be fain to pawn both my plate and the tapestry of my dining-chambers.
Falstaff: Glasses, glasses is the only drinking: and for thy walls, a pretty slight drollery, or the story of the Prodigal, or the German hunting in water-work, is worth a thousand of these bedhangings and these fly-bitten tapestries. (2 Henry IV II. i. 157-63)
In the Epilogue to Troilus & Cressida, Pandarus offers some commonplace verses to be remembered in a painted cloth:
Good traders in the flesh, set this in your painted cloths... (V. x. 46-7)
Rare painted textiles in merchant and country houses of Shakespearian England do survive, from the summit of their period of popularity. The two panels found in the Ancient House in Ipswich are some of the best and earliest, believed to be those mentioned in a will of Thomas Coppid, a merchant, in 1587. They depict scenes from the legends of the Labours of Hercules and are now in the Christchurch Museum in Ipswich. Two panels in the chapel at Hardwick Hall, in Derbyshire, are at the top of the social scale. They were painted (for another room) by John Ballechouse, the Flemish master painter working for Bess of Hardwick, in about 1590, at a time when a good deal of manufacture in England was beginning to come from northern Europe. They are the best examples of their period; indeed one of the great works of English Elizabethan art, in a good state of conservation, depicting the story of the Conversion of St Paul. Most of the earlier series of English decorative cloths to survive depict the set pieces of well-worn biblical and mythological histories such as these, often with trite conventional mottoes on scrolls, from a popular culture widely disseminated by contemporary engravings and pattern books. There is an unusual cloth at Coughton Court in Warwickshire, a large framed panel sewn together at the middle, traditionally known as the 'Tabula Eleusensis', dated 1596. It depicts Ely Cathedral and the heads of the line of English kings on roundels, with coats of arms and references to the tribulations of recusant families in black letter texts, appropriate to the Catholic Throckmorton family who probably commissioned it. |
One of the cloths at Hardwick Hall illustrating the Conversion of St Paul, attributed to John Ballechouse, c. 1590 |
The Seventeenth Century
In the seventeenth century interior, painted cloths became increasingly old fashioned and provincial, under the influence of the sparser surfaces of neo-classicism and Puritan restraint. We hear the maverick antiquary, John Aubrey describing in about 1640 the dowdy dwelling of a 'widow woman'-- the landlady of the theologian, John Hales, fellow of Eton College (of which his friend, Sir Henry Wotton, was Provost):
Mistress Powney was a woman primitively good... She has a handsome darke old-fashioned house. The hall after the old fashion, above the wainscot, painted cloath, with godly sentences out of the Psalmes, etc., according to the pious custome of old times.
But there were always revivals. The cognoscienti of the post-Restoration scientific age, Pepys, Evelyn and the polymath Constantijn Huygens, refer in their letters and diaries to pintadoes, chintzes and rich painted calicoes, either imported from the Indies (the Coromandel coast, in particular), or inspired by Oriental prototypes. Exotic leather panels, blind-stamped with gilt, were imported from Hispano-Flemish contexts.
Painted cloths at Owlpen Manor, Joseph is rescued from the pit, circa 1705 |
Even the native cloths are stylised, suggesting a revival of archaic forms. An unusual series of cloths survives from the end of the tradition of painted cloths. They are probably all from one workshop, if not by the same hand, dated by duty marks to the turn of the eighteenth century. The most complete is that preserved at Owlpen Manor, in Gloucestershire, recorded in situ there by 1719, illustrating naive and graceful scenes from the life of Joseph and his brothers. About a dozen sets have been tracked down, preserved in various provincial museums and old houses, mainly in the south of England. Some are still in situ, such as those (until recently) at The White House, Munslow, Shropshire, and a boar hunt at Yarde Farm, Kingsbridge, Devon. A long frieze removed from Brandeston Hall, Suffolk, is now at Gainsborough Old Hall Museum (Lincolnshire), and a series of six panels, including one of Elijah Ascending to Heaven, is at the Luton Museum (Bedfordshire). The series of six panels at the Victoria & Albert Museum have had a chequered history. Rescued from a heap of builders' rubbish from Jenkyn Place, Hampshire, in 1919, they were thought to be lost until their conservation for the Britain 2000 Galleries. |
The Eighteenth-Century Interior
Painted cloths continued to be used in the eighteenth century interior, at the late end of the time period, with a more florid and frivolous emphasis. Chinoiserie imitations were fashionable, often manufactured in the Far East for the European market, with the use of fabric supports and still using the old tempera techniques. Others, particularly in the Low Countries, begin to resemble oil paintings. We find them there, and in France and Germany, quite commonly set into the boiseries of neo-classical interiors, from Versailles itself to the gentil'hommieres of Provence, and stray examples have turned up as far away as Slovenia.
In England, a set of cloths is featured in a painting attributed to Johann van der Hagen at Drayton Hall, Northamptonshire, which records a ball held by Lionel Sackville, the first duke of Dorset, at Dublin Castle, in 1731. Sackville was Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, and his son, George Sackville, inherited Drayton. They are in all probability the same cloths as those found behind wallpaper when a partition wall was being removed at Knole in the early 1970s. We know that the decorations for the ball were designed by Sir Edward Lovett-Pearce, the 'leading Palladian architect of his day in Ireland'.
Late cloths with floral designs on panels are preserved in the Queen's Room at Belton House in Lincolnshire and there is a set at Packwood House, in Warwickshire, painted with verdures illustrating the Fables of La Fontaine. Those at Southside House, Wimbledon, are of French origin. Cloths in the festive tradition survive at Syon House in Middlesex, where there is a set of panels probably prepared for the exotic marquees made for the Thameside 'routs' held in the grounds, suggesting the painted Turkish pavilions of the landscape garden.
The development of wallpapers and improved industrial processes of fabric printing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries led to the retreat and ultimately displacement of the painted cloth. In eighteenth-century culture, painted textiles as an interior decorative form begin to decline to a trade level as the opportunities for grand displays gradually diminished. They never seem to have appeared in eastern North America. A new age of rationalism in religion and of enlightenment or constitutionalism in the functions of government made them increasingly redundant in public life outside the scene-paintings of the court opera house and rococo fetes champetres. Ultimately, far from remaining a fashionable substitute for tapestry, painted stuffs became fly-bitten folk art survivals, provincial curiosities appealing to an antiquarian taste.
They were superseded in interior decoration by the production of cheap colour-printed wallpapers and toiles peintes by new industrial technology in the factories of Switzerland and along the borders of France. In public places, pervasive cultural change made the old painted cloths an anachronism in all but a few specialised contexts. We find cloths, which were Falstaff's 'pretty slight drolleries', dismissed in 1827 by the canons of Reims, where they were recorded fifteen hundred years ago, as irrelevant and unloved: 'vieilles friperies'. Painted wall textiles enjoyed an afterlife at the popular level as primarily a folk-art retreating to the margins. In remote Scandinavia, where cloths are noted from medieval times, numerous lively examples survive in the provinces such as Halland and Dalarna in Sweden well into the nineteenth century. |
Cloth painters in Scandinavia, 17th-century print |
Victorian Gothic Revival
There were isolated attempts to promote them by the Victorian architect-designers of the Gothic Revival, notably in France under the influence of Eugene Viollet-le-Duc, who was a forceful advocate in his interior schemes. Benjamin Bucknall, Viollet's great disciple in England, almost certainly knew the Owlpen set. He translated Julien Godon's book on Painted Tapestry and its Application to Interior Decoration (1879) and the ideas were taken up by a number of designers of antiquarian tastes, interested in textured, polychromatic surface effects. Painted cloths are recommended for their 'velvety, warm, substantial effect', and cheapness and hygiene are also mentioned as advantages.
Hewell Grange, Worcestershire, Gothic revival cloths by Garner and Bodley |
Gothic Revival cloths survive at Hewell Grange, Tardebigge, near Worcester, by Garner and Bodley and, attributed to Bucknall, in the baptistery of St Wulstan's, Little Malvern. Towards the end of the century, the designers of the Arts and Crafts movement studied and experimented enthusiastically with the traditional techniques employed in painted textiles, which had a brief flowering with the 'tempera revival' of the Birmingham School of Art; but such efforts ultimately proved a dead end, and they never again achieved popular currency. |
Today: interpretation of historic interiors
Although little understood today compared to the sister arts of mural painting, tapestry and wallpaper production, it is now recognised that painted cloths were equally important in the public and private lives of early modern societies. Survivals are cherished for their rarity. Full-scale facsimiles of the painted cloths at Owlpen Manor were made carefully for the Ancient Monuments' Record during the War, in case of destruction (surely unlikely) by enemy action. Further copies of this series have been prepared recently using the original glue tempera techniques, for a more 'authentic' presentation of Tudor interiors. They include the folk museums at Blakesley Hall (West Midlands) and the Wimbourne Museum (Dorset), where they are successful and popular exhibits. Others have been conserved for The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. The understanding of the use of painted cloths in the frons scenae has also been a key element in the scholarly interpretation and reconstruction of The New Globe Theatre on Bankside.
© Nicholas Mander, Owlpen Manor Estate, 2007
