Painted Textiles in England
Panels from parade tents of Henry VIII, now at Loselely Park, Surrey, about 1520.
Painted cloth at Hardwick Hall illustrating the Conversion of St Paul, attributed to John Ballechouse, c. 1590
Great little online essay with images of surviving painted cloths in England.
http://www.owlpen.com/paintedclothsessay.shtml
A Pretty Slight Drollery: Painted Cloths
adapted from an article by Nicholas Mander which first appeared in Country Life magazine.
EXCERPTS
“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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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