Sew What?

Opening the Doors to 17th-Century Embroidered Cabinets and Caskets

July 30, 2020 Isabella Rosner
Sew What?
Opening the Doors to 17th-Century Embroidered Cabinets and Caskets
Show Notes Transcript

In this episode, Isabella discusses one of her greatest loves, embroidered cabinets and caskets made in the 17th century. She explains the differences between cabinets and caskets, how they were made, some exceptional surviving examples, and what these boxes can tell us about the relationship between early modern women and privacy. 

Whatsup stitches!!!! How is everybody today? I hope you’re all thriving and vibing and living your best lives in a safe and socially distanced way. This episode is all about one of my favourite types of needleworked objects, which is the 17th-century embroidered cabinet or casket! Cabinets and caskets are two slightly different iterations of essentially the same object, a small box with secret compartments, used to hold smaller possessions like letters, writing material, gems, shells, sewing supplies, et cetera et cetera. I’ll get into more detail obviously, because there’s a lot to talk about when it comes to these bad boys and TRULY they are some of my favourite objects so I could talk about them forever for truly the rest of my life because I LOVE THEM, but I’ll just say briefly they’re early modern boxes that were in vogue in England in roughly the latter half of the 17th century and they were covered entirely in embroidery, usually. 

Here’s a an outline of what I’ll go over in this episode because it goes a bit all over the place. Okay, I’ll start off by describing these boxes and getting into the difference between cabinets and caskets, because that’s often a point of contention. That’ll include a really lovely chat (I hope) about the different shapes and arrangements of secret compartments and underdrawings and stuff, because I find it really fascinating that you could pretty easily group these objects by artisans that were involved. And there are people who are doing that work and that research, which is very cool!!!! Anyway. Okay. Theeeeen I’ll talk about professional examples versus ones made by gals completing their needlework education. The ones made by teenage girls are like for real OHMYGOD my favourite things on this entire planet so we are gonna get INTO it. The episode will end with a discussion about how these boxes were sites of privacy and security for women in a time when they didn’t really have much of either. 

Okay! Woohoo!! Yay! 17th-century cabinets and caskets!! Here we go.  

Okay, so cabinets and caskets are pretty small boxes. I’ve tried to figure out what object to compare them to so you can get an idea of their size and the closest I’ve gotten to is childhood music boxes. Take the idea of a music box and make it like 50% bigger on all sides, so it has the like same ratio of dimensions but is just a bit bigger. It’s a box that’s longer than it is wide usually. Most of these boxes are smaller than shoe boxes but larger than music boxes. Does that make sense? I hope it does. Some are bigger but shorter and others have domed tops and others are cubes and others are really small but for the most part they’re boxes that are around 12 to 16 inches long by 8 or 9 inches wide by 10 to 12 inches tall. They survive in similar numbers to boxes with domed lids that have flat tops and four sides that angle in. Please go to the “Sew What?” social media to see some pictures of these things because they are clearly really hard to describe. @sewwhatpodcast on Twitter and Instagram. You know it, you love it, you know the drill at this point.  

Okay so usually these boxes are called embroidered caskets but it is not that simple. Sometimes they’re called cabinets and sometimes they’re called caskets. A lot of museums disagree on this – you’ll see them labelled in a bunch of different ways. But the way I understand the difference is that cabinets open two ways – they have lids you can lift up and doors that open outwards to reveal more drawers. Caskets only open one way. They only have the lid part that lift up. They don’t have the front doors that open outwards. I wish you could all see right now how much hand movement I’m doing to explain this because I feel like it’d make it a bit easier, but here we are. I hope you get what I’m talking about. 

Okay, onwards. On the outside, cabinets and caskets are embroidered, either on silk or paper. Sometimes all of the panels on the outside of a box relate to each other – they’ll show different scenes in one Old Testament story, for example. Other times, some panels will show a Biblical or classical narrative and others will show nature scenes or courting couples or mermaids in grottos or hunting scenes or female personifications of the scenses or lions, unicorns, stags, and other royal animals. You know what I mean. Or maybe you don’t, which is totally fine. This is just to say that cabinets and caskets are covered in a whole variety of stories and images. The interior usually features salmon-coloured silk, which covers the insides of the doors and all of the larger interior spaces like the pin cushion area and spaces for paper. The smaller drawers are usually covered in marbled paper and sometimes edges are covered in silver braid and punched, silver-coloured wood. Every single surface in these boxes is covered – there’s a huge, HUGE attention to detail.  

On their insides, cabinets and caskets tend to have spaces for ink wells, sewing supplies, paper, writing implements, jewels, shells, and other treasured small objects. Many of the boxes also have surviving perfume bottles, which is very cool. My favourite part is that they also have secret compartments!! It’s so fun. These compartments are behind drawers that can be pulled out and underneath containers that can be lifted up. These secret spaces show us that these boxes were not only spaces of storage, but also spaces of security and privacy. Girls had the opportunity to hide their most precious, secret objects away. I’ll talk more about the relationship between women and the physical space and security provided by these boxes later in this episode. 

 Also, for those of you not familiar with these boxes or how they were made, lemme briefly discuss the physical construction of these delightful things. So the underdrawings were made by professional artists. An American scholar named Tricia Nguyen I believe is researching these artisans, which is really exciting because if you’ve seen a lot of these boxes you’ll notice that some underdrawing styles appear again and again. Clearly there were just a few people in London pumping these designs out. Next, girls did their stitching on top of these underdrawings. The cabinets and caskets were then put together by professionals who completed the boxes. So there’s a very apparent mix between non-professional and professional work. Girls were offered creativity but only within a preexisting structure. 

 I should say here that I would really, really recommend a book I consider the early modern needlework Bible. It’s called English Embroidery in the Metropolitan Museum, 1580-1700: ‘Twixt Art and Nature and its edited by Melinda Watt and Andrew Morrall. The PDF is available online for free and it’s really high quality, so I’ll put a link to it on the @sewwhatpodcast social media. The book is a catalogue that accompanied an exhibition about early modern English embroideries in the Met’s collection that was on display at the Bard Graduate Centre in 2008. The book is super informative and you can zoom in on the pictures, which is, you know, the best thing!! I would absolutely recommend downloading it. Aaaaaand the title, ‘Twixt Art and Nature’, will come up again later in this episode, which we love to see. Okay, that’s that on the early modern needlework bible. I’m a big fan, clearly!!

Back to the cabinets and caskets. There are a few really unique cabinets I want to mention because they’re the only ones of their kind to survive (that I know of) and they’re really fascinating. The first one is a casket that was sold by Christie’s in 2001 and then went to the Cotsen Collection and is now in the Textile Museum in Washington DC. The entire exterior is embroidered, which isn’t that exceptional because most cabinet and casket exteriors were! What is truly unique about this casket is that there are artificial flowers inside of it. Open the casket’s lid to reveal a whole garden of magnolias, gillyflowers, pears, and strawberries made out of pressed silk and feathers. How cool! The flowers are set within a lawn made with green feather grass and a path made of wool. Along the walls of this garden are mirrors and the cutest lil pilasters, completing the Baroque garden scene. It is, honestly, so dreamy! 

 The interior of the casket raises questions about who made the piece. Boxes stitched by girls completing their needlework education usually included drawers, ink wells and ink pots, spaces for letters, etc. They had a purpose. This casket doesn’t really have a purpose, I don’t think – it’s entirely decorative because you obviously wouldn’t want to put anything on top of the garden to crush the flowers and fruits. But maybe a girl did make this – maybe she wasn’t planning on putting an objects in her box and instead wanted to utilise more skills to fashion her own artificial garden. It’s sometimes fairly easy to guess if a casket or cabinet was made by a schoolgirl or a professional based on the quality of stitching. But this casket’s exterior embroidery isn’t in stellar condition, with a lot of its paper ground showing through, so it’s hard to tell precisely the level of skill involved in the stitching. So basically, I don’t know the story behind this casket or who made it but it is a really cool example and is perhaps the only surviving example of what might’ve been a larger trend in the production of these boxes. Who knows how many caskets lost to time had delightful artificial gardens in them?!

There’s another really exceptional and unique and wonderful box I wanna mention. It’s a cabinet (so it’s lid and front doors open) in the Royal Collection Trust. The outside features some absolutely lovely raised work embroidery but the best part, in my opinion, is the thing on top. The top is decorated with a landscape featuring a shepherdess wearing a hat sitting under a tree. She’s surrounded by four sheep, a lamb, a dog, and two other leafy trees. The trees and figures are modelled around wire and involve silk fabric, silk chenille, and lots of detached buttonhole stitch. The lil sheep are definitely made of detached buttonhole stitch from the pictures I’ve seen and they are SO STUPIDLY CUTE oh my goodness.  

This cabinet was definitely made by a professional. You can just tell by the quality of embroidery, especially the raised work. It was almost certainly made by professional cabinet makers and was perhaps commissioned by an individual or family or was sold at a shop. I can’t say for certain because not a lot of scholarship exists about these boxes and there’s even less about the production and sale of professional examples. I think there is some scholarship in the works about this, but I don’t believe there’s anything published yet. If you know of some scholarship I don’t know about lemme know!  

Okay, those were some exceptional examples of 17th-century boxes made by professionals. Let’s talk about some examples that were definitely made by girls at the end of their needlework education! These examples have their names either stitched onto them or have descended through families with their provenances intact.  

There are some cabinets and caskets that are the only surviving needleworked objects made by their makers. That’s the case for people like Rebecca Stonier Plaisted, whose cabinet is from 1668. It’s in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago now. Opening the cabinet’s top lid reveals a miniature drawing room with mirrored walls and silver pilasters and five teeny tiny dolls dressed in silk and silver costumes. I’ve only ever seen an old black and white image of that drawing room scene but I’m hoping there’ll eventually be some high-def images of it because it looks VERY cute. Some elements of that scene, specifically the mirrored walls and silver pilasters, make me think that casket I mentioned earlier with the artificial garden inside it was actually likely made by a schoolgirl and not a professional. I say this because that artificial garden also sits within walls covered in mirror and silver pilasters. That makes me think the mirrored walls and silver pilasters were sold in shops, available for girls or their teachers to buy and use in those boxes. That brings up questions I ask a lot when thinking about embroidered cabinets and caskets – which merchants were selling things like those pilasters? Did they sell other cabinet and casket accoutrement? Was including things like artificial gardens and mini drawing room scenes just for fun or was figure modelling and artificial flower making in the context of these boxes specifically considered female accomplishments? There’s a lot to think about and figure out and delve into, which, as you can tell, I love and am DEEPLY, deeply obsessed with. 

 There are a few cabinets and caskets that survive that were made by girls who also have other pieces of surviving needlework, so that is very rad. There’s a Quaker gal named Parnell Mackett who made a sampler in 1690 and a workbox casket thing in 1692, both of which survive. The sampler is in the Art Institute of Chicago and the box is in the Victoria and Albert Museum. This is obviously not a complete set of all the needlework a girl would make over the course of her education, but it shows how objects get disseminated and then reconnected. Also Parnell Mackett’s stuff is close to my heart because I have a tattoo of the female personification of the sense of sound from a 17th-century casket tattooed onto my arm and I lovingly call the woman on my tattoo Parnell Mackett. 

 ANYHOO, okay, back to cabinets and caskets. There are a few complete sets of schoolgirl needlework that include cabinets and caskets and they are wonderful and lovely and really helpful when it comes to understanding how 17th-century English girls were taught to stitch. The arguably most famous needlework suite is that of Martha Edlin. It’s all in the V&A and descended through the female line of her family before being donated to the museum. Her suite includes everything Martha made during her education and possibly what she made after that was done. That includes, in addition to the casket, two samplers, a jewellery case, heckin pin cushions, a purse, a pair of miniature gloves, and some delightful silver trinkets given to her as a reward for her stitching skills. Martha made her colourful band sampler first, in 1668. Then she made whitework and cutwork sampler in 1669 and her casket in 1671. Her casket has surviving lil feet that they kind of sit on and the lid is embroidered with the figure of Music surrounded by representations of the four elements, air, fire, earth, and water. The edges of the lid show a geometric pattern stitched in couched and laid work. The four sloping panels that connect the lid to the main body of the casket are embroidered with a whole lotta fun animals, including a camel and unicorn, and the squares below those animals have more geometric and floral patterns in couched and laid work. Three sides of the main body of the casket are stitched with the seven Virtues, Faith, Hope, Charity, Justice, Temperance, Fortitude, and Prudence. And the back randomly has a squirrel framed by two birds. Like much of her needlework suite, Martha’s casket is in really, really good condition. I am a big fan and you all should be too!! If you want to be, of course. Martha came from a family of nonconformists in Pinner, near London (now technically in London). Which is cool because a lot of the Hackney schools, which I’m about to get into, were run by nonconformists. Nonconformists were those in the 17th-century who were not down with the Church of England – they include groups like the Methodists, Presbyterians, and Quakers. There seems to be a big overlap between nonconformists and their education and the production of these boxes, which is something I’m thinking about and actively researching as part of my PhD. What is up with nonconformists and these cabinets and caskets? I don’t know yet but there is obviously much to think about!!!!

 Okay, as I just mentioned, a lot of caskets and cabinets that girls made they made in schools in Hackney. In the 17th-century, Hackney was the centre of female education. Hackney was close to London but was, at the time, the countryside, so provided fresh air and no distraction in the form of men. The Hackney schools were so notorious and so popular that even famous diarist Samuel Pepys used to go check them out. Two of the most famous Hackney schools were those run by Mrs Salmon and the Perwich family. But no surviving cabinets and caskets are confirmed to have been made at any specific Hackney girls’ school, thus far, at least. The closest we get is a note found in a cabinet made by one Miss Bluitt, now at the Ashmolean Museum. The note reads, “The cabinet was made by my mother's grandmother who was educated at Hackney School.” There we go, proof of what we already knew, that a lot of these boxes were made in Hackney.

 I have also gotten as close as possible to proving that a cabinet at LACMA (the Los Angeles County Museum of Art) was made at the Perwich school in Hackney but that is a conversation for another day or another episode, if people are interested. Basically, this cabinet at LACMA may have been made by Susanna Perwich, a musical prodigy who was famed for her needlework skill and piety. Remember the name of the book I mentioned earlier, English Embroidery in the Metropolitan Museum, 1580-1700: ‘Twixt Art and Nature? Well, ‘’twixt art and nature’ is a line from a poem about a girl’s glorious needlework skills. And who is that girl? Susanna Perwich!! Her brother in law, John Batchiler, wrote a book called The Virgin’s Pattern celebrating Susanna after her untimely death at 24 years old. So that cabinet may well have been made by one of the 17th century’s most famous, celebrated needlewomen in the Hackney school system! Very, very cool. 

 Okay, I know I’ve just come at you with a lot of specific examples of these boxes and I realise that’s probably a bit overwhelming. So I’m gonna get into some more thematic, bigger picture stuff for a bit. The Hackney schools, and 17th-century girls’ schools in general, were spaces of structure and categorisation, and needlework cabinets and caskets themselves reflected these priorities. Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford have a good quote about this in their book called Women in Early Modern England, 1550-1720. They say, ‘in some contexts, segregation was imposed on the female sex by patriarchal edict, for women were barred from certain locations and institutions reserved for men. But women's role in the gendering of space was not merely negative. They created their own culture, in part, by demarcating and controlling their own space’. Embroidered cabinets and caskets are examples of this exclusion. These objects were made for gals, by gals, in the company of gals. In an embroidered cabinet or casket, this female space is physically demarcated and controlled, dividing space into drawers, open receptacles, locked compartments, and secret chambers. 

 Although men had cabinets and caskets that were similar to women’s embroidered 

examples in size and function, women’s cabinets and caskets were more personal because women stitched them themselves and they contained a much larger proportion of the owners’ possessions, as gals owned so few objects in comparison to dudes. While men had cabinets made for them from opulent materials including exotic hardwoods and ivory, women crafted their cabinets’ exteriors, developing more intimate bonds with their boxes because they spent so many months decorating them. When finished, the cabinets and caskets held personal possessions such as rings, letters, jewels, and keepsakes, items similar to those kept in men’s cabinets. But for women, the contents of these containers represent most of their possessions. The men who owned cabinets, princes and patricians, also owned immense amounts of land, luxury items, and technically their wives; women possessed very little. For women, cabinets and caskets represented autonomy and ownership, whereas for guys, a cabinet was just one of many possessions. 

 Okay, those are my thoughts on 17th-century cabinets and caskets!! As you can probably tell from my enthusiasm, I could spend like 6 full episodes talking about these boxes, so I thought maybe like a cursory overview like I just did was probably a good way to start. Am I tempted to have an entire season of “Sew What?” devoted to these bad boys? Yes, I am. Now I haven’t even gotten in to contemporaneous beadwork cabinet and caskets in this episode. That’ll be a future episode, hopefully. Beadwork is equally fascinating but appears on these 17th-century boxes less often. But there are also beadwork pictures, jewellery boxes, mirror frames, and baskets from the 17th-century so I will hopefully spend an entire future episode focusing on those. Something to look forward to, right?

 I am so bad at concluding these episodes so I will just say yay! Thank you so much for listening!! Your support really does mean a lot to lil old me.

 Now go out and stitch some stories! And look at images of cabinets and caskets online because they are so cool! Bye!!