Historical perspectives

Historically, textiles were highly prized and valued for their beauty as well as their function, as they were time-consuming and labour-intensive to produce. Because there were few alternative materials suitable for wrapping, carrying, sheltering, shrouding and clothing, textiles held a status and importance in everybody's lives; we have lost this respect for textiles today. In our modern throwaway world we take for granted the availability, variety and cost of textiles.

Appliqué has existed for thousands of years. Although textiles by their nature deteriorate and disintegrate over time and colours fade, beautiful examples of exquisitely designed and intricately worked appliqué have survived from all over the world. These give us a tantalizing insight into the historic use and importance of appliqué, and an appreciation of the technical skill and creativity of the people who used this method of decorating one cloth with another.

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Ancient appliqué

Archaeological excavations reveal that richly decorated appliquéd and embroidered textiles were closely associated with, and reflected the elite status of, the deceased. They were entombed with the revered dead to accompany them to the afterlife, giving us a fascinating insight into the everyday lives and lost worlds of ancient civilizations.

Some of the earliest surviving appliqués have been discovered in Ancient Egyptian tombs. Mummified animals have been found wrapped in appliquéd cloths, and a linen collar with appliquéd petals dating back 3,000 years was discovered in Tutankhamen's tomb.

In southern Siberian tombs, examples of felt and leather appliqué, dating back to the fifth century BC, were discovered in the 1920s. These highly decorative and incredibly well-preserved appliquéd carpets and wall hangings, saddle blankets and coverings were made by the early nomadic tribes of the Pazyryk region of the Altai Mountains. It is astonishing that these beautiful textiles really are 5,000 years old - the colours, textures, designs and workmanship are so intact that they could have been made yesterday. It is only because of exceptional climatic conditions that these precious ancient textiles have survived.

Although much of the physical evidence of appliqué has been lost with the passage of time through deterioration, wear and tear, and recycling, there is such a consistency in the use of materials, designs and technique, it is obvious that the traditions of appliqué have been passed from generation to generation through the ages.

For centuries, textiles were a valuable trading commodity and, as they were traded between cultures, ideas about appliqué were exchanged, designs were reinterpreted and techniques were adapted to make them more suitable for use with locally available materials and cultural tastes.

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Saddlecloth, 218 × 68cm (86 × 27in), 5th-4th century BC (Pazyryk culture, Siberia, collection of The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg). The whole surface of this white felt saddlecloth, except for a narrow band beneath the saddle, is covered with ornamental inlay felt appliqué, with horseshoe shapes in the border.

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Medieval appliqué

Disease also played its part in the development of appliqué. In England, the Black Death of 1348 contributed to the destruction of the system of medieval guilds and workshops where skilled textile workers and embroiderers produced vestments and hangings for the Church and the wealthy elite. The style of embroidery at this time, known as Opus Anglicanum (English work), predominantly involved exquisite metal thread and silk stitching, and was intricate, expensive and time-consuming to produce. These pieces were highly valued and exported throughout Europe.

The decimation of a highly skilled professional workforce had a dramatic impact on the way that textiles were decorated: appliqué increasingly began to be used as a less costly substitute for solid embroidery on military regalia and ecclesiastical vestments, and European embroidery became more of a domestic art form. Appliqué was widely used to suit the needs and resources of the household and continued to be popular as it could involve the endless recycling and reworking of older textiles. It was used on covers, household linen, curtains, clothing and furnishings as a decorative feature and for small-scale mending.

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Sixteenth to eighteenth centuries

In large, grand households, where a greater wealth of resources was available, appliqué featured on a more significant scale. The important allegorical Hardwick Hall panels, stitched by Bess of Hardwick, Countess of Shrewsbury, are a fine example of sixteenth-century appliqué. They show the use of recycled vestments, which would have found their way into private hands at the time of the Reformation.

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Embroidery for a casket c.1650 depicting King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba (collection of The Bowes Museum, Barnard Castle). Raised embroidery in coloured silks and metal threads with needle lace and seed pearls, applied as wired, padded slips to a silk foundation later (probably in the 1960s) mounted over a wooden carcass.

In the late seventeenth century there was a fashion for a three-dimensional style of appliqué known as raised work or stumpwork. This lively, secular form of English embroidery adorned caskets, mirrors and narrative pictures, often of a biblical theme. Individual motifs were stitched and then padded and applied as a 'slip' to a background of silk, satin or velvet.

An important step in the history of appliqué was the development of a patched and pieced style of quilt-making by settlers in North America throughout the seventeenth century. Trade restrictions put in place by the British severely limited the import of cloth into North America, which forced the settlers to find ever more inventive and creative ways to use and reuse available fabrics. By the time the British lifted the trading restrictions in 1826, the integration of appliqué into quilt-making was firmly established and continues to develop to this day. Fine examples are the album quilts of the mid-nineteenth century and the distinctive Baltimore quilts, many of which were stitched by groups of women working together.

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Nineteenth and twentieth century to the present day

Casket #1 - Moving House (Rachael Howard). Screen-printed drawings, appliquéd motifs and machine embroidery.

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Technology has also played its part in the development of appliqué. With the introduction of aniline dyes in the 1850s, fabrics could be mass-produced in more vivid colours, which appealed to an increasingly insatiable market for domestic needlework goods.

Victorian Britain developed a passion for these newly discovered lurid colours and enthusiastically incorporated them into fancy needlework projects, reflecting the Victorian appetite for highly decorative and ornate surfaces. Their love of busy surfaces was translated into the technique of crazy patchwork - an appliqué style created from an assortment of colours, textures and irregular shapes, which were randomly pieced together in the making process, then further embellished with decorative hand embroidery.

As a reaction to this overwhelming riot of colour and pattern, Jessie Newbury and Ann Macbeth (notable teachers of artistic needlework at Glasgow School of Art) championed the ethics of the Arts and Crafts Movement led by William Morris and his contemporaries. At the heart of the movement was a belief in the revival of traditional craft skills and the rejection of the industrialization of production. For the first time the relationship between materials, technique, working process and aesthetic form was considered. Appliqués were designed with simple, clean lines and harmonious colour palettes.

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Insects, 1928 (Margaret Nicholson, collection of Anthea Godfrey). Hand appliqué and embroidery onto printed ground.

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Pawnbroker Crazy Coverlet, 1877 (collection of Quilt Museum and Gallery, York). Recycled velvets and silks; applied and elaborately decorated with embroidery embellishment. Purchased from a pawnbrokers in London in the 1920s/30s after the death of the owner.

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Throughout the twentieth century, appliqué continued to be used in more diverse and experimental ways as an art form in its own right. Rebecca Crompton was an influential embroiderer and teacher who emphasized the importance of design rather than the perfection of stitch technique. Her appliqués of the 1930s show a contemporary approach to design combined with a new and exciting use of the sewing machine as a drawing tool.

Constance Howard, an important and deeply influential figure in twentieth-century embroidery and a pioneer in textile art, pushed the boundaries of appliqué and continued to assert the significance of textile art as a vehicle for artistic self-expression.

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The Magic Garden, 1937 (Rebecca Crompton, collection of Victoria & Albert Museum). Plain and patterned fabrics appliquéd by hand and further embellished with textured surface stitching.

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Two Doves, 1950 (Constance Howard, collection of Embroiderers' Guild). Applied stylized imagery onto silk ground with hand embroidery.

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Overlord Embroidery (detail), 240cm × 90cm (95 × 35in), (collection of D-Day Museum,...