Embroidered Footstool, John Taylor & Sons, ca. 1850

This walnut and inlaid footstool with Berlin wool needlework top was made by John Taylor & Sons, Edinburgh, ca. 1850. It is square, with carved scroll feet and a geometrical coloured inlaid border around the lower edge.  The needlework top features a design of a fox head in semi-profile surrounded by winter foliage reminiscent of Victorian Christmas decorations, with a coloured braided cord forming a border on the upper edge.  The footstool is stamped underneath with the maker’s mark.  An amateur may have made the embroidered top. 

Footstools existed in the eighteenth century, but the great age for production and use was the nineteenth century, with a peak of newspaper advertising between the 1860s and 1880s.  They came in numerous styles, but were typically small wooden objects with an upholstered top covered in fancy textiles often, as in this case, featuring embroidery. Footstools were intended to raise the feet out of draughts and damp floors in houses and churches.  They were found in sitting or drawing rooms in spaces usually associated with middle class women.  They served various functions in addition to acting as footrest, with contemporary images showing them used as seating for small children or pet dogs and also supporting piles of books and papers. The homemade footstool featuring elaborate and time-consuming embroidery was a display item and often gifted within families.  

John Taylor & Sons, sometimes styled ‘Cabinetmakers to the Queen’ were founded in Edinburgh in 1825 with premises in West Thistle Street, moving to 109 Princes Street by mid century, where they had extensive retail premises and a workshop and offices behind, and also establishing a more extensive workshop – the Rosemount Cabinetworks – to the west of the city, close to Haymarket railway station. At the Census of 1851, the founder, a wright by training, employed 90 men and four apprentices, one of them his own son who was an apprentice cabinetmaker.

John Taylor & Sons designed, made and retailed footstools, possibly employing female needle workers in their premises, or more likely as outworkers, to make the elaborate textile covers, which comprised a large part of the value of the object.  They might also have purchased the embroidered tops ready made, since there was significant importing of made panels for sale, mostly produced in Europe and described as ‘German Embroidery.’  This type of needlework, using popular Berlin wool, which was retailed through many premises for home use, was also undertaken by amateur embroiderers and the company catered for this market, as it announced in the Scotsman in 1855 as part of a larger advertisement for their ‘cabinet furniture manufactured in their own works’:

J. T. & S. devote great attention to the Making Up of SEWED WORK into CHAIRS, OTTOMANS, CUSHIONS, FENDER and FOOTSTOOLS and they execute Designs specially to suit the WORK.