1 10 3 https://www.artisansinscotland.shca.ed.ac.uk/files/original/333d079b61bcbdfcabe72b873fe2922b.jpg 840b416fb4add6b8b8c43f98e28e299b Exhibition Item Title Embroidered Footstool Category Textiles Description 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. Image copyright National Museums Scotland Item Location National Museums Scotland Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Embroidered Footstool, John Taylor & Sons, ca. 1850 amateur Edinburgh embroiderers middle class needlework textiles women craftworkers https://www.artisansinscotland.shca.ed.ac.uk/files/original/e32166916d6b183515e77feef3aa4b24.jpg 606b5789b35f8764ce232c43f2f41afd Exhibition Item Title Fern Ware Box, Mauchline Category Wood Description This sycamore wood box is decorated with a pattern of ferns and other leaf shapes in green and red on a brown ground. It has been customised with the initials ‘E.L’, and it was probably made by the firm of W. & A. Smith in Mauchline, a small town in East Ayrshire that became a centre of wooden souvenir manufacture in the early nineteenth century. Fern patterns were a popular finish for small items of wood ware (collectively known as treen) from the 1870s, though similar wooden items were decorated in a range of styles and finishes, including tartan and scenic views of Scottish landmarks. Decorated wooden boxes were associated with a number of Scottish manufacturers but particularly with W. & A. Smith,which operated from 1810 to 1939. Desire for souvenirs decorated with fern motifs grew from a trend in botanical exploration that became widespread from the 1840s and reached fever pitch by the 1850s. Fern ware was the fifth most common finish for Scottish box ware in a range that included seaweed ware, tartan ware, transfer ware (mostly landscape scenes) and other motifs designed to appeal to Scotland’s tourist trade. In 1850 Smith’s published Authenticated Tartans of the Clans and Families of Scotland, in which ‘ the garb of the Highland Clans was given in all its brilliance and vibrancy’ and which showcased a technological development pioneered by W. & A. Smith. The firm mechanically reproduced intricate tartan designs on paper that could be skilfully glued to small items of wood ware, their seams concealed with black and gold paint. Smith’s was awarded a gold medal at the Great Exhibition in London in 1851 in recognition of the ingenuity of their invention. Applying fern patterns was a skilled and complex process often carried out outside the factory by small-scale producers or as a sub-contracted cottage industry. Decorators used a reverse stencil method whereby dried fern leaves were arranged and pinned in place on a surface coated with resin before being sprayed or speckled with coloured dyes and varnish. Repeating this process in layers gave fern ware its delicate, three-dimensional quality. Reputedly ferns were collected from the Isle of Arran, though experts have noted that not all of the wood ware ferns were Scottish or even British and that many came from New Zealand, Central and South America, the West Indies or Southeast Asia. Decoration was applied to wood ware items both large and small but fern designs were the only finish applied to items of domestic furniture. East Ayrshire Museums has examples of fern ware tables and piano stools, and other known examples include a table made by the Edinburgh cabinet maker John Taylor and Son, and cupboards and stools decorated in the workshop of Thomas Morton of Muirkirk (1859-1945). In 1897 an inventory taken at Castle Fraser near Aberdeen notes that Fern Ware tables were used in the boudoir, the study, and the drawing room. W. &. A Smith’s closed in 1939 when a fire at the boxworks brought an end to production, but a plaque commemorating Mauchline’s wood ware industry and workers can be found on the old factory building in Kilmarnock Road. Image copyright East Ayrshire Council Item Location The Baird Institute Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Fern Ware Box, Mauchline, ca. 1900 amateur Ayrshire craft communities engravers exhibitions Mauchline Scottish motifs tartan tourist industry wood https://www.artisansinscotland.shca.ed.ac.uk/files/original/20c88e402542cd0d1d8d8abccc0b7cf0.jpg 2e375135098855cbb0afccf6c189e77b Exhibition Item Category Metal Wares Image copyright National Museums Scotland Item Location National Museum Scotland Description A photographic portrait of Robert Davidson (1845-1921), master blacksmith at Woodfoot, near Hawick, Roxburghshire with his second daughter, Mary, stood outside the lodge house and gate entrance to Stobs Castle, dated 1887 according to record, but, from the costume worn by the woman, probably a decade later. Robert Davidson is dressed in his working clothes of heavy stripped collarless cotton shirt and waistcoat, with flat peaked cap and leather blacksmith’s apron over trousers and sturdy but dusty boots. His shirt sleeves are rolled up to the elbows and he strikes a pose typically seen among men involved in the physically demanding metal and building trades, with brawny arms crossed high on his chest and a penetrating stare. The full beard and walrus-styled moustache, though fashionable at the time, add a patriarchal air. His daughter is stylishly dressed in a bell shaped walking skirt and matching jacket, with gigot sleeves, tight waist and a flared peplum. She has a white shirt with stand-up collar and tie. This ensemble along with the flat straw hat is characteristic of the style of dress adopted by the later nineteenth century ‘new woman’. Robert was descended from a long line of Roxburghshire blacksmiths. His grandfather, father and elder brother, all named Walter, were the blacksmiths who occupied the Newmill-on-Teviot smithy a few miles south of Hawick for most of the nineteenth century. A country blacksmith such as Robert Davidson would turn his hand to many different activities, such as shoeing horses, mending and making farm or local workshop equipment and fashioning tools for use by other craftsmen, such as hammers, knives, files and chisels. The Stobs Castle estate, from which he rented the cottage and workshop attached to the castle lodge would have generated much of his work. Though the name of the photographer is unrecorded, he was probably an amateur who enjoyed taking photographs of local people and scenes and was possibly connected to the gentry family who lived in Stobs Castle. Craft portraits of the period showing artisans in their places of work with well-dressed female family members included in the composition are common, but the men are normally also in their Sunday-best, with aprons over good trousers and smart shoes. What is unusual in this image is the contrast between the smart young woman, proud of her fashionable costume and her equally proud and dignified father in the ordinary working clothes of the master blacksmith. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Robert Davidson, Blacksmith and his Daughter, Roxburghshire ca. 1897 amateur blacksmiths dressmakers Hawick joiners photographers Roxburghshire