1 10 5 https://www.artisansinscotland.shca.ed.ac.uk/files/original/4e8f8b24bdc553cde1101ad218215c2e.jpg 18bd83a08be4313560fca7e43b7bb959 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 Trades and Communities Exhibition Item Category Glass Description This oil painting of the town of Dumbarton in west-central Scotland, taken from the west bank of the River Leven, is dominated by the three distinctive cones of the Dumbarton Glassworks. At the time the landscape was painted the town, of ancient foundation, had a population of c.3,500 people. The glass works, founded in 1777, was owned for most of its history by the Dixon family, who were local gentry landowners. They dominated the politics of Dumbarton, with several serving as Lord Provost. The glass works was located in Dumbarton because of the proximity to coal and sources of kelp from the Highlands (an ash derived from burned seaweed), which with sand formed the key ingredients of glass making. The firm was notable for two types of product – glass bottles and ‘crown glass’, the latter its main claim to distinction, giving employment to many skilled craftsmen. At its height, c. 1800-1830, the company supplied most of the high quality glass used in Scotland, with a focus on the Edinburgh market where it maintained an agent and warehouse. Crown glass was used as window glass and having highly reflective qualities is still made today using similar craft techniques for historic building conservation projects. Crown glass was first perfected in late seventeenth-century London and remained the main form of window glass through to the mid nineteenth century. It was made using a blowpipe technique, with the glass spun rapidly until a disk has been formed that was then cut into panes for astragal windows. The workshop, with its ovens for melting the glass, was a difficult place to work. Machine rolled plate glass replaced hand-blown crown glass from ca.1840. In charting the rise and fall of a glass making community in Dumbarton, the first Statistical Account in the 1790s referred to a ‘considerable crown and bottle glass manufactory, which employs 130 hands’. The town was also notable for employment in the nearby cotton dyeing and printing fields that were then developing along the banks of the Leven. Employment in shipping was also noted. The ‘glass-house men’ were said to earn up to 25s a week, which put them on a par with other local craftsmen such as carpenters. Skilled glass workers in Dumbarton were largely attracted from other places, such as Lancashire or London, where glass making flourished. The unskilled were locally born. At its height, the glass works employed about 300 men, who, with their wives and children comprised about a third of the local population. Many of the women who lived in the town worked in the home-based muslin embroidery industry. The second Statistical Account for the late 1830s noted the end of the industry, which ceased trading in 1832 following the death, in quick succession, of two owners. Most of the workers and their families left the town to seek employment elsewhere, mainly in England. By this stage in the history of Dumbarton another industry, shipbuilding, was starting to take shape and the cotton printing industry in the Vale of Leven was also in the ascendant, both associated with a different range of skilled trades and communities, attracting workers from Glasgow and as far afield as Ireland. Although briefly revived in the 1840s, Dumbarton-made glass could no longer compete with production in Edinburgh or England and the Dumbarton Glassworks was finally discontinued in 1850 when the brick-built cones that dominated the skyline were dismantled and the premises, with its river-frontage, were given over to a ship yard. The site on which the first Dumbarton glassworks was founded on the banks of the River Leven was known as ‘the Artisan’ long after the works had gone. In 1973 a new river crossing was named the Artisan Bridge. The artist responsible for this painting was Alexander Brown, born in Dumbarton in 1792 but little known beyond his home town. Image copyright West Dunbartonshire Council Item Location Clydebank Museum and Art Gallery 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 Dumbarton Glassmaking c. 1820 building carpenters cotton Edinburgh embroiderers glass London https://www.artisansinscotland.shca.ed.ac.uk/files/original/e0976010d7379a0a792aed43645f6f10.jpg 3231c3097fd7a30fab43ede69f873b69 Exhibition Item Category Metal Wares Image copyright National Museums Scotland Item Location National Museums Scotland Description This image shows the ‘pattern shop’ and foundry at the agricultural implement making firm of Alexander Jack & Sons of Maybole in Ayrshire in the mid 1880s. It is one of a series of photograph of the different departments of the firm, which employed up to a 150 men at its height in the first decade of the twentieth century, many of them skilled craftsmen. In the foreground are some of the molding boxes, blocks and sand that are used for making metal castings, with a wide variety of patterns and models stored and displayed along the walls. Castings were made here in both iron and brass, with some of great weight, hence the iron rig and pulley system for lifting that is seen in the middle of the image. The rotund figure facing the camera is probably the foreman, who would have been a skilled blacksmith or iron founder and there are another eleven men at work in the image. Though this was a workshop on a large scale with some mechanisation, according to local report ‘old craft and new machines work hand-in-hand.’ The firm was founded by small-town craftsman, Alexander Jack, who started as a joiner and cabinet maker in a business that soon failed. But ever the entrepreneur, from 1852, with only limited capital, Jack began making small tools for other craftsmen and soon expanded into agricultural implements and vehicles making, taking advantage of the local demand from farming and the nearby railway line for transport to markets beyond Ayrshire. Jack’s business partner and successor was John Marshall, an engineer, who also became Provost of Maybole and served as President of the Society of Scottish Agricultural Engineers. The firm, which gained many prizes at exhibitions, survived to 1966. The craft communities that were supported in Scotland’s small towns were a significant feature of the nineteenth century. Maybole was a long-established market town at the heart of agricultural south-west Scotland, just a few miles south of the port of Ayr. Bartholomew’s 1887 Gazetteer of the British Isles gave a population of 6,623 and identified the main employments as boot and shoe making, leather tanning and agricultural implement making. The weaving trade, which had once been important, had much declined from its peak in the 1820s. However, textiles still flourished, with women in the town and in the countryside beyond extensively employed in the home-based Ayrshire whitework embroidery industry, making finely ‘flowered’ cottons mainly for use in baby christening gowns. 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 Alexander Jack & Sons, Agricultural Implement Maker, ca. 1885 Ayrshire blacksmiths Brass cabinet maker embroiderers engineers exhibitions foundry iron joiners patterns photographers shoemakers textiles weavers https://www.artisansinscotland.shca.ed.ac.uk/files/original/e97dbd1b24c6f4ac1d133f15f58d18e7.jpg 33621ee8edbc043e6de9d708203537b7 Exhibition Item Category Textiles Image copyright University of Edinburgh Item Location Private Collection Description This detail of a 19th century christening gown is a typical example of Ayrshire work consisting of firm satin stitches on fine cotton cloth with areas of cut-out cloth which are filled with fine, needlepoint lace stitches. It has a simple design of flowers and a trailing vine worked in a combination of solid satin stitches, curved lines of ‘laddering’, and overcast eyelets that anchor two types of needlepoint fillings. Traditional whitework items included sleeves, chemisettes, baby’s robes, bonnets and trimmings, though changing trends in nineteenth-century fashion also dictated different styles and products. For example, over 200 designs for fashionable embroidered collars were copyright-registered by the firm of Sharps & Co. of Paisley between 1843 and 1844. Irish lace was expensive and worn by only the wealthiest women whereas whitework offered a pleasing, affordable alternative. The whitework industrywas introduced to Ayrshire in the 1820s, with five principal producers listed in the Ayr Post Office Directory by 1830. Its production increased steadily over the next two decades. The New Statistical Accounts of Scotland (1834-45) show that there were nineteen parishes in Ayrshire alone where women were working as muslin embroiderers or ‘flowerers’. The intricacy and delicacy of the work shows the skill of its makers, though the notion of whitework as a congenial cottage industry fails to recognise the scale and speed of its manufacture in the mid-nineteenth century. Outline designs were printed on cloth by Glasgow-based, ‘sewed muslin’ manufacturers who distributed them to Ayrshire embroiderers in a putting-out system of production. Each design was sent with information on how long the embroiderer had to complete it and what rate they would be paid. Skills were passed from mother to daughter with single households often containing more than one sewer. A single hand could complete small items like collars, whereas more complex items such as christening robes could include the work of several women. Unfinished examples suggest that outlines and edgings could be completed by less experienced sewers whereas needlepoint sections demanded the skills of highly experienced embroiderers. Despite the beauty and versatility of Ayrshire whitework changes in fashion and mechanisation led to its decline as a large-scale, home-based craft industry in the 1880s. 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 Whitework Christening Gown, mid-19th century Ayrshire copyright and patenting design embroiderers Glasgow home industries https://www.artisansinscotland.shca.ed.ac.uk/files/original/b8c9e295c443b74236fc83e94cced2e0.jpg 5dd460c539d706e246e942e7af184338 Exhibition Item Category Jewellery and Silverware Image copyright Scottish National Portrait Gallery Item Location Scottish National Portrait Gallery Description This self-portrait of Phoebe Traquair (1852-1936) was painted in oil on a mahogany panel between 1909-11. Traquair was a key figure in the Scottish Arts and Crafts movement and is perhaps its most well-known woman. Her work included jewellery enamelling, book illuminating and binding, embroidery, and mural painting. The portrait shows Traquair at the peak of her career having completed several large commissions and at a time when she was developing her small-scale decorative work. She began enamelling in 1901 using a technique that involved painting enamels onto copper plate, and in total produced over 300 enamelled works including the gold and enamel ‘Love Cup’ pendant designed as a special commission for the architect Robert Lorimer. Born Phoebe Anna Moss in Kilternan, near Dublin, Ireland, in 1852, Traquair attended art classes at the Royal Dublin Society before moving to Scotland with her husband Dr Ramsay Traquair in 1873. She started her career preparing scientific drawings for her husband who became Keeper of Natural History at Museum of Science and Art in Edinburgh. Her early work was produced within the context of her family but after 1885 she began to take on larger works and public commissions. In 1888 she was commissioned by the Edinburgh Social Union (ESU) to produce a large-scale mural scheme for the Song School at St Mary’s Episcopal Cathedral. This was followed in 1893 by an even more ambitious mural commission for the interiors of the Catholic Apostolic Church Edinburgh. Traquair’s style and imagery were influenced by Renaissance art and her love of illuminated manuscripts. She combined realistic representations of the human figure with symbolic imagery, the latter influenced by her Catholic faith but also by her travels to Italy at the end of the 1880s. The University of Edinburgh’s rare books collection includes a series of illuminations on velum that are typical of her skills and preoccupations in using jewelled colours, gold leaf and fine detail. The illuminations, which depict the medallions for the Song School commission, were bound in green calf leather at Cobden-Sanderson’s Doves Bindery in London. Traquair’s diverse practice made her contribution substantial and far-reaching. Her enamel heraldic plaques can still be seen in Lorimer’s Thistle Chapel at St Giles Cathedral, and her three-panel embroidery, The Salvation of Mankind, which took eight years to complete between 1885 and 1893 and was exhibited in St Louis in 1904, is now housed in the National Galleries Scotland. In 1920 Traquair became the first woman to be awarded Honorary Membership of Royal Society of Arts in 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 Phoebe Traquair, Self Portrait, ca. 1910 Arts and Crafts decorators Dublin Edinburgh embroiderers jewellers Lorimer 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