First, let us turn to the dictionary for an explanation of the word “angel.”
angel (n): a spiritual being believed to act as an attendant, agent, or messenger of God, conventionally expressed in human form with wings and a long robe.
Yesterday, while antique-shopping near Rutland, Vermont, I found a wonderful old print of “Angel’s Heads,” a famous painting by Sir Joshua Reynolds, b. 1723.
My delight in finding a tangible document, that I could reproduce to show you, was about on the same par as finding this image rendered in Redwork, in a Maine antiques shop, a number of years ago. I have re-created a usable line-drawing, for Redwork, for anyone who would like to order it and embroider their own design.
The Redwork version presented a conundrum and was nothing like we’d seen before. It features the words, “Angels Sing Thee to Thy Rest,” derived from Shakespeare’s play, “Hamlet,” of course. If you are interested in ordering this pattern, please contact me at: pat@quiltersmuse.com
Angels are often found as stone carvings in cemeteries. Perhaps, they help to transport a soul on their heavenly journey.
The most interesting point about Reynolds’ painting, held by the National Gallery of London, is that the angels’ head actually represent only one little girl, his model, Miss Frances Isabella Gordon. To him, she looked like an angel.
Looking at the reproduced Redwork piece, one would never guess that the angel represents the same little girl, from different angles and affects.
A question remains: Why was this piece re-created in Redwork? One answer is that the image could be ordered from a 19th century catalog for stamping patterns. The second reason might be the Victorian Era’s preoccupation with Death and the occult. The piece in our collection may have been used within a coffin, or on top of a coffin, at the time that funerals were held in the front parlor. When we purchased it, the white cloth was very dirty, almost as if it had been buried, at one time.
Since then, a few times I have seen this pattern worked with Black embroidery thread, but the angels did not look angelic at all. Rather, they looked demonic, a large sway from Sir Joshua Reynolds’ original intent to paint a beautiful little girl and “save” her for posterity. We are so glad he did, and I hope that you agree that it is fun to see the original work from which derivative pieces in needlework came forth.
We never know what will turn up in the antiques shops of New England. The “hunt” is the fun part of the game. This was a serendipitous find. We hope you will enjoy it.
I will be making the pattern available on the Products Available page on our website, when I can get around to having more copies made, which involves a trip to a copy shop. Hope your day will be a good one!
P.S. – We are making some changes at Quilter’s Muse Publications. The change we made to this blog is to do away with automatic feeds to subscribers. Please bookmark, http://quiltersmuse.com/blog/ to visit our posts. One reason is that too many subscribers had changed their e-mail addresses and every time we posted a blog, we’d receive notices from the Mailer daemon. It was a real pain.
In the future, we will not be posting one word comments that individuals make as a response to posts, just so they can list their own blog’s address. If you don’t have something substantive to say, don’t bother trying to leave a comment. I hope that doesn’t sound just awful. I am sick of being used for everyone’s else’s self-promotion. Whom I choose to promote because of their quality contributions is another matter. Thanks for understanding.
We do our best to bring great information to you and important public notices. We will continue to do so.
Patricia Cummings
Quilter’s Muse Publications
