Abstract
This exhibit is a set of painted cloths in ‘Queen Margaret’s Chamber’ at Owlpen Manor, Gloucestershire. They are painted in distemper (a tempera technique where earth pigments are bound with glue size) on 42-inch unbleached canvas-linen strips, with an expansive stylized landscape of trees, foliage, conical hills and white buildings (Fig. 1). Within this landscape setting are figures and animals representing scenes from the biblical story of Joseph (Genesis 37:1–36). Duty stamps on the reverse side are consistent with a date between 1712 and 1719. The cloths were acquired for another of Owlpen’s rooms with similar dimensions but later repositioned in this space, so their current presentation retains a sense of their original form and appearance as expansive wall coverings.
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Notes
- 1.
My thanks to Nicholas Mander for permission to feature these cloths and represent his research, published most recently as ‘The Painted Cloths at Owlpen Manor, Gloucestershire’, in Nicola Costaras and Christina Young (eds.), Setting the Scene: European Painted Cloths from the Fourteenth to the Twenty-First Century (London: Archetype Publications, 2013), 24–32.
- 2.
As represented by the 2012 conference at the Courtauld Institute of Art, resulting in the publication just referenced.
- 3.
William Harrison, The Description of England (1587), ed. Georges Edelen (New York: Dover, 1994), 197.
- 4.
Tara Hamling, Decorating the Godly Household: Religious Art in Post-Reformation Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010).
- 5.
John Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. by Richard Barber (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1998), 123.
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Hamling, T. (2016). The Fabric of Domestic Life: Rethinking the Humble Painted Cloth. In: Craciun, A., Schaffer, S. (eds) The Material Cultures of Enlightenment Arts and Sciences. Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-44379-3_15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-44379-3_15
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