The Lady Lever Art Gallery Catalogue of Embroideries by Xanthe Brooke

William Hesketh Lever, later created 1st Lord Leverhulme, self-made soap-manufacturing magnate and founder of Port Sunlight began his remarkable collection of embroideries in around 1900. His aim was not merely to preserve the beautiful works he found, but to inspire others, particularly his predominantly female workforce, to emulate the creativity of their ancestors. Catalogued here are more than 200 examples of the fine works displayed by Lever in the Lady Lever Art Gallery, founded and built between 1913 and 1922. One of the richest collections made, it combines the delightful and exuberant pictorial needleworks of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with embroidered samplers, clothes accessories and furnishings, most of which are not the products of professional houses, but of young amateurs. Combined with a detailed description of each of the embroideries and the method employed in its production is new and careful research into the printed pictorial design sources which provided the basis for many of the works. Through such research the hidden and intriguing significance of many of the stories depicted is unveiled, revealing much about the teenage embroideresses' education, socialization, activities and the attitudes to the religion and politics of the society in which they lived.

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