The sister arts: Textile crafts between paint, print, and practice

Abstract

This article explores intersections between portraiture, printed genre images, and conduct literature in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain, focusing on representations of needlework between these cultural forms. In extant scholarship, needlework has been characterised as an important site of debate, a discursive locus wherein the qualities of appropriate femininity were sketched out and redefined. This article centres on the very mechanisms by which this discourse operated, arguing that visual and literary images of needlework were central to the creation of a grammar of respectable femininity, a symbolic language that simultaneously advocated maternal instruction, domestic industry, and marital eligibility.