Miscellaneana: Pictures without paint

LONDON – It was a monthly, village-hall auction and we were there on the off chance of picking up a bargain. You know the kind of sale I mean: the auctioneer rents the room on the Friday and all the local dealers take along their junk for the sale the following day. It’s where we caught the collecting bug and where we made some of our best buys.

In the end, it looked like being a blank day and all we finished up buying was a handful of old pictures, useful only for the frames. Or so we thought. There was just one picture that stood out from the rest. It was an embroidery of a sailing ship done in a naive, rough-and-ready but nevertheless clever fashion that transpired to be the work of a 12-year-old boy.

How can you possibly know that? I hear you ask. Simple. The picture needed reframing. When we removed it from its original frame, there on the back was the following inscription written in black ink: “Worked by Algernon R. Baker, aged 12 years. In loving memory from Muzzer.”

Who Muzzer was is anyone’s guess. But mine is that Algernon was a young midshipman who worked the embroidery to while away the hours during a long voyage. Too romantic perhaps, but the embroidery has pride of place in our small collection of pictures without paint. Its cost is hard to say, but we paid £6 for the job lot of frames. Its value to us is immeasurable.

The only other sailor’s woolwork picture we own was altogether more expensive. I spotted it in an online auction, and couldn’t resist having a go. It shows a pilot boat leading a clipper in full sail past a headland with a lighthouse on it — clearly a tricky place for shipping — still in its original frame and in perfect condition. If memory serves, it cost something north of £300 but it’s 10 times the size of Algernon’s effort, although the stitching technique is identical.

None of the so-called pictures without paint is more inventive or fascinating than those made by sailors, who must surely have been subjected to the mind-numbing boredom whiling away the hours on the dog watch. What better way to pass the time than by embroidering a picture of the ship on which you serve?

In fact, some pictures were done in such accurate detail, it is often possible to date and even identify the vessels concerned. Naturally, this has a dramatic affect on values, potentially doubling those of the best.

The pictures are quite obviously the work of a male hand. Usually they were embroidered on sailcloth or some other coarse material stretched over a frame knocked together from any wood that happened to be available. Wool was the most commonly used for the pictures, in a crude longstitch, although in rare examples, cotton and linen are seen.

Highly detailed rigging is another feature, usually in spidery black or brown thread. The same thread is sometimes used to work dates and names into the pictures.

The ship pictures were highly popular between about 1840-1880. Nowadays they are a popular addition to sales of naive and primitive antiques and works of art. Prices vary according to size and detail. Earlier examples tend to be the most expensive, while later, less carefully worked pictures lose their quality and appeal. Expect to pay £400-600 for one worth hanging on the wall; £500-800 for a good one and twice, or even three times that for the exceptional.

One of the most esoteric in this area of collecting are sand pictures, which started life centuries ago as ceremonial or ritualistic exercises intended to be transient and temporary. None were more temporary than those created by the German artist Benjamin Zobel (1762-1831) for his employer, the mad King George III.

Zobel, the son of a German confectioner, became a “table decker,” creating pictures of colored sand, marble dust, powdered glass, sugar and even bread crumbs to replace tablecloths at banquets. The work probably made the Bavarian artist mad too. Each day, just a little more insane, the king would view Zobel’s latest masterpieces and then ruffle them up and make him start all over again.

It was enough to start a craze, albeit a brief one. Bored Regency and Victorian ladies spent hours making sand pictures, not on the tops of tables, but on canvas which they framed and hung on the wall. And before you ask, the sand they used was mixed with glue. That way their work didn’t end up on the floor like Zobel’s.

Sand pictures find a ready market when they turn up in the saleroom, as do other pictures without paint, the list of which is extensive. Perhaps the best known is the cut-out paper portrait, the silhouette, so named after the French Controller General of Finances, Ettienne de Silhouette. The term came to mean “a man reduced to his simplest form” which is just what you were when you paid your taxes.

Other types of paper pictures include elaborate and intricate cut-out designs, not unlike doilies, that first appeared in about 1840. Cut-outs were favoured by artistic young ladies and gentlemen who produced work of the most amazing delicacy. The less artistic, however, chose to make tinsel pictures, mainly because they took less skill and talent.

Colored and shiny paper was cut to form pictures of fruit, flowers and landscapes in the pastime that first became popular towards the end of the 18th century. It had largely died out by about 1850.

Those lacking the ability to create their own pictures probably spent their spare time with one of the many kits available to produce pinprick pictures: basically pictures made from holes. Complete instructions and designs were to be found in books and magazines at the height of their popularity from 1820-1840. Pictures were made using a range of different-sized pins and often also involving the cut-out technique. Other pictures that never saw an artist’s brush were fashioned from all manner of raw materials: seaweed, cork, wax, even human hair.

The First World War was another opportunity for men to try their hands at sewing and embroidery. Traditionally, soldiers had always dabbled with embroidering their regimental badges on to handkerchiefs to send home to sweethearts and the 1914-18 war saw the habit grow into an art form.

Often quite large pictures contained a photograph of the soldier, surrounded by flags of the Allies, laurel leaves, poppies and patriotic inscriptions. The good ones, worked in colored silks, can only appreciate in value, but don’t be fooled by manufactured versions that soldiers who were all thumbs purchased to send home to their loved ones.

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ADDITIONAL IMAGES OF NOTE

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