by Régine Deforges, Geneviève Dormann
Cross stitch is one of the most popular and widely used embroidery techniques, including for educational purposes. Its uses have been varied and diverse over time, starting with the need to mark linen items in a recognizable way. Samplers (marquoirs in french, imparaticci in italian), are pieces of canvas used to memorize the rudiments of this and other processes in the form of small exercises, progressing from the simplest to the most complex. They offer a very interesting field of application. From the beginning of an apprenticeship, samplers also provide opportunities for virtuoso displays, where the two-dimensional, stylized rendering gives rise to elegant decorative solutions. In these artifacts, numbers, letters, and images coexist, composing friezes of intangible lightness. The passage reproduced here is taken from the book Marquoirs, published by two leading figures in the French literary and cultural scene: writers Régine Deforges (1935–2014) and Geneviève Dormann (1933–2015). See R. Deforges, G. Dormann, Marquoirs, Albin Michel, Paris 1987, pp. 9-12. Images accompanying the text are the result of an editorial choice.
The first marquoirs were pieces of fabric onto which examples of stitches were sewn or embroidered so that they could be memorized and kept handy for reference.
They had an eminently practical function, serving as a reference when sewing or embroidering linen or clothing. In those days, sewing and needlework manuals did not exist; women passed these stitch samplers down from mother to daughter, and each added new stitches, learned here and there or invented by themselves. Later, marquoirs became exercises: girls applied themselves to embroidering entire alphabets and decorative motifs with different stitches, threads, and colors.
In the 17th century, these works began to become more decorative than practical, aesthetically refined even more than useful.
The french term marquoir derives from the point de marque or cross stitch, the easiest to use for the considerable task that was once required to mark each item of linen. In fact, until the beginning of the 20th century, a family’s laundry (and families were always large) was only done once or twice a year. Owning a lot of linen was not only a necessity but also a sign of wealth: piles and piles of linen and cotton, bed linen, table linen, bathroom linen, and personal linen were crammed into chests or wardrobes and proudly displayed, hung out to dry on the lines, on those fateful laundry days.
Once garments were dry, it was necessary to be able to identify them easily: hence the numbers and countless alphabets that were created and embroidered on shirts, corsets, towels, sheets, tablecloths, and napkins. Relatively few examples of these 17th- and 18th-century ciphers exist in France, Italy, and other mediterranean countries. They are more abundant in nordic and eastern european countries and are preserved in museums as well as private homes. Perhaps this is because they were held in low regard as the product of women’s work, considered unimportant craftsmanship too minor and common to merit display. Consequently, they have been dispersed or lie forgotten in dark attics.
On the other hand, some french marquoirs from last century are starting to turn up. Most of the ones presented in this book date back to the second half of the nineteenth century. Their naïve motifs reflect the mentality of a country that experienced periods of war and peace, monarchy and republic in the span of a hundred years, moving from romantic exaltation to the rejection of romanticism’s oleography. It was a prosperous France in the midst of industrial, scientific, economic, and colonial expansion. It was a bourgeois France, satisfied with its comfort. It was discovering electricity and building large, solid monuments, such as the Sacré-Cœur and the Opéra. It was digging its first section of metro and preparing to astound the world with the audacity of the Eiffel Tower. It is France that still applauds Sarah Bernhardt, is scandalized by the realism of Bizet’s Carmen, elevates the old poet Victor Hugo to stardom, and is shocked by the avant-garde of young painters named Degas, Cézanne, and Renoir. It is the France of Flaubert, Maupassant, and Zola, whistling Verdi arias and popular songs. It is the France of Casque d’Or 〈1〉, queen of the underworld. It is the France of our grandmothers, who still wear their hair in a chignon and walk around dressed in lace and velvet. At school, which has become compulsory, girls learn cross-stitch embroidery. Alphabets, flowers, and symbols are drawn on canvas or fabric while waiting for the arrival of the precious husband, the house, the children: in short, everything that is a woman’s destiny and that conditions a girl’s entire education.
If you have not chosen to become a cocotte, the program is simple: be a respectable woman, that is, a submissive and preferably faithful wife, an angel bent over a cradle, according to traditional oleography, a good cook, an attentive, active, and solemn hostess, queen of tablecloths and sheets, embroidered doilies and cushions, lace and drapes that adorn armchairs and pouffes with small stitches, according to the dictates of the prevailing fashion. Everything is embroidered, bibs and towels, napkins and handkerchiefs, bodices, petticoats and those puffy underskirts that men love to fiddle with and ruffle are marked and initialed.
Faith is not forgotten either. In convents and girls’ schools run by nuns, altar cloths and ecclesiastical vestments are embroidered. For the comfort of devotion, the hard boards of kneelers and confessionals are covered with tapestry stitching. Embroidery is everywhere: on the slippers of beloved men, on the fire screens in front of fireplaces, on evening bags and work bags, on curtains and handrails.
Since 1830, Germany has flooded Europe with cross-stitch patterns printed on hand towels and colored by hand. From Italy to Denmark, from the Netherlands to Greece, the same little dogs and parrots are embroidered. In protestant countries, scenes from the bible are common, while in catholic countries, the bleeding hearts of Jesus and Mary, depicted with needle and thread, are very popular.
After world war I, needles were gradually put away. Goodbye lace, goodbye festoons and petit point. Women had other things to do. They worked to replace the men who had fallen at the front. To save time and walk faster, they cut their hair and shortened their skirts considerably. Their daughters still learned to sew and embroider alphabets at school, but their samplers were only pale memories of their grandmothers’ work. They no longer had the refinement of execution or the harmonious colors of the past. Relegated who knows where, they began to fade. They are thrown away as useless junk. Later, a nostalgic writer, Colette, sensitive to their charm, will buy some at flea markets for a few francs, but for a long time no one will think of starting one of these old-fashioned crafts. French schools continued to teach the basics of sewing and embroidery until after world war II. Then, feminist fashion consigned needlework to oblivion.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic ocean, the descendants of 17th-century european immigrants to America continued to embroider samplers. More attached to the past and traditions due to nostalgia for the old world, these women, who came from England, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Italy, and later Spain, embroidered from memory. They mixed traditional european and indian motifs, creating an interesting and original style.
It is from America and northern Europe that the taste for cross-stitch has returned to us, along with the desire to make up for our delay in invention and creativity applied to this embroidery technique.
〈1〉 Casque d'or: nickname of Amélie Élie (1878-1933), a prostitute who became famous for being at the center of the bloody events that pitted two parisian criminal gangs against each other in 1902. See A. Élie, Mémoires de Casque d'or, Editions l'Apprentie, Bordeaux 2022 [Editor's note].
Homepage: dutch sampler with alphabetical characters, geometric motifs, initials, and numbers relating to three different people, 1921, cotton embroidery on cotton, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum (Wikimedia).
Below: sampler pattern with alphabetical and numerical characters to be embroidered in cross-stitch, image taken from the book by P.W. Cocheris, Pédagogie des travaux à l'aiguille, Delagrave, Paris 1882, p. 156 (archive.org).
