Studio: international art (15.1899)

Textile Patterns

and leaf used in a highly conventional manner, and
depending for its effect on the massing of its
colours rather than on its form.

The specimen, Fig. 7, is remarkable in many
ways. It is an extremely beautiful diaper in which
great richness is obtained by a simple but inge-
nious repetition. It should be compared with the
pattern from the robes of SS. Paul and Matthew at
Southwold (Fig. 3), with the vine of which it will
be found to be identical as far as its elements go.

A detailed analysis of the patterns has been
somewhat insisted on because one of the beauties
of this set will be seen to lie in the great variety of
results obtained by variants of a few simple
themes: and no more valuable exercise can be
set to the student of design than the problem
which has thus unconsciously been worked out by
the old craftsman who invested a portion of his
brains and manual dexterity in the decoration of

FIG. 6.—DIAPER ON THE ALB OF ST. PETER
SOUTHWOLD SCREEN

244

FIG. 7.—DETAIL FROM RAND WORTH SCREEN

these screens. He—for it is pretty certain that
both were the production of one man, or, at all
events, one workshop—invented nothing. Certain
stock patterns of Byzantine or Oriental origin and
Mediterranean type had come into his hands.
They can be traced in detail from the fine fabrics
of Lucca and Sicily at the end of the twelfth and
during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, to
the early paintings by Van Eyck, Memlinc, and
Roger Van Der Weyden, in the fifteenth. They
reached England in the first half of the latter
period, probably at the hands of Dutch or Flemish
artists; indeed, it is suggested that panels of this
kind were actually painted in the Low Countries