Patty
Your long response was fascinating and I understand how confusing and
complicated is the history of development of bobbin lace styles and
techniques.
As to Sluis Duchesse-- that one I can say a little about. Sluis, a Dutch
town, had a lace school where Duchesse was the most prominent kind taught.
Sister Judith, the inventor of Withof, and her students started out with a
basis of Sluis Duchesse, and developped Withof out of that tradition. There
is a brief history chapter in WITHOF LACE by Heijden-Biemans, Schelle-Kerkhof
& Smelter-Hoekstra. Also Anneke Reijs has written a series of booklets on
Sluis Duchesse and Withof, available (I believe) from her website. The first
is MANUAL FOR SLUIS AND WITHOF DUCHESSE LACES, PART I - 1913-1935.
I've taken 2 Duchesse workshops and 2 Withof ones. I'm not an expert, but
based on this limited experience, the only differences I can see between
standard Duchesse and Sluis Duchesse is the greater number of ways of
decorating flower petals and leaf shapes, particularly laying twisted pairs or
4 strand braids on top of the leaf or flower petal to suggest veins. And
although regular Duchesse occasionally uses fancy braided grounds between
motifs, Sluis seems to use these more often. The differences are very small.
So I suppose the time sequence would be:
c 1853-late 19th c Duchesse
c. 1913-1935, the Dutch variant of Duchesse, Sluis (in 1935 the school
closed)
since then- Withof gradually develops
Point de Angleterre is very problematic. I think most of the problem was
created by lace historians and "expert" of 50 to 100 years ago who were just
trying to apply names to visually distinctive styles, without necessarily
knowing much or anything about the real history. I hear the term and I start
to growl. Forgive me.
It seems to me that "Point de Angleterre" is applied to laces similar in style
to Brussels of the time period 1750-1850. In most the ground and the motifs
each occupy about 50% of the surface, and usually the ground is droschel, as
you said. There would be a substantial amount of raised work, but not as much
as Bruseels c 1720-1745.
The thing about point de Angleterre is the relatively large amount of ground.
This made it ideal for using machine made net when that became available. It
was first made in the 1780s, but became more readily available from the 1820s
and 1830s. The earlier and better quaility kind would have had the handmade
droschel net (which is still faster to make than dozens of tiny raised work
flowers). The later would be applied to machine net to save time and keep the
price down.
My impression in general is that with continental part laces the 18th century
was the peak of complexity and supremely refined and difficult technique, and
that the time after that is generally a gradual decline in complexity.
Duchesse of 1850-1900 is really a continuation of earlier Brussels, but there
is somewhat less variety in the motifs and raised work, while still present,
is not encrusting everything. Fine Bloomwork appears to be a product of the
years right around 1900 and is a simplified flat, larger scale sort of
Duchesse.
Modern Bruges Bloomwork is distinct in style, with a severely restricted
number of different motifs, which are just rearranged from one design to the
next, and is worked on a scale larger than "fine bloomwork". I'm pretty sure
it is solely 20th century, but I don't know whether it had an exact beginning,
or just when that was. I wonder if it was an invention of Kantcentrum (this
is a wild speculation on my part).
It is my understanding that the term "Brabant" was adopted by Santina Levey to
describe Brussels type laces of the 18th and early 19th centuries which was
not "tuned up" to the supreme level of complexity and skill of the ones called
Brussels. The examples that I've seen are more flat (I don't remember for
sure if any of them had raised work). The clothwork tends to be more loosely
woven than in standard Brussels, the motifs are a little larger, the designs
are a bit "off". It's hard to describe. Levey's idea is that these laces
were made away from the city center where there was less contact with the
center of fashion and therefore only a partial understanding of what current
fashion required -- provincial. And she uses the term "Bath Brussels" to
describe the made-in-England variant of this type. It started out trying to
be exact imitations of Brussels but comes out similar to "Brabant".
Lorelei
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