it be seen where they meet: broad
masses give breadth: vagueness generally means ignorance. That is,
perhaps, why one dislikes it, and why it is so common.

FIGURE EMBROIDERY.

To an accomplished needlewoman embroidery offers every scope for art,
short of the pictorial; and the artist is not only justified in
lavishing work upon it, but often bound to do so, more especially when
it comes to working with materials in themselves rich and costly. A
beautiful material, if you are to better it (and if not why work upon it
at all?), must be beautifully worked. Costly material is worth precious
work; and there should be by rights a preciousness about the needlework
employed upon it, preciousness of design and of execution. To put the
value into the material is mere vulgarity.

It seems to an artist almost to go without saying, that the labour on
work claiming to be art should be in excess of the value of the stuff
which goes to make it. What we really prize is the hand work and the
brain work of the artist; and the more precious the stuff he employs,
the more strictly he is bound to make artistic use of it. I do not mean
by that _pictorial_ use. You can get, no doubt, with the needle effects
more or less pictorial--most often less; but, when got, they are usually
at the best rather inferior to the picture of which they are a copy.

Work done should be better always than the design for it, which was a
project only, a promise. The fulfilment should be something more. A
design of which the promise is not likely to be fulfilled in the
working-out is, for its purpose, ill-designed. To say that you would
rather have the drawing from which it was done (and that is what you
feel about "needle pictures") is most severely to condemn either the
designer or the worker, or perhaps both. Only a competent figure
painter, for example, can be trusted to render flesh with the needle;
her success is in proportion to her skill with the implement, but in any
case less than what might be achieved in painting: then why choose the
needle?

Admitting that a painter who by choice or chance takes to the needle may
paint with it satisfactorily enough, that does not go to prove the
needle a likely tool to paint with. It is anything but that. There was
never a greater mistake than to suppose, as some do who should know
better, that, to raise embroidery to the rank of art, figure work is
necessary. The truth is that only by rare exception does