embroidered
figure work rise to the rank of art: the rule is that it is degraded,
the more surely as it aims at picture. And that is why, for all that has
been done in the way of wonderful picture work, say by the Italians and
the Flemings of the Early Renaissance, the pictorial is not the form of
design best suited to embroidery.

Needlework, like any other decorative craft, demands treatment in the
design, and the human figure submits less humbly to the necessary
modification than other forms of life. Animals, for instance, lend
themselves more readily to it, and so do birds; fur and feathers are
obviously translatable into stitches. Leaves and flowers accommodate
themselves perhaps better still; but each is best when it is only the
motive, not the model, of design. If only, then, on account of the
greater difficulty in treating it, the figure is not the form of design
most likely to do credit to the needle, and it is absurd to argue that,
figure work being the noblest form of design, therefore the noblest form
of embroidery must include it.

The embroidress entirely in sympathy with her materials will not want
telling that the needle lends itself better to forms less fixed in their
proportions than the human figure; the decorator will feel that there is
about fine ornament a nobility of its own which stands in need of no
pictorial support; the unbiassed critic will admit that figure design of
any but the most severely decorative kind is really outside the scope of
needle and thread; and that the desire to introduce it arises, not out
of craftsmanlikeness, but out of an ambition which does not pay much
regard to the conditions proper to needlework. Those conditions should
be a law to the needlewoman. What though she be a painter too? She is
painting now with a needle. It is futile to attempt what could be better
done with a brush. She should be content to work the way of the needle.
Common sense asks that much at least of loyalty to the art she has
chosen to adopt.

Wonderful and almost incredibly pictorial effects have been obtained
with the needle; but that does not mean to say it was a wise thing to
attempt them. The result may be astonishing and yet not worth the pains.
The pains of flesh-painting with the needle (if not the impossibility of
it for all practical purposes) is confessed by the habit which arose of
actually painting the flesh in water colour upon satin. Paint on satin,
if you like. There may be oc