Part 1

Transcriber’s Notes

A few words in relation to era/dialect have been retained e.g. tho, possest, stopt, dropt, slipt, distrest.

The frontispiece spelling of the Queen of Belgium is Elisabeth, as shown in the photo with her signature. Throughout the main text however, it has been spelt Queen Elizabeth. These spellings have been left as printed.

In the Appendix, where there are two or more illustrations per page, the words (Top), (Middle), (Bottom) have been used, to indicate the link with the text and illustration.

p.292: changed 4 to _d_

Printer errors have silently been corrected.

BOBBINS OF BELGIUM

BOBBINS OF BELGIUM

A BOOK OF BELGIAN LACE, LACE-WORKERS, LACE-SCHOOLS AND LACE-VILLAGES

BY

CHARLOTTE KELLOGG _Of the Commission for Relief in Belgium, and Author of “Women of Belgium”_

FUNK & WAGNALLS COMPANY NEW YORK AND LONDON 1920

COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY FUNK & WAGNALLS COMPANY [Printed in the United States of America] Published in February, 1920

Copyright Under the Articles of the Copyright Convention of the Pan-American Republics and the United States, August 11, 1910.

DEDICATION

To the women of the Brussels war-time lace committee—Madame Allard, the Vicomtesse de Beughem, Madame Kefer-Mali, and the Comtesse Elizabeth d’Oultremont, with admiration and gratitude.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE Preface 15 Introduction 25 I. Turnhout 49 II. Courtrai 79 III. Thourout-Thielt-Wynghene 97 IV. Grammont 127 V. Bruges 143 VI. Kerxken 169 VII. Erembodeghem 189 VIII. Opbrakel 201 IX. Liedekerke 215 X. Herzele 231 XI. Ghent 247 XII. Zele 265 XIII. Appendix 275 Index 307

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

FACING PAGE

H.M. QUEEN ELIZABETH OF BELGIUM, _Frontispiece_

FIFTEENTH CENTURY PORTRAIT 32 Showing heavy brocade as yet unrelieved by linen or lace trimming.

PORTRAIT OF CHARLES IX (1570) 33 Linen collar showing picot edge made with the needle.

PORTRAIT TOWARDS END OF SIXTEENTH CENTURY 40 Showing collar ornamented with bobbin-made cluny.

ANNE OF AUSTRIA BY VAN DYCK 41 About 1635, cluny lace made with bobbins.

ABBÉ BERRALY SCHOOL, TURNHOUT 56 General view.

NINE-YEAR CHILDREN MAKING POINT DE PARIS 57

POINT DE PARIS CLASS 64 On dark days lamps are lighted behind bottles filled with water, the rays passing through, fall in spotlights on the cushions.

WINDING BOBBINS FOR THE CHILDREN 65

POINT DE LILLE, OR POINT D’HOLLANDE 72 Mesh showing “Esprits” or dots characteristic of this bobbin lace.

END OF A POINT DE PARIS SCARF ABOUT 2½ YARDS LONG ON WHICH COLETTE WORKED ONE YEAR 73

IN THE ABBÉ BERRALY SCHOOL, COLETTE, 16-YEARS OLD, WORKS WITH 1,000 BOBBINS 73

BELGIAN LACE MESHES (Plate I) 80 After Pierre Verhagen in “La Dentelle Belge.”

BELGIAN LACE MESHES (Plate II) 81 After Pierre Verhagen in “La Dentelle Belge.”

BOBBIN LACES 88 Malines, Point de Paris, Valenciennes.

CUSHION COVER REPRESENTING BELGIUM’S GRATITUDE TO AMERICA FOR BREAD 89 Point de Paris lace combined with linen. The lower right-hand centerpiece shows the rose design, emblem of Queen Elizabeth.

BOBBIN LACES 104 Torchon, Cluny, Old Flemish, Binche.

TABLE CLOTH SHOWING ARMS OF THE ALLIES 105 Cut linen with squares of Venise surrounded by filet and cluny; Venise made with the needle; cluny with bobbins.

A “MARIE ANTOINETTE” IN CHANTILLY LACE 128 Made with bobbins, near Grammont.

CUSHION COVER 129 Center Venise, borders Valenciennes, lace executed by 12 workers in one month, embroidery and mounting by four women in two months; design by M. de Rudder.

TEA CLOTH 129 Point de Paris, cock design.

LACE MAKERS OF BRUGES 144

BRUGES AND SIMILAR BOBBIN LACES 145

LACE NORMAL SCHOOL, BRUGES. BEGINNER’S CLASS 152 Symbolic color pattern on left-hand easel; demonstration bobbins attached to colored threads at right.

BED COVER IN DUCHESSE OR BRUSSELS LACE 153 Made with bobbins; executed in Flanders by 30 women in three months; design by the Lace Committee.

ROSALINE, WHICH CLOSELY RESEMBLES BRUGES 160

DETAILS FOR BRUGES LACE 160 Made with bobbins on round cushion.

DOILY SET IN POINT DE PARIS IN THE “ANIMALS OF THE ALLIES” DESIGN, EXECUTED AT TURNHOUT 161

POINT DE FLANDRES OR FLANDERS LACE 176 Flowers made with bobbins, mesh with needle; designs by the Lace Committee.

HANDKERCHIEF IN NEEDLE-POINT 177 Made near Alost. Both mesh and flowers made with needle.

DETAIL SHOWING SEVEN DIFFERENT FILLING-IN STITCHES 177

VENISE DESIGNS BY THE BRUSSELS LACE COMMITTEE 180

HANDKERCHIEF AND JEWEL BOXES; FLANDERS AND VENISE OVER SATIN AND VELVET 181

VENISE BANQUET CLOTH PRESENTED BY THE LACE COMMITTEE TO H.M. QUEEN ELIZABETH ON HER RETURN FROM EXILE 192–193 Design by M. de Rudder; executed by 30 best Venise-makers in Belgium in six months.

CUSHION COVER IN VENISE 196 Pekinese dog; design by M. Allard.

TABLE CENTER IN FLANDERS WITH CENTER AND BORDER OF VENISE 197 Design by Lace Committee; executed in West Flanders by five workers in 15 days.

“THE TOURNEY” BANQUET CLOTH 208 Design reproducing a mediæval painting in Tournai, executed in Venise lace by 10 workers in one month, mounting and embroidery by five workers in one month. Price in Brussels, 1,000 francs.

“ARMS OF ALLIES” CUSHION COVER IN VENISE, WITH DETAILS IN FLANDERS 209

NEEDLE-POINT SCARF EXPRESSING GRATITUDE OF BELGIUM TO HOLLAND. PRESENTED TO H.M. QUEEN WILHELMINA 216–217 Executed by 30 workers in eight months.

BOBBIN LACES 224 Malines; Application, flowers sewn on tulle; Duchesse, with Needle-Point insertion.

APPLICATION DETAILS TO BE SEWED ON TULLE 225 Upper flower shows open spaces left by bobbin worker for needle worker; lower flower shows both bobbin and needle work completed.

WEDDING GIFT OF MR. HOOVER TO MRS. PAGE 240 Executed in Venise and Flanders lace by 30 women working three months. American eagles with outspread wings, protecting the Belgian Lion enchained in the four corners.

FLANDERS—NEEDLE MESH, BOBBIN FLOWERS 240

VENISE LACE CENTER, BORDER OF VALENCIENNES 241 Lace executed in Flanders by 40 women in two months; embroidery and mounting in Brussels by four women in three months.

VALENCIENNES, SQUARE MESH 241

FAN IN NEEDLE-POINT 256 Executed by three women in six weeks. “Shields of the Allies,” design drawn by M. Knoff for the Lace Committee.

EIGHTEENTH CENTURY MARRIAGE VEIL IN NEEDLE-POINT, BELONGING TO THE COMTESSE ELIZABETH D’OULTREMONT 257 It would take 40 workers about a half year to copy this veil.

AT WORK ON DETAILS OF A NEEDLE-POINT SCARF TO BE PRESENTED TO QUEEN ELIZABETH 268

NEEDLE LACE CLASS-ROOM IN THE TRADE UNION LACE SCHOOL AT ZELE 268

NEEDLE-POINT ILLUSTRATION FOR THE FABLE OF THE FOX AND THE GRAPES 269

IN THE ZELE LACE SCHOOL. JOINING DETAILS OF THE NEEDLE-POINT SCARF PRESENTED TO QUEEN ELIZABETH 269

PREFACE

I entered the lace-world by the grim door of war. For it was the war-time work of the women of the Brussels Lace Committee that opened the way to me.

Long before the war, Queen Elizabeth in Belgium, like Queen Margharita in Italy, had sought means to protect the lace worker, through centuries the victim of an economic injustice, not to say crime, and to rescue and develop an industry threatened from many sides. In 1911 she gave her royal encouragement to a group of prominent Belgian women who organized as “Amies de la Dentelle,” Friends of Lace, and began a lace-saving campaign by trying to remedy the deplorable condition of most of the lace schools, the defective teaching, long hours, and pitiful pay. They could insist in the schools, as they could not elsewhere, on the right to inspect, to grant or refuse patronage. They subsidized worthy institutions, and advocated the establishment of a lace normal school and of a special school of design. Education they felt to be the main road leading out of the prevailing misery, and they were making progress along this road, when suddenly the Invader poured over their borders.

While other women hurried to open refuges and hospitals and soup-kitchens, a few of the Friends of Lace remembered first the lace-makers; and by November 1914, had effected a war emergency organization, known as the Brussels Lace Committee, with Mrs. Whitlock as honorary president. Unfortunately most of the lace dealers failed to cooperate with them, but they won the approval of the powerful Belgian Comité National, which, with the Commission for Relief in Belgium, carried on the relief of the occupied territory throughout the war. And with an initial gift of $25,000 from America to be converted into lace, they were able to start their work. It soon came to be directed altogether by four women; The Comtesse Elizabeth d’Oultremont, Lady-in-Waiting to Queen Elizabeth; the Vicomtesse de Beughem, an American; Madame Josse Allard, and Madame Kefer-Mali. At the same time the aid and protection of workers on filets and other commonly called “imitation” laces, was assigned by the Comité National to another group of women, the “Union Patriotique des Femmes Belges.”

The Brussels Lace Committee employed, as trusted business director of their offices, M. Collart, generously released to them by the Allard Bank, and as technical expert, Madame Sharlaecken, before the war with the Compagnie des Indes, one of the largest lace houses in Belgium; and as the work developed, an increasing number of designers and aides necessary to a lace business were added.

During the first few months the situation seemed utterly hopeless; thread was impossible to obtain; and even if the thread were forthcoming, no one could say who would buy the laces they might encourage the women to make; the Germans were cutting off successive sections of the lace-making areas where they had established sub-committees, and were forbidding communication with them. And yet these four women continued bravely to create the foundations of a great lace business—for an extraordinary commercial organization grew from their efforts.

However, despite all their intelligence and devotion, such a result would have been impossible but for a hard-won diplomatic victory. In early 1915 Mr. Hoover forced an international agreement which permitted the C. R. B. to bring thread for the Lace Committee into Belgium, and to take out an equivalent weight in lace, to be sold in the Allied countries for the benefit of the workers. England required a rigid control of the thread, and that it be given only to establishments open to inspection by the C. R. B. At one time these thread shipments were stopt—a period of cruel anxiety for the women—but happily after a re-adjustment they were continued. And once these international guaranties were obtained, the Belgian Comité National was able to arrange for the distribution of the thread to the various, even remote, lace centers, and for the return of the finished laces to Brussels. They granted the women a subsidy of $10,000 and insured to each _dentellière_ the chance to make at least three francs worth of lace a week—a small minimum, to be sure, but every one understood it might be increased later, and that if each of the many thousands of workers was to have an equal opportunity, it could not in the beginning be more. After this the Lace Committee had at times as many as 45,000 women on its lists. The work in the schools and out of them began to bear fruit. The sweating system, and payment in kind (in clothing and food) were practically wiped out, and inspection and control established. Everywhere the standard of design and of execution was raised; old patterns were restored and improved, and by the end of the war 2,237 new designs had been added.

But this was not advance through open country. There was constant danger that at any moment the way might be completely barred; at any time the guaranties covering the thread importations might be withdrawn. The Germans early originated a “Lace Control” of their own, and tried in every possible way to win over the Belgian workers, and to buy up all the lace in the country. They accused the Brussels Committee of being a political and patriotic body existing chiefly to defeat the occupying powers and the Flemish activists. Then there were other courage-testing difficulties. But despite all obstacles and perils, the women persisted, and continually the precious skeins of thread, with their message of “Carry On” were flung out from Brussels to the farthermost corners of the land, binding all together in a firm and beautiful web of hope and confidence. For the enemy was right in suspecting the Committee of a purpose deeper than that of merely trying to save women from the soup-line; they carried on a patriotic work of highest importance. To them I owe a personal debt of gratitude, for they permitted me to follow their devoted service closely, and they opened the door for me to a new world of beauty and interest.

INTRODUCTION

Lace is a tissue composed of mesh and “flowers” (pattern), or either one alone, produced with a needle and single thread, or with several threads manipulated by means of bobbins. It is the product of a natural evolution from early embroideries and weaving.

We possess no contemporaneous history of the origins and development of the lace art, partly, perhaps, because of the tradition, strong among the initiated, of hiding its secrets, and of the consequent difficulty of an outsider to master them, and partly because successive wars and world cataclysms have interrupted or destroyed its progress.

We have ample proof, however, that lace in some form existed in remote antiquity,—in early Egypt, in Persia, in Bysance and Syria, where it was chiefly made by slaves; the Greeks and Hebrews speak of needle lace as known throughout all time. It was not, in these oriental countries, the delicate white mesh that we call lace, which would have been most unbecoming to dark skin, but included richly colored passementeries and filets and fringes, woven of gold and silver thread, of dyed wool and cotton, and of the coarse linen fiber of the Nile Valley. It was usually of hieratic and symbolic design, and sometimes sown with gems—all capable of brilliantly enhancing the beauty of the East. Egyptian ladies of 6,000 years ago trimmed their robes with elaborate lengths of filet, and covered their dead with it. In the Cinquantenaire Museum at Brussels there is the photograph of a remarkable little woven linen bag, similar to one we might carry to-day, which was found in the tomb of a Priestess of Hathor, bearing the mark of one of the earlier dynasties. Its mesh is almost identical with that of our modern Valenciennes, and it was undoubtedly made with bobbins.

Between ancient and mediæval times, the lace-gap is unbridged by written record; we must gather what we can from the archeologist and from the works of the sculptor and painter. Occasionally we are thrilled by such a discovery as that of M. Bixio, who in excavating at Claterna, an old Roman City near Bologna, came upon a set of bone bobbins, lying in pairs, as we employ them in lace-making to-day. But interesting discoveries are rare, and the body of our knowledge of lace history so far is meager.

However, we are interested primarily, not in the ancient origins of the two great lace groups, nor in early passementeries and filets and their processes, but in the marvelous efflorescence of the lace art of the Western Europe of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, and in its still lovely expression of to-day.

In mediæval painting, before the appearance of linen and its use as trimming, or as lingerie, I know of no picture showing lace. Stuffs were stiff and heavy, and ornamented with metal, or with gold or silver thread. As they became more supple, we find, as in the portrait of Wenceslas of Luxemburg (about 1360) decoration introduced in the clipped cloth border of the collar and hood. This serrated edge suggests the first simple Cluny lace patterns that appeared later. Then we see the first linen showing through the slashed sleeve or above the corsage,—one of many paintings illustrating this development, is that of the Duke of Cleves, by Memling (second half of the 15th century). And shortly afterward the first lace edgings appear, the beginning of our lace of the middle ages, of its rebirth in Western Europe. The search for these details of progress in the paintings of European galleries is a fascinating and rewarding game; a Belgian friend of mine has spent many years at it.

The flowering of the lace-art was part of the great Renaissance (lagging behind, to be sure, the major arts) and now was no longer the work of slaves, but regarded as an important, independent _métier_, and happily it usually escaped the despotism of the mediæval corporations. Italy, probably through her exploitation in the early part of the 15th century of her Greek Colonies, was its first western home, and Venice, the center for the exquisite needle laces of which our museums fortunately still preserve specimens. While laces made with the needle and single thread were flourishing under the Doges, bobbin laces, twisted and braided with many threads, were being made in Sicily and in other sections of the country.

From Venice, the secrets of the art traveled easily in several directions, and probably about the close of the 15th century by way of the thriving port of Antwerp, to the industrious and beauty-loving Flanders, where the seed fell on most fertile soil. Flanders possest a multitude of workers already skilled in an allied art, that of weaving, and the necessary lace material in her valley of the Lys, the finest flax region of the world. Valenciennes, Lille, Malines, Ghent, Bruges, turned to lace-making with a veritable passion; it spread throughout wide districts of what are now Northern France and Belgium.

During the 16th and 17th centuries, the lace industry made phenomenal progress, both extensively and intensively. Holland and England sent continually larger orders to Flanders. As cloths grew finer and softer, and the mode of wearing them more graceful, and as daintier linens were increasingly employed, lace became ever more filmy and exquisite. A worker spent perhaps a whole year on a single meter of Valenciennes, one head-dress cost as much as 200,000 livres. Every lace had its time, its season. During this epoch, needle laces were supreme, as bobbin laces were to be in the 18th century.

Under Louis XIV lace reached its climax of perfection and beauty. Colbert imported lace-women from each center where they had been conspicuously successful. He encouraged the invention of new designs and technique; he subsidized schools in many cities, at Reims, Alençon, Arras, Sedan, and he threatened with the death penalty those who might attempt to carry lace secrets beyond the French borders,—in every way he sought to develop an art that should belong peculiarly to France. Thus directed and subsidized by the state, and nurtured and stimulated by a beauty-seeking court, whose love of luxury was still controlled by taste and refinement, it is not surprizing that this lace-period surpassed any other known. It was true of the Court of Louis XIV as of that of Louis XIII that a _seigneur_ was known by the number and quality of his lace points; some of them possest several hundred garnitures. Unfortunately the workers did not profit by this brilliant development,—they seem from the beginning predestined to be the victims of a social and economic slavery.

But there were already evidences of an attempt to control a demand for luxury that threatened disaster. With the 16th century, heavy duties and excess taxes were levied upon lace. An edict, dated 1729, prohibited the wearing of it, in the hope of checking over-extravagance in dress.

After its _apogée_ under Louis XIV, lace-making was caught, along with the other arts, in the tide of degeneracy. Its designs were marked by fantasy and grotesqueness, rather than by the delicacy and beauty of the preceding period; tho while it deteriorated in design, its technique grew constantly finer and more complicated, until, from the point of view of the workmanship at least, it seemed almost superhuman. But in the second half of the 18th century, wearied of complications and extravagance, people amused themselves by a return to simplicity. The Marquise de Pompadour affected laces sown with simple “flowers,” and Marie Antoinette went further in preferring a pattern of scattered “points” or peas. With this return to the primitive in design, the technique of lace reverted also. In many quarters, the sheer muslins of the Indias gained favor over lace. Trade, already burdened with the duties and imports that had grown up around the extravagant laces, suffered further from the sudden popularity of the simple costume.

The death-blow of the industry in France was to follow close on the heels of this new fashion. Since lace had been the particular pride of the aristocrat, the Revolution made it a crime to appear in it. In such one-time famous centers as Valenciennes and Lille, the bobbins ceased, tho the industry of that region sought refuge farther west, in Bailleul,—in Bailleul, dust and ashes to-day! Fortunately in Belgium, lace-making generally survived the crisis of the Revolution, tho it has suffered from succeeding disastrous influences.