1720's - research & making - Anna Maria Garthwaite
- Stephanie Smart
- Aug 27
- 5 min read
Anna Maria Garthwaite (1690–1763) moved to Spitalfields in London during the 1720's. She is perhaps the best known individual silk designer from that period and she is a woman. As part of a collection, made mostly by women and inspired by the history of silk in the UK, there had to be a dress created in her honour.
This was to be the first dress ever made by The House of Embroidered Paper at one-third life-sized. You can read more about the historical tradition of creating small scale mannequins in my post about the Pandora doll. But suffice-to-say the expense of making up a full mantua in silk would have been enormous. So making a miniature/model sized dress to check that your customers were happy with the planned design of a dress before you began making the life-sized version was therefore financially sensible, as well as aesthetically appealing..
The style of dress chosen to reflect her work is from the 1750's because wide mantuas were created specifically in order to show off large areas of beautifully designed (hand-made) silk.
Nb. For some beautiful examples of this style,
in vogue during much of Anna Maria's lifetime, please see:
Some 874 of her original designs in watercolour from the 1720s through to the1750's have survived and are now in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A).
"She was noted for her naturalistic, botanically accurate designs and credited in the Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce of 1751 as one who ‘introduced the principles of painting into the loom'. She lived in the age of enlightenment when scientists and artists were obsessed with exploring and recording the Natural World, and when botanical illustrators such as Georg Ehret became minor celebrities. Yet no-one...has been able conclusively to discover how Anna Maria, who showed a youthful artistic talent, learned the highly technical and complex skills of designing for silk. Or how a single woman by then in her middle years managed to develop and conduct such a successful business on her own account in what was a largely male-dominated industry"
This piece was also to be the first of any size made as part of the collection Weaving Silk Stories, so for its title it seemed sensible to simply attribute it by name to the best known silk designer from the late 17th to early 18th centuries.
"Anna Maria Garthwaite was the daughter of the Reverend Ephraim Garthwaite...who was rector of nearby Harston, Leicestershire, at the time of her birth...Anna Maria left Grantham to live in York with her twice-widowed sister Mary from 1726 to 1728. They relocated to a house in Princes Street (now Princelet Street) in the silk-weaving district of Spitalfields east of the City of London in 1728, and Anna Maria created over 1000 designs for woven silks there over the next three decades." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Maria_Garthwaite
Anna Maria established her trade at 2 Princelet (formerly Princes) Street, Spitalfields, and lived and worked there until her death in 1763. How she got to work for a French speaking community and set up on her own stretches the imagination, and has to be left largely to the imagination because although she was one of the foremost designers of flowered silks in 18th-century England hardly anything is known of her private life beyond the existence of her father and sister.
Research:
It was whilst browsing the V&A collection for her silk designs that I came across a picture that she produced when she was 17 (in 1707), and then I realised it was a paper cut. A silk designer creating a design from paper, seemed like perfect serendipity to me.
This is my interpretation of it, you can see the original here.
It has been said that some of the trees in this paper-cut work resemble shapes in the watercolour textile designs she would go on to produce. This early papercut piece and Anna Maria's links with Spitalfields, the silk weaving area of London in that era, are written about further here: https://www.spab.org.uk/news/In-Spitalfields-Garthwaite-silk
As soon as I saw it I started to work out how to reproduce this image as the design on the front of the dress.
For the back and sides I needed to look more generally at her floral silk designs.
Getting permission to include example images of items from the V&A's collection is unfortunately very expensive act so I can only include some links here that you might follow them and look for yourself:
https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O90929/design-garthwaite-anna-maria/design-anna-maria-garthwaite/
"Garthwaite’s composition...ingeniously creates opportunities to show off three-dimensional shading with leaves that curve outwards, petals and small posies that overlap each other, and peaches that seem to revel in their own roundness. Because Garthwaite’s style doesn’t seem to bear influence from the leading naturalists of the day, scholar Natalie Rothstein believes that Garthwaite would have visited botanical gardens directly to familiarize herself with the details of a wide variety of plants, especially those not native to the area. Garthwaite’s style then appears to be down to her own artistic vision and natural talent, and if her designs show the current trends in English silks, it is because she drove those trends."
Note: As is noted in the article from which this is a paragraph
it's important to note the rarity of woman
involved in design at this time. To read a little more
on this please click here
You can see a beautiful finished gown made from silk of an Anna Maria Garthwaite design here
In the end it was to be these two more muted designs that I would choose to draw on the sides of the skirt, loving their minimal pencil quality:
Making:
When creating a dress, just as when we get dressed, you need to begin by considering underwear (and/or in this case under structures). Here therefore is an image of my first small-scale pannier:
At this early stage I was just beginning to learn Tenerife lace with Denise Morton, one of The House of Embroidered Paper's amazing volunteer team. Here you can see some early examples of our early efforts.
And if you'd like to learn Tenerife lace I recommend the resources and videos offered by Gina B. For example see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=as22qBWcmcI
I learnt on one of Gina B's paddles but she doesn't sell one the exact shape and size of a third life-size stomacher.
So I had to make my own version from cardboard.
Then I applied what I'd learnt, making up my own design for the lace as I went, using gold silk thread from Whitchurch Silk Museum, who I am working with on this project.
I was rather happy with the result.
Some work in progress images of the bodice under construction.
I recreated Anna Maria's paper cut for the front of the skirt on paper of course (Dunicel paper tablecloth in this stage), using a mixture of stitching and drawing.
This first piece in the Weaving Silk Stories collection would cause us to challenge ourselves to learn more than one brand new technique. Tenerife lace as mentioned was the first but then there was card weaving. Below you can see the second band I personally made, from white sewing thread and the same gold silk thread. I incorporated a fringe so that the dress would seem to literally sweep the ground. I have written more about the history of band weaving here
Here are some work in progress shots of my first and second attempts.
Then came the rest of the paper bodice, sleeves and cuffs.
Making the parts of a garment on such a small scale is a new discipline in its own right and an intriguing one indeed.
Weaving Silk Stories is a new project in partnership with the independent charity Historic Royal Palaces, which is due to launch in 2027.
Paper sponsorship by Duni Global
