Raised work embroidered picture, Judgment of Solomon and the Senses

This large scale embroidered picture depicts the Judgment of Solomon in its centre and female personifications of the senses in its four corners. The picture’s stitcher, likely a schoolgirl at the end of her needlework education, utilises detached buttonhole stitches to add three-dimensionality and texture to figures, flora, fauna, and structures. The inclusion of the Stuart coat of arms suggests that the picture’s maker – or her teacher or family – was a supporter of the Stuart monarchy. The lack of facial hair on the king who sits below the coat of arms is rare and perhaps even significant, as nearly all men in seventeenth-century needlework pictures are depicted with the period’s fashionable goatee. Could the barefaced king represent King James II of England, who used this coat of arms and who was famously clean shaven? If it is indeed James II who is being likened to Solomon in this scene, it would be possible to date this picture to between 1685 and 1688.

Both biblical scenes and allegorical imagery were popular in early modern English needlework, but the two were less often depicted in the same picture, as they were here. The biblical scenes most commonly depicted by English schoolgirls were those that involved pious, virtuous, and caring woman. The second mother in the story of the Judgment of Solomon is one such figure. Depicting the senses as women was well established by the early seventeenth century [1]. Here, Sight gazes at herself in the mirror, Taste eats a piece of fruit, Smell sniffs a flower, and Touch is being lightly bitten by a bird.

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