AFA Winter 2017

2017 Antiques & Fine Art 127 would accept their work, and even the Society of Artists relegated all eight to the “honorary exhibitors” category. The rival Royal Society of Artists explicitly stated in newspaper notices for upcoming exhibitions that “NO COPIES WHATSOEVER, Needlework, artificial Flowers, Models in coloured Wax, or any Imitations of Painting will be received.”  5 Ansell’s use of needlework to copy an existing artwork was the epitome of what the Royal Society sought to exclude. The Society of Artists, however, accepted all of these categories. This divide between the societies represented a broader schism within the artistic community over the composition of the professional trade, and ultimately, what counted as fine art. The dissolution of the Society of Artists in 1791 did not spell the end of needlework exhibitions, but the context of their display did change in the subsequent decades. The entrepreneurial embroidery. These artists, and others of their period, utilized worsted wool on linen and a variety of techniques, frequently highlighting forms and imitating brushwork through long, floating, overlapping stitches. The faces rendered by Ansell and Linwood are accomplished fully in embroidery. Needlework pictures of the Neoclassical era that followed tend to use silk on a silk textile and are more likely to employ predominantly shorter stitches. Faces and other minute details are frequently painted, and in some cases, purchased from professional artists. Academies advertised exhibitions of their students’ work in both England and America, while parents patronized professional framers who created églomisé surrounds with text identifying the accomplished student artist. Although no longer permitted on the main stage of professional artistic societies, needlework painting remained an active outlet of expression well into the nineteenth century through academic and domestic sites of display. The fate of Margaret Ansell is still unclear. A sale of her household and boarding school effects took place in February 1782, which likely indicates she was deceased by this date. Yet there is a hint that Margaret lived on to ply her needle. The final exhibition catalog of the Society of Artists in 1791 includes a “Mrs. R.” whose list of twelve needlework is startlingly similar to those shown by Margaret Ansell over the course of her career. Indeed, a Margaret Ansell (noted as a spinster from Tottenham) married widower James Roberts in 1781. Perhaps the 1782 sale of the “late Miss Ansell’s” property only marked the close of one chapter of her life, but not the end of her participation in the evolving landscape of public art in London. Lea C. Lane is the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Curatorial Intern at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. Formerly, she was the Elizabeth and Robert Owens Curatorial Fellow at Winterthur, where she co-curated the 2016 exhibition Embroidery: The Language of Art . 1. “’Freak Pictures.” Times, 20 Aug. 1919, p. 13. 2. Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser (London, England), February 20, 1782. While the 1780 catalogue referred to Ansell as “ at the Boarding School, Tottenham,” by 1782, the contents of the school are aligned with her, suggesting that by then she was owner of the school in addition to presumably teaching. 3. The decision of Margaret Ansell to replicate two well-known works by an artist born in the North American colonies, of scenes that took place in North America, at a moment when the relationship between the British North American colonies and motherland were in violent contention, could be read as a political statement, either for the presence of Britain in those areas or for the independent histories of the same. Additionally, both Wests had recently been engraved and would have been familiar to visitors to the 1776 Society of Artists exhibition. The popularity of West’s painting of Wolfe might have influenced Ansell’s decision to interpret this specific composition and to offer it for sale. 4. Ansell exhibited her needlework pictures relatively soon after the engravings were available. In fact, a print of Woollett’s Wolfe was also on display at the 1776 Society of Artists exhibition. 5. There was some inconsistency in the treatment of copies. Engraved versions of both West paintings rendered by Ansell also appear in the 1776 Society of Artists exhibition, but are given full billing (i.e., not honorary exhibitors). An engraving is, after all, often a copy after an existing painting. Fig. 4: A Catalogue of the Pictures, Sculptures, Models, Designs in Architecture, Prints, &c. Exhibited by the Royal Incorporated Society of Artists of Great Britain, London, 1776, page 19, showing the entry for M. Ansell as well as the engraving by William Woollett of Wolfe . needlework artist Mary Linwood developed her own independent exhibition that ran for the better part of forty years and became a “must see” in London. Linwood and Ansell were early practitioners of the needlework painting that was widely produced in the early nineteenth century, usually in silk rather than wool. The work of Ansell and Linwood is a transitional form of pictorial