The history of needlepoint, century by century

How old needlepoint is

Needlepoint is embroidery stitched over the threads of canvas, a stiff cloth woven so openly that a hole is left between the threads. Its basic stitch is tent stitch, a small slanted stitch over one crossing of the canvas threads.

Tent stitch survives from the Middle Ages. A burse, a flat case for a cloth used at mass, was made in England between 1290 and 1340: canvas embroidered in colored silks, in tent stitch and a crossed stitch. A German linen cover for a crozier (a bishop's staff), from the 1400s, has two bands of silk tent stitch.

As a craft of the home, needlepoint became popular in Europe in the 16th century. In the 17th, embroidered furniture came into fashion, and canvas, durable enough for a seat, was the cloth that covered it. Histories that begin in ancient Egypt, about 1500 BC, are speaking of a slanted stitch used to decorate clothing and religious objects.

What it was called

Canvas work was the name until the early 19th century, and canvaswork is still used in Britain. In the 19th century Berlin work, the fashion described below, became for many people another name for all embroidery on canvas. The word needlepoint first meant the point of a needle, and from 1865 it is recorded for a lace made with a needle.

In Britain needlepoint is also often called tapestry. Strictly, a tapestry is woven on a loom, and the weaving makes the cloth and the picture together. Needlepoint is stitched with a needle onto canvas that is already woven, so no loom is used. The name passed to canvas work that copied the woven tapestries of palaces and great houses.

The 16th and 17th centuries: tent stitch for the house

A great deal of embroidery in wool or silk on linen canvas survives from these two centuries; canvas was woven of linen then, and is usually a stiff cotton now. Most needlepoint from the 16th to the 18th century was petit point, which is fine tent stitch, on canvas of 20 to 45 holes to the inch; most hand-painted canvases now have 13 or 18 (canvas and mesh sizes). Much of the work furnished the house:

• Cushion covers. Long ones, made to fit hard wooden benches. One of about 1540, in silk tent stitch on linen canvas, has a coat of arms among flowers, leaves and insects; coats of arms were much used in canvas work.
• Table carpets. These lay on a table, not the floor. One made in a professional workshop between 1600 and 1615 is silk tent stitch on linen canvas, about 400 stitches to the square inch (62 to the square centimeter), which is 20 to the inch each way. The pull of the stitches has drawn its canvas from a rectangle into a leaning parallelogram. A new piece that leans is pulled square by blocking; an old piece is not blocked without a conservator's advice.
• Slips. Small motifs, usually flowers, were drawn on canvas, stitched, cut out and sewn to velvet or satin, often for bed hangings. A small canvas could be held in the hand, and a slip could be moved to a new backing.
• Hangings made of panels. One set was worked between 1569 and about 1585 by a Scottish queen held captive in England and by the countess whose husband had charge of the queen. The queen's household included professional embroiderers, and not every panel is the queen's own work. The panels are in colored silks and silver thread, mainly in tent stitch and in cross stitch, which is two slanted stitches crossed, and they are mounted on green velvet. Most of the motifs were copied from woodcuts in printed books.
• Pictures. Many needlework pictures of the 17th century show a scene from the Bible or from mythology. One dated 1636 shows a couple among flowers, birds and animals instead. It was never finished, and it shows that the whole design was marked on the canvas before the stitching began.
• Chair covers. A chair of about 1660 has an older cover, dated between 1641 and 1655: tent stitch on linen canvas, with raspberry stems in red and green on a dark background.

Amateurs drew their own designs, often from the printed pattern books that Europe had from the 16th century on; otherwise a professional embroiderer drew the design. Since the 16th century three stitches have been the most used: tent stitch, cross stitch and Florentine stitch, an upright stitch worked in zigzags that is also called flame stitch or bargello.

The 18th century: chair seats, screens and shops

In the 1700s tent stitch covered furniture (chair seats, armchairs, stools and screens) and made pictures and panels:

• A chair seat of about 1730 in wool and silk, in cross stitch and tent stitch: a scene in the center inside a border of large flowers.
• A pole screen of 1740 to 1770: a Bible scene in silk tent stitch with a border of flowers on a dark blue background. A pole screen is a framed panel on a tall pole and stand, and in England pole screens became popular from the 1740s.
• Wall hangings of 1710 to 1720 showing formal gardens: mostly tent stitch, in wool and silk, on a linen canvas of 22 threads to the inch. They lined a room as woven tapestries did. Family tradition said the household had made them, but their size and even quality show that a professional workshop did.

By the middle of the century professional embroiderers in Europe were so many that a number of them opened shops. The shops sold supplies and kits: a canvas with the design on it and all the materials to finish it.

The 19th century: Victorian Berlin woolwork

Berlin woolwork was the craze of Victorian Britain (the Victorian age, 1837 to 1901). It is wool stitched on canvas from a colored chart, usually in one stitch throughout, cross stitch or tent stitch. The chart was printed on squared paper, each square standing for one stitch on the canvas, which is how a needlepoint chart still works.

• The charts. The first was issued in Berlin in 1804. Early charts were printed in black and white and colored by hand; later ones were printed by machine. Before them, a pattern rarely said which colors or threads to use. They sold as single sheets, which kept them cheap.
• How common. About 14,000 designs were on sale by the 1840s, when the charts had pushed aside nearly every other kind of embroidery pattern in England and the United States. In Britain no embroidery technique was more popular from 1830, a few years before the Victorian age began, to the 1870s.
• The wool and its colors. Berlin wool came from Merino sheep in Saxony. It went to Gotha for spinning and on to Berlin for dyeing. Synthetic aniline dyes arrived in the mid-1850s, when the fashion was already more than twenty years old, and Berlin wool took them well: it was soon sold in a range of bright colors not to be had before.
• The canvas. Some early designs were stitched in silk on fine silk canvas. Later, wool on coarser canvas was usual. Penelope canvas, a double-thread canvas woven with its threads in pairs, became available in the middle of the century.
• What was made. Chair seats and backs, cushions, footstools, fire screens, pictures, bags, belts, caps, purses and slippers. Women bought slipper patterns, stitched them for themselves or their husbands, and handed the stitched pieces to a shoemaker to make up, much as a stitched canvas now goes to a finisher.
• What was shown. Bouquets of flowers, often full-blown roses; copies of popular paintings; Bible scenes; geometric patterns. Glass beads were worked in. So was plush stitch, which leaves loops of wool standing on the surface; the loops can be cut into a pile and trimmed to the shape of a flower or an animal. On a fire screen panel of the 1850s plush stitch gives a cockatoo its plumage.
• The end of the fashion. A leading designer of the day blamed Berlin woolwork for a falling-off in skill with the needle, and in 1872 a school of needlework was founded in Britain to bring ornamental needlework back to its old standing. Demand fell in the 1880s as taste turned to simpler designs. The wool itself was made until the 1930s.

The 20th century and after

• 1900 to the 1930s. Flowers in tent stitch went on: an English canvas bag of about 1900 with roses in petit point; a handbag of the 1920s, possibly French, with petit point flowers on brown; a London seat cover of the 1930s in wool tent stitch, a floral pattern on dark brown. A chair back made between 1900 and 1925 has no stitches at all: it was woven by machine, in wool on silk satin, to give the look of petit point.
• 1920 to 1970. British needlework magazines carried needlepoint, under the name tapestry, beside knitting, crochet and embroidery. Old cottages, villages and country scenes were common subjects, and in 1960 one magazine offered the printed canvas for a cottage picture by mail.
• The war years. In 1939 a British needlework magazine offered a tapestry for the long evenings of the blackout, on a coarse canvas so that dim light would not tire the eyes. In 1943 an appeal for a relief charity asked for half-done embroidery and needlepoint to give wounded prisoners of war as occupational therapy.
• The 1950s and 1960s. British suppliers sold part-worked canvases in 1955 and again in the 1960s: the flowers at the center came already stitched, and the buyer filled in the background.
• New methods. Basketweave, which is tent stitch worked in diagonal rows, became widely popular in the 20th century. Interlock canvas, whose threads are twisted together where they cross, is an invention of the same century.
• The 2020s. A revival began in the lockdowns of the Covid-19 pandemic, among younger stitchers, in the United States and beyond.

In America

The colonies. In the mid-1700s well-off families in Connecticut usually sent their daughters to school in Boston or Newport, where needlework was taught: a Newport teacher's newspaper notice of 1758 offered reading, writing, plain sewing, embroidery, tent stitch and samplers. Tent stitch was one of the stitches usual in Boston needlework pictures. Their scenes, shepherds and shepherdesses and a fox hunt among them, were copied from European prints; some show a lady fishing. A panel in tent stitch made in Boston about 1760 was probably meant for the back of a chair, and a Newport chair of 1758 keeps its original cover of wool flame stitch.

The 1800s. By the middle of the 19th century Berlin patterns were being exported across North America. A large Berlin woolwork picture of 1871, copied from a painted portrait, was stitched in Baltimore by a pupil who studied canvas work at an academy there.

The guilds. An embroiderers' guild was started in New York in 1958 as the American branch of a London guild. It was examining teachers in canvas work by 1963 and became independent in 1970. It grew from 17 chapters in 1972 to 92 chapters and 11,000 members in 1975, the year it began an awards program in canvas work. A guild for needlepoint alone was founded in 1972.

The 1970s. Interest in needlework was at its height, and afterward many stitchers turned to quilting and knitting. A needlework teacher's series was made for public television in 1971 to 1972 and again in 1975 to 1976, and the same teacher's embroidery book of 1973 had needlepoint among its chapters. In 1973 a former professional football player published a book of needlepoint for men.

Who stitched it

Workshops and households. Both made it. Much of what survives from the 16th and 17th centuries is probably amateur work, and little is known of how the work was shared with professionals. A group of slips of about 1600 was worked to order, almost certainly by household servants and not in a workshop. Before the 18th century most professional embroiderers were in the service of a court or of a rich household.

Women and girls. Women stitched canvas work at home from the 16th century on. In the 17th century girls of all classes were taught to sew, but only a few had the time and the materials to embroider. In 18th-century America a girl's schooling was in accomplishments such as music, manners and sewing, and a boy's in academic subjects. A finished picture or decorative sampler was framed and hung in the parlor, where it showed its maker's skill and the family's standing to possible suitors.

Samplers and their alphabets. A sampler began as an embroiderer's own record of stitches and patterns, and over the 17th century the English sampler became a practice piece for girls learning needlework. The letters were practice for marking household linen with initials, so that each piece came back to its owner after the wash. Through the 18th century tent stitch and cross stitch came to dominate samplers, and by the 19th the English sampler was a schoolroom exercise almost wholly in cross stitch.

Men. In Britain between 1920 and 1970 men were generally taken to be non-stitchers, and some stitched all the same: sailors, and men recovering from wartime injuries, who in both world wars were often given needlepoint.

Beyond Europe. Tent stitch is not only European. A Chinese official's badge of rank of about 1800 and a Chinese robe of the 19th century are embroidered in silk tent stitch on silk gauze in place of canvas.

Placing an old piece by its look

Before handling an old piece to look at it, read old needlepoint, which says how to handle one, what not to take out of its frame or off its furniture, how to keep it and who can say more about its age or its worth. Nothing is opened, unpicked or taken apart to check a row of this table: the two canvas rows apply only where bare canvas already shows.

A look dates a fashion, not a piece. Later stitchers kept the old looks: the roses of about 1900 and the floral seat cover of the 1930s are above, and a book cover embroidered in 1955 took its design from a Berlin woolwork sampler. A museum's date is not always firm either: when the chair with the cover of 1641 to 1655 was bought, the cover's exact date was in some doubt, for want of pieces to compare it with.