e purpose of traditional
employment for the leisure class. This came into vogue and was rather
extensively used for coverings of screens, chairs, sofas, footstools and
the various specimens of household furniture made by workmen who had
served with Adam, Chippendale and Sheraton, and who had brought books of
patterns with them to the prosperous, growing market of the New World.
Berlin woolwork was a method of cross-stitch upon canvas in colored
wools or silks--in fact, an extension of sampler methods into pictures
and screens, or the more utilitarian chair and sofa covers. It was
sometimes varied by using broadcloth or velvet as a foundation, the
canvas threads being drawn out after the picture was complete. We
occasionally find entire sets of beautiful old mahogany chairs, with
cushions of cross-stitch embroidery, the subjects ranging over
everything in the animal or vegetable world, so that one might sit in
turn upon horses, bead-eyed and curled lap dogs, or wreaths of lilies
and roses.

Occasionally, also, a glassed and framed picture of elaborate design and
beautiful workmanship is seen, but as a rule it must be confessed that
in America this method of embroidery, as an art, failed to achieve
dignity. This was not in the least owing to the actual technique of the
process, since beautiful tapestries have been accomplished, taking
canvas as a medium and foundation for a dexterous use of design and
color.

The square blocks of the canvas stitch are no more objectionable in an
art process than the block of enamel of which priceless mosaics are
made, but one can easily see that if every design for mosaic work could
be indefinitely reproduced and sold by the thousands, with numbered and
colored blocks of glass, something--we hardly know what--would be lost
in even the most exact reproductions.

Original design, however simple, is the expression of a thought, and
passes directly from the mind of the originator to the material upon
which it is expressed; but when the design becomes an article of
commercial supply it loses in interest, and if the process of production
is simple, requiring little thought and skill, the work also fails to
call out in us the reverence we willingly accord to skillful and
painstaking embroidery.

[Illustration: BED HANGING of polychrome cross-stitch appliqued on blue
woolen ground.

_Courtesy of Brooklyn Museum_]

[Illustration: NEEDLEPOINT SCREEN made in fine and coarse point. Single
cr