Lot 106: Susan Mary ('Lily') Yeats (1866-1949) PEONIES AND

Susan Mary ('Lily') Yeats (1866-1949) PEONIES AND PLUMS; AN EMBROIDERED CUSHION SQUARE WITH SILK TASSELS silk threads on silk and linen fabric signed lower right; Cuala Industries label on reverse 53 by 53cm., 21 by 21in. Provenance: By descent from the artist's cousin, Rupert Gordon (1894-1961) to present owner With a family letter dated 22 September 1952 regarding the cushion cover and three related news clippings included with lot. It is unusual to be able to document an early piece of embroidery by Lily Yeats once she had returned to Dublin in 1902, after the six years she spent working in the embroidery workshop run by William Morris's daughter, May, which she had been invited to join in 1888. This piece appears to have originally belonged to Dr. Rupert Gordon, the son of Frances Armstrong ('Fannie') Yeats, the sister of John Butler Yeats, father of Lily, W. B., Jack and Elizabeth ('Lolly') Yeats. Fannie Yeats married Dr. Samuel Thomas Gordon, Vice-President of the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland, and Surgeon in the Royal Irish Constabulary. Rupert Gordon was therefore a first cousin of Lily Yeats. May Morris' embroidery shop was originally based in her father William Morris' Kelmscott House in Hammersmith, and then, after her marriage in 1890, was run from Hammersmith Terrace, close to the Yeats' family's London house in Bedford Park. Although Lily Yeats had been glad to be able to earn a wage by working on distinguished designs by Morris (who often visited the shop), Henry Dearle, and other luminaries of the Arts and Crafts movement, Murphy records that May Morris "seldom did any work herself but supervised the girls, who never completed a curtain or bedspread but simply began the needlework for wealthy women who purchased the designs" from her. Parry, however, states that the success of the venture was due to "May's hard work designing, embroidering and supervising the work", and to her underrated "skills and use of satin stitches", which gave "a marvellously shimmering silky texture, an effect described by George Bernard Shaw, a great admirer, as 'glowing fruit-forests'". Lewis quotes Lily Yeats: "What we did was to start [beautiful] work for great ladies who probably never finished it. We worked an inch or two of ground, half a flower, a leaf and a bit of stem". May Morris's authoritative book, Decorative Needlework (1893), served as a valuable guide for amateur embroiderers and for those who collected her fashionable workshop's completed designs. That year, the four-poster bed hanging William Morris had asked her to embroider for his Kelmscott Manor in Oxfordshire was exhibited with the English Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society. By then, Lily Yeats had become the most experienced assistant working there, working alongside the actress Florence Farr (wife of Emery Walker), Mary de Morgan, sister of the potter William, and other distinguished designer/craftsmen's wives. The following year, she resigned from the workshop, and in 1895, she exhibited "an embroidered mantle" border at the first exhibition of the Arts and Crafts Society of Ireland. May Morris' influence is clear here, in the centralised, sinuous design, the rhythmic disposition of flowerheads, fruits, leaf stems and thorny stemmed arabesques which anchor the composition. The design also resembles the cushion covers or firescreen panels, designed earlier, between 1878 and 1885, which Parry states "became the financial mainstay" of the embroidery section of Morris & Co., and were as often the designs of Henry Dearle and May Morris as of Morris himself. A much more accomplished design in the formalised floriated mode than any other that has so far come to light by Lily Yeats, it is particularly interesting that it is clearly signed by her (in orange silk thread, in the distinctive manner which demarcated all her own work once she returned to live in Dublin). Its scale of design is smaller and more intricate than the large (filled) cushion which appears in the foreground of the well-known 1903 photograph of Lily Yeats and her girls in the Embroidery Room at Dun Emer. The fact that it is a cushion cover, in perfect (seemingly unused) condition, and not an embroidered version of a design by her brother Jack, her sister Elizabeth, or other friends, family and fellow artists (not even Walter Crane, mentioned in the attached letter of 1952), or one of her later 'Abbey' pictures, 'Garden' firescreens or embroidered decorations for clothes and domestic items, makes it of particular and rare interest. Dr Nicola Gordon Bowe April 2008