Wall hanging: Penelope flanked by Perseverance and Patience
Category
Textiles
Date
c. 1573
Materials
Silk, cloth of gold and silver; linen backing
Measurements
278 cm (height); 350 cm (length)
Place of origin
England
Order this imageCollection
Hardwick Hall, Derbyshire
NT 1129593.1
Caption
During the 16th century, the nobility and gentry commonly used embroidered wall hangings and tapestries to decorate their houses. The elaborate hanging shown here is one of the largest and most significant to survive from the Elizabethan period, and was commissioned by Elizabeth Talbot, Countess of Shrewsbury for her house at Chatsworth in Derbyshire. It is one of a set of five showing biblical and mythical female figures – Lucretia, Zenobia, Artemisia, Cleopatra and, in this case, Penelope, wife of the classical hero Ulysses, who spent ten years away at the Trojan war. She is celebrated at the centre of this embroidery, and personifications of the virtues of patience and perseverance are shown at either side. The embroidery includes the countess’s coat of arms alongside that of her fourth husband George Talbot, 6th Earl of Shrewsbury (c.1522– 90). The couple’s marriage ended acrimoniously, and the hangings became the subject of legal disputes between husband and wife in 1585 and 1586. This was resolved in the countess’s favour, and they appear in an inventory of her goods at her new home – Hardwick Hall – in 1601.
Summary
An embroidered appliqué wall hanging showing the central figure of Penelope standing in a large portal with personifications of her qualities of Perseverance and Patience in smaller portals at each side. They stand within a larger classically inspired setting featuring a foreground of tapering pilasters, a fluted column with an ionic capital at each side and an entablature running along the top. It is one of a set of five hangings commissioned by Elizabeth, Countess of Shrewsbury (1527-1608), to furnish her home at Chatsworth in the 1670s following her fourth marriage to George Talbot, 6th Earl of Shrewsbury (1528-90). They are represented by an intertwined GE at the top of each column and GES for George and Elizabeth Shrewsbury in the centre of the entablature. Above each of the smaller portals in an oval medallion decorated with two white and two blue heraldic roses and featuring the arms of Talbot impaling Hardwick on the left and the Talbot badge of a Talbot hound on the right. The set of five hangings was taken to Hardwick in the late 1580s and 1590s and used to furnish the recently completed New Hall built by the Countess between 1597 and 1601. They are recorded in the Withdrawing Chamber in the 1601 inventory. The hanging is constructed of high value brightly coloured silk fabrics including velvet, satin, tissue and lampas, cloth of silver and gold and is embellished with applied couched decoration of gold and silver filé and silk floss threads, braids and bobbin lace, cords, spangles and purl, all applied to a plain weave linen lining that covers the whole of the reverse.
Full description
This embroidered wall hanging of Penelope, the faithful wife of the Classical hero, Ulysses, is one of the largest and most splendid embroideries surviving from the Elizabethan age. It is from a set of five showing historical and mythical female figures, which also included Lucretia, Zenobia, Arthemesia and Cleopatra. They were probably inspired by female characters in Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Legend of Good Women, published in his complete works in 1532 and were intended to show the virtues of their owner, Elizabeth, Countess of Shrewsbury. The group of Noble Women selected by the Countess are all defined by their relationship to their husbands as either wives or widows and in the same way, she constructs her own identity in her textiles though prominent use of the Earl of Shrewsbury’s arms and initials, conjoined with her own. During Penelope’s ten-year wait for her husband to return from the Trojan War, she kept suitors waiting by promising to make a choice once she had completed her weaving but deferred her decision by unpicking each night what she had woven during the day. Standing proudly as the crowned ruler of Ithaca at the moment of Ulysses’s return, Penelope’s hand rests on a finished roll of fabric while the other is raised to admonish her suitors. Her patience and perseverance are personified as female figures at her side. Luxurious textiles were a significant part of the furnishing of a sixteenth-century household, used for comfort, decoration and to indicate wealth and the Countess used fine textiles in the form of hangings, table carpets, bed sets and cushions to create a display of opulence and wealth in her homes. This hanging is made using appliqué, a technique where fabric is cut and layered together to create a design, here using the most expensive silk, velvet and cloth of gold, embellished with gold and silver thread. Many of the fabrics came from ecclesiastical vestments removed from churches in the mid-16th century following the changes to religious worship introduced during the English Reformation and, in this case, then recycled as domestic furnishings.
Marks and inscriptions
Penelope/Perseverance/Paciens
References
Levey, 2007: Santina M. Levey The embroideries at Hardwick Hall: a catalogue. [London]: National Trust, 2007. White 2005: Gillian White, “Pictures of the Vertues”: A Set of Wall-Hangings at Hardwick Hall, Renaissance Journal, vol. 2, no.3, 2005 Slocombe 2016: Slocombe, Emma., ‘The Embroidery and Needlework of Bess of Hardwick’ in Adshead, David., Taylor, David.A.H.B., (eds.), Hardwick Hall : A Great Old Castle of Romance. New Haven: Yale University Press (2016), 110-132.