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Books > Health, Home & Family > Handicrafts > Needlework & fabric crafts > General
The little-known art of Berlin Work was once the most commonly
practiced art form among European women. Pictorial Embroidery in
England is the first academic study of both pictorial Berlin Work
and its precursor, needlepainting, exploring their cultural status
in the 18th and 19th centuries. From Enlightenment practices of
copying to the development of an industrial aesthetic and the
making of the modern amateur, Berlin Work developed as an official
knowledge associated with notions of cultural and scientific
progress. However, with the advent of the Arts and Crafts movement
and modernist aesthetics, Berlin Work was gradually demoted to a
craft hobby. Delving into the social, cultural and economic context
of English pictorial embroidery, Pictorial Embroidery in England
recovers Berlin Work as an art form, and demonstrates how this
overlooked practice was once at the centre of cultural life.
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