Sewing cushions and baskets

 Depictions of women sewing in the 16^th and 17^th centuries often show them with a sewing cushion, something to rest their sewing on. Figure 1 shows the title page of Johann Sibmacher’s Newes Modelbuch, published in 1604 (Met Museum). Some may recognize the three women, indicating learning (sophia), industry (industria) and idleness (ignavia), as they were used again, hardly altered, on the title page of the 1631 book The Needles Excellency, for example to of the ruffs have been replaced with standing bands. Industry, seated on the ground, rests her work on a sloped box with a sewing cushion on top, this cushion may have been separate from, or integral to, the box. 

Figure 1 Title page from Johann Sibmacher, Newes Modelbuch, 1604

 

A similar box with cushion can be seen in the image of ladies in a garden embroidering in the Album Amicorum of GervasiusFabricus which dates to the early seventeenth century. 

A surviving sewing cushion is in the collection of the Rijksmuseum, (Figure 2) they date it to 1580-1620. Closed it is approximately 22 cm by 37.5 cm by 11.5 cm. It is covered in green velvet, with green silk covered acorn shaped tassels at the corners. The cushion is filled with unspun flax.  As you can see it opens to show storage inside. The interior is of wood covered with red silk, and divided into compartments, the covers of which are brown leather with gold leaf decoration. There is also a mirror, this is very expensive item. Most of these cushions would have been very plain, and without storage.

Figure 2. Sewing cushion. c.1580-1620. Rijksmuseum.

This use of sewing cushions seems common across western Europe, as well as the German examples a plain example appears in Velázquez, The Needlewoman, in the National Gallery of Art, Washington.(Figure 3)  There are also examples in Dutch genre paintings,  Gerard Ter Borch’s Woman Sewing beside a Cradle in the Mauritshuis, has a plain blue cushion,while Gabriel Metsu’s Woman Reading a Letter in the National Gallery of Ireland, has a cushion with a blue top and a red base, it, like the Rijksmuseum example, has tassels at the corners. 

Figure 3. Diego Velázquez, The Needlewoman (c 1640-49), National Gallery of Art, Washington

 Next to the sewer you will often, as in the Metsu painting, (Figure 4) see a large basket. Schipper-Van Lottum in her article found a reference to one sewing basket with two sewing cushions in the 1613 inventory Sara Berwijns. A drawing of an interior c.1620 by Willem Buytewech, shows two women working with a basket next to one. 

Figure 4. Gabriël Metsu, Woman Reading a Letter. National Gallery of Ireland

 

These are not small baskets but are of a size to hold shirts or smocks, or sheets or tablecloths. They are usually very open in construction. In Nicolas Maes painting The Virtuous Woman, in the Wallace Collection, she has pulled cloth from the basket onto her sewing cushion, and gestures towards the basket with one hand. In the Gerard Ter Borch painting The Apple Peeler (1660), the woman has placed her sewing cushion, of the folding Rijksmuseum sort, in the top of a basket which is full of linens. (Figure 5)

Figure 5. Gerard ter Borch, Woman peeling an apple. Kunsthistorisches Museum

Reference

M.G.A. Schipper-Van Lottum. A Work-basket with a sewing cushion. Bulletin of the Needle and Bobbin Club, 1979, Vol 62, no.1&2, pp3-44