243:: "Shade of Miss Linwood, erst of Leicester Square, London, thou art welcome here, and thy retreat is fitly chosen! I myself was one of the last visitors to that awful storehouse of thy life's work, where an anchorite old man and woman took my shilling with a solemn wonder, and conducting me to a gloomy sepulchre of needlework dropping to pieces with dust and age and shrouded in twilight at high noon, left me there, chilled, frightened and alone. And now, in ghostly letters on all the dead walls of this dead town, I read thy honoured name, and find that thy Last Supper, worked in Berlin Wool, invites inspection as a powerful excitement!"
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century. It was subsequently rebuilt and refurbished from 1806 to 1809 by architect Joseph Page (1718–1776). Linwood displayed her work in a long gallery on the first floor from 1809 until her death in 1845. A legal dispute regarding the payment for renovations became a decades long battle, and eventually landed in The House of Lords in 1837. The House decided the case against
Linwood and her partners, who were ordered to pay Page. In 1865, Savile House was destroyed by fire.
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Four years before her death in 1845, Mary's works were still exhibited in London. She worked with stitches of different lengths on a fabric made especially for her in
Leicester, and had coarse linen tammy cloth prepared for her as well. Her long and short stitches looked like brush strokes, with silk
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She embroidered her last piece when she was seventy-eight, although she lived to be ninety and worked as a school mistress until a year before her death. She never married and, according to the
Greater Wigston Historical Society, was the last person in Leicester to use a Sedan chair. In 1845, during
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Her exhibition in
Leicester Square, London, was the first art show to be illuminated by gaslight and innovative theatrical displays with red, silver and gold curtaining and one where it looked like peeping into a cottage window. The exhibition consisted of copies of paintings after such masters as
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in 1764 with her family after her father, a wine merchant, became bankrupt. He died young, and her mother opened a private boarding school for young ladies in
Belgrave Gate. When her mother died, Linwood took over the school and continued it for 50 years. Linwood made her first embroidered picture
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Linwood's needlework exhibition was housed in the old Savile House on
Leicester Square, which also housed William Green's Pistol Repository and Shooting Gallery from 1836 to 1855 in a rebuilt section upstairs. The run-down building had been leased to Mary Linwood and associates at the turn of the
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offered £40,000 for the whole collection while the Tsar offered her £3,000 for one example. However, Linwood refused as she wished her work to remain in
England. On one occasion her copy of a painting by the Italian artist Salvator Rosa (1615–1673) sold for more than the original. One of her own
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Her entire collection was dispersed at
Christie's Auction House, after both the British Museum and House of Lords had earlier rejected her offer to donate her collection, the auctioned pieces were sold for sums far below those at which they had been valued a few years previously.
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wool (named from the crewel or worsted wool used), in which the irregular and sloping stitches resembled brushwork, achieved great fame from the time of her first London exhibition in 1787. She met most of the crowned heads of Europe. She exhibited in Russia and
203:, whose portrait was said to have been done from life. He conferred on her the Freedom of Paris in 1803. So successful was Linwood in these annual shows attracting 40,000 customers a year, similar to
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For nearly seventy-five years, she worked in worsted embroidery, producing a collection of over 100 pictures that specialised in full size copies of old masters. She opened an exhibition in the
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when she was thirteen years old, and by 1775 she had established herself as a needlework artist. By the age of 31, Mary had attracted the attention of the royal family, and she was invited to
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began to criticize Berlin wool work for having led to a loss of embroidery skills, and in later decades
Linwood's notoriety was put in question due to its association with Berlin wool work.
221:'s (1776–1837) first commissioned work was to paint the background details in one of her works. Linwood is said to have refused an offer of 3000 guineas for her version of Carlo Dolci's
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her annual visit to her
Exhibition in London, Mary Linwood, by then regarded as the most celebrated needlewoman of her age, caught the flu and died. She was buried in
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211:(1758–1810) to paint her portrait. By this time Hoppner was principal painter to the Prince of Wales (later George IV) and the most important portraitist in England.
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in 1798, which afterward travelled to Leicester Square, Edinburgh and Dublin. Linwood's copies of old master paintings in
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Her tomb in Leicester, erected by friends refers to her skills adding a "lustre on her age, her country and her sex.
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for highlights. She inspired many amateurs in later years to copy her needlework techniques on a smaller scale.
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Credited as the most notable needlepainter of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, along with
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spoke of its "variety and graduation of tints cannot possibly exceeds in effort by the pencil."
623:"Mary Linwood 1798 - Antique Embroidered Textiles - Meg Andrews - Antique Costumes and Textiles"
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in Leicester and London and was the school mistress of a private school. In the 20th century,
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Pictorial Embroidery in England: A Critical History of Needlepainting and Berlin Work
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was named in her honour. In 1790, she received a medal from the Society of Arts.
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Biography of Mary Linwood's Life in Bygone Leicestershire, pp. 238–243, 1892
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Threads of life : a history of the world through the eye of a needle
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The Oratorio in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (2000), p.315
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and Anne Eliza Morritt, and perhaps as few works survive of
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Mary Linwood's Exhibitions of Her Needlework, 1798–1845
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Miss Linwood's Gallery, Catalog of her Exhibition, 1822
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whom the queen also engaged with to show their work.
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535:A Biographical Dictionary of British Architects
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572:(online ed.). Oxford University Press.
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377:The Grove Encyclopedia of Decorative Arts
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400:"Leicester Chronicler - Mary Linwood"
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500:"BRIEF HISTORY DURING THE SNOW ERA"
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489:(London: Bloomsbury, 2019).
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578:10.1093/ref:odnb/16748
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299:(1808), and the poem
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667:Mary Linwood gallery
307:Last years and death
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547:Smither, Howard E.
164:Catherine the Great
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712:English embroidery
485:Rosika Desnoyers,
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591:(Subscription or
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692:1845 deaths
687:1755 births
583:11 November
260:needlepoint
252:Mary Delany
177:Carlo Dolci
149:Exhibitions
681:Categories
595:required.)
451:1079199690
331:References
126:Birmingham
110:Early life
130:Leicester
105:Biography
524:, p. 400
303:(1818).
266:and the
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193:Reynolds
185:Ruisdael
124:Born in
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630:2016
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447:OCLC
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