Chair

In inventories and other descriptions in Hungary from the 17th century until the 19th century, we often read about wall tapestries and furniture upholstery embroidered using the gros et petit point technique, with small and large flat stitching. Known throughout Europe, these works were made mainly after Low Countries engravings and designs at the courts of aristocrats and in the manor houses of the lesser nobility. The embroidery was called ‘sewing’. In her manor house at Fogaras (today Făgăraş, Romania), Orphan Kata Bethlen (1700–1759) kept at her home apprentice embroidery women who with her worked with wool, 121 ‘szekvarro becsi szőrrel’. Mention of this kind of yarn work occurs in writing also. It was not by chance that in the whole of Europe the name point de Hongrie (Hungarian stitch) was given to the type of upholstery embroidery which embellished using coloured yarn and zig-zag lines: a flat stitch always starts from the middle of the preceding one. This simpler, geometrical form later gave way to hand-embroidered upholstery showing crowns of trees and later on scenes, as in the case of the furniture set exhibited here. Similar is the Regec seating (in the Hungarian National Museum) of Prince Ferenc Rakoczi II (1704–1711), and also that in the Dessewffy collection depicting Maria Theresa (1740–1780) and her husband Francis of Lorraine, Holy Roman Emperor. On the seat surface but mainly on the back surface of these we encounter Flemish peasant scenes. Supplemented with Chinese scenes (chinoiserie), these genre pictures appear in the set exhibited, too.