The Sister Arts: Textile Crafts between Paint, Print and Practice

This article explores intersections between portraiture, printed genre images and conduct literature in late eighteenth‐ and early nineteenth‐century Britain, focusing on representations of textile crafts and their accoutrements. In extant scholarship needlework has been characterised as an important site of debate, a discursive locus wherein the qualities of appropriate femininity were sketched out and redefined. Centring on the very mechanisms by which this discourse operated, this article argues that visual and literary images of textile‐work were central to the creation of a grammar of respectable femininity, a symbolic language that variously advocated maternal instruction, domestic industry and marital eligibility.