Men of the cloth

This article is taken from the February 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

The art of the painter-stainer is a lost art. in common with the arcane activities of the patten-maker, the fan-maker, and the fletcher, one is unlikely to find oneself sitting next to practitioners of such “misteries” at their appropriate livery company dinners. As a newly adopted freeman of the Worshipful Company of Painter-Stainers, I was keen to discover more about my illustrious forebears, being the anonymous craftsmen whose 16 tonnes of painted linen cloths provided the backdrop in 1520 to the meeting of Henry Vlll and Francis l of France on the Field of the Cloth of Gold.

Despite their significant contribution to the fabric of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century life, the tangible legacy of the painter-stainer is pretty scant. The company’s own history barely mentions this aspect of their craft, except to make reference to the odd receipt or commission agreement. Unlike, say, the art of the tapestry, the marble terrazzo pavement or the panel portrait, sadly, there are no hefty, handsomely illustrated coffee table books dedicated to the painted cloth.
Aside from a few bits of linen banners in the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Society of Antiquaries, Britain’s only (nonetheless spectacular) remaining complete decorative set of “waterworks” can be found in situ at Owlpen Manor, Gloucestershire, seat of the Daunts and current home of the Manders. Sir Nicholas Mander has done much to plug the gaps in the academic history of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century domestic interior, and Owlpen’s original painted cloths depicting the life of Noah and other Old Testament scenes have been restored to life as commercially available wallpapers and hangings by the decorative artist Melissa White.

I made it my artistic mission to resuscitate the painted cloth, both materially and thematically, within my own contemporary art world context. It was when I discovered creatures moving about in my paint — some sort of maggots or larvae, no idea where they came from — that I realised I’d literally brought a dead art back to life.

As well as obvious Biblical and classical themes, the origin myths of the British people figure prominently

Unlike easel painting, my chosen medium appears to fit more into the realm of the painter-decorator than that of the old master. The paints used are the same as those which would have been mixed by the craftsmen, probably plasterers or carpenters, responsible for the decorative flourishes of the Tudor and Jacobean interior, there being no specific trade of general house painter at the time.

“Milk” or casein — deployed for its breathability when applied to porous lime plaster, its versatility when thinned with water as a medium for “staining” unprimed linen and for its gradual impermeability — became the standard medium for binding pigments to execute the “waterwork”, a decorative art form lauded by Falstaff in Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor as worth more than a thousand fly-bitten tapestries.

Merchants as well as nobility patronised the painter-stainer. Painted cloths had the advantage of being both cheaper and swifter to execute than tapestries. Their portability also suited the often itinerant character of important families. Commissioned by the yard, large bolts of linen were stretched across wooden batten frames, usually corresponding to the dimensions of the intended domestic interior, “sized” with rabbit skin glue, and decorated with intuitive, bravura, linear designs, the subjects of which suited the patron’s interests or caprices.

The arrival of wallpaper, panelling, and changing tastes saw the painted cloth consigned to the skip, like so much plasterboard and formica during a Chelsea basement conversion.

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Contemporary descriptions of seventeenth-century public pageants show that the culture of classical allusion was given spectacular visual form via masques, and accompanying painted cloth backdrops, by the likes of Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton and particularly Inigo Jones. Jones’s tableaux cast even the monarch as a player in the fantastical enactment of divine principles, noble attributes and unifying political tenets.

As well as obvious Biblical and classical themes, the origin myths of the British people figure prominently in City of London pageants. In particular, there was Geoffrey of Monmouth’s pseudo-history of how the refugee Brutus of Troy landed at Totnes and routed Albion’s population of giants to become Britain’s first king. Thomas Dekker‘s “Magnificent Entertainment”, concocted to celebrate the triumphant passage of James l and VI as King of England and of Scotland, showed the crowds of jubilant Londoners the imaginary King Brutus uniting a nation, as he crowned his sons kings of Wales, Scotland, and Cornwall.

I designed my poster for the Lord Mayor’s Show 2024 around characters from the City of London’s origin myths such as the captive giant guardians of the Guildhall, Gog and Magog, as well as King Brutus. While it’s unlikely that the exploits of Bran the Blessed and his disembodied head or the 33 wicked daughters of Diocletian will be back on the curriculum any time soon, it is surprising that such characters once so embedded in common history as to be recognisable points of reference when they appeared in popular entertainments, have now been entirely replaced by new heroic characters such as James Bond and Paddington Bear.

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Rather than refocusing on Britain’s peculiar origin myths as the theme for my cloths through the invention of novel illustrations, my exercise in bringing the art of the painter-stainer back to life was given an extra dimension thanks to the resources of the London Society of Antiquaries at Burlington House. Despite not containing any complete examples of painted cloths, the vast hoard of seemingly random objects and literature donated by fellows throughout the society’s 300-year history provided a wealth of visual material, ripe for deployment as elements in my reconstruction of a series of imaginary artefacts for the twenty-first century.

The culmination of my project is the exhibition Legends of Albion, which consists of eight 9ft by 5ft “stained” cloths currently hanging in the listed townhouse Newlands Gallery in Petworth, West Sussex, alongside several maps and charts cataloguing, among other things, the lineage of British monarchs — providing a clear link from Prince Harry all the way back to the Greek god Zeus. That the larvae who’d taken up residence in my paint pots might similarly trace their lineage back to one particular sixteenth-century grub who could have been the inspiration for Shakespeare’s “maggot as emperor” is no more ridiculous in the world of time-travelling exercises.