Why did we forget Mary Linwood?

In 1809, a new gallery opened in London’s Leicester Square. It would remain one of the capital’s most celebrated attractions for almost four decades. Featuring large-scale textile copies of paintings by British artists including Sir Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough, it was a dazzling spectacle, with a series of interactive chambers designed to take visitors on a journey through different facets of British identity, from ‘Cottage’ to ‘Gothic’.

Today, the name of the embroidery artist whose work filled the gallery is little known. Mary Linwood died in March 1845 leaving an estate worth £45,000, more than £5 million today; testament to her extraordinary success not only as an artist, but an entrepreneur, too. Her illustrious patrons included Queen Charlotte and Catherine the Great, who once offered her £40,000 for her entire collection. Yet, in the words of Heidi A. Strobel, author of The Art of Mary Linwood, “She really isn’t part of the canon of famous female artists at all.” 

A major new exhibition opening this month at Leicester Museum and Art Gallery, in Linwood’s home city, aims to illuminate her life and work for a new audience and restore her to her rightful place in art history. The first exhibition in almost 80 years to bring together a significant collection of her embroideries, Mary Linwood: Art, Stitch and Life, is curated by Ruth Singer, a contemporary textile artist who says: “What fascinates me is how little known she is, even in Leicester.”

A major reason Linwood has languished in relative obscurity since her death is undoubtedly down to patriarchal attitudes, which have denied many brilliant women entry to the art history books.

“Sadly, it’s a commonplace tale for female artists to have been well known in their lifetimes, but not be remembered now,” says Laura Moseley, Assistant Curator of The Women’s Art Collection at Murray Edwards College, Cambridge. “Much of that is to do with the biases in academia. Books such as HW Janson’s History of Art didn’t record any women artists until its edition in the late 1980s.”

With their association with domesticity, or women’s work, textiles have often been especially marginalised in art discourse. The Royal Academy of Arts expressly banned the exhibition of embroideries shortly after it was founded. “Crafts such as embroidery have never been given the same attention as painting or sculpture, which are predominantly recorded as men’s work,” says Moseley.

What made Linwood so remarkable during her lifetime, however, is the fascinating story of a woman who, through her creativity and ingenuity, managed to transcend the constraints imposed by Georgian society on her sex and social class.

Little is known about her early years, beyond that she was the eldest of six children born in Birmingham to Matthew, a trained linen draper, and Hannah, who founded a boarding school called the Priory in Leicester, where the family moved in 1763. Linwood is believed to have learned embroidery from her mother and followed in Hannah’s footsteps once again when she became a teacher at the Priory in the 1770s, later running the school.

Linwood’s work, seen at the time as high art, has often been dismissed since as part of a sentimental, overly feminine tradition. One memorable 2014 review by the Evening Standard art critic Ben Luke derided it as “hideous and kitschy, if undoubtedly accomplished”.

The idea of copying paintings seems unoriginal to modern audiences. Yet, as Singer says, Linwood’s work was “streets ahead of all the other embroideries being done at the time.” Her technically innovative, intricately detailed ‘needlepainting’ in crewel wool mimicked the brush strokes of an oil painting, giving her works incredible depth and richness.

And in Linwood’s day, her decision to recreate famous paintings was not seen as mere imitation: “It was a respected art form,” says Singer. “She was following in a tradition of embroidery and tapestry, which was based on other people’s drawings and paintings.”

In an age before galleries and photography, it also served a wider social purpose. “Most people never got to see paintings, because they were held in private,” she says. “Black and white engravings would be the only other way the average person could see a Gainsborough. By copying them in colour, her aim was to educate and enlighten the British public about the amazing art being produced mostly in their country.”

This is key to what Singer finds compelling about Linwood: “She was so forward-thinking in how she made culture accessible. She expressed her creativity in a way that was very public-facing. She wasn’t making her tapestries privately, for the home, which was far more normal at the time for women.”

Strobel agrees. “One of the most remarkable aspects of her story is that she took a medium, embroidery, that was typically associated with women and privacy, and made a big public splash with it,” she says.

Linwood never married or had children, which Strobel describes as a “strategic move” allowing her far more autonomy than most women could even imagine at the time. She was able to travel freely between Leicester and London, where, with Queen Charlotte’s support, she held her first temporary public exhibition in 1787 at the Pantheon Assembly Rooms on Oxford Street.

The earnings from this and other shows funded the Leicester Square Gallery – the first in history to be owned and operated by a British woman. There, exhibiting 65 textiles, 85 per cent of which were copies of British paintings, she brought together her dual passions, for art and education.

Strobel estimates that over its 36 years in operation, the gallery pulled in around 115,000 visitors. Linwood refused to sell any of her works, meaning her fortune came from ticket sales. And she pulled out all the stops to ensure the crowds kept coming.

Her themed chambers featured red, silver and gold theatrical curtains and a variety of props to fully immerse visitors in the experience, a tactic that would later be employed at Madame Tussaud’s wax museum. In the ‘Gothic’ room, visitors looked at her replicas through a barred window; in ‘Cottage’, she placed rustic furniture and even a bowl of porridge. Linwood’s were also the first exhibitions to be illuminated by gaslight, adding to the drama and allowing visitors to keep coming after dusk.

“All these innovations tell us that she was actively looking to appeal to a more popular audience than other galleries,” says Strobel. “Education was a big motivation for her.”

She met most of European royalty, seeming to dazzle wherever she went, although she turned down Catherine the Great’s offer to buy her collection, as she wanted it to remain in England. Napolean conferred on her the Freedom of Paris in 1803. Not every eminent figure was a fan, though: Charles Dickens described her exhibition as “a gloomy sepulchre of needlework dropping to pieces with dust and age and shrouded in twilight at high noon” which left him “chilled”.

Towards the end of Linwood’s life, as audiences moved on to new spectacles, her popularity waned. She died aged 89, leaving her wealth to her 17 nieces and nephews and various charities, and one of her tapestries – her copy of Carlo Dolci’s Salvator Mundi – to Queen Victoria in the hope its display would continue to educate and entertain. An 1845 auction of her work by Christie’s garnered a meagre £300, setting the erasure of her legacy in motion.

So what happened? Several factors came into play. The quality of her work depreciated after being removed from her gallery and dispersed to people’s homes, where they were rolled up and languished in attics. Then, in the 1840s, Berlin wool work took off, and Linwood’s work began to be conflated with this less creative style of embroidery, which was often based on mass-produced kits or patterns. The undervaluing of her ‘women’s work’ began.

Strobel also believes that the unique, complex nature of what Linwood achieved has made it difficult to fit her into a neat box. In 2014, some of her pieces were featured in Tate Britain’s British Folk Art exhibition. “I don’t think they’re folk art,” she says. “But where does Mary Linwood belong? Her work sits in this interesting liminal space between art and craft. She was also celebrating British art and exhibiting her work in a novel, innovative way. She tests the boundaries of conventional art history.”

Strobel wrote her 2024 book about Linwood “to put down a historical footprint for her where there hadn’t been one and point out the many ways she was unique.” Singer, a textile curator as well as an artist in her own right, has spent years working on the forthcoming exhibition with the aim of revealing the true level of skill in Linwood’s tapestries, as well as her ingenuity and resilience.

It will feature Singer’s own textile responses to Linwood’s work, with themes including ‘matronage’ – the idea explored by Strobel of a female form of patronage such as the support Linwood received from Queen Charlotte.

“She had no model to follow and created a path that was entirely her own,” says Singer. “Her example should have led to other female textile artists exhibiting, but it didn’t.” The exhibition is “an examination of what happened to that legacy – why is she so unknown now, and who and what is complicit in that?”

She hopes it will “elevate Linwood back to the position she deserves: the most successful British woman artist of her time.”

Mary Linwood: Art, Stitch and Life will take place at Leicester Museum and Art Gallery between September 13 and February 22.