ABSTRACT
John Dando Sedding was a successful designer and ecclesiastical architect who worked in a Gothic-revival style. His publications include Garden-Craft Old and New and Art and Handicraft. The Arts and Crafts Essays from which this article is taken was a compilation of essays by members of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society in London. While the main thrust of the paper was to discuss embroidery and its design issues, Sedding touched on the favourite topic of the part that nature might play in the inspiration of designers. Every phase of the world’s primal schools of design—Egyptian, Babylonian, Indian, Chinese, Greek, Byzantine, European—has been illustrated and made easy of imitation. Besides which, the very limitations of the materials used in realising a design in needlework, be it ever so naturally coloured, hinders a too definite presentation of the real. And needlework is a pictorial art that requires a real artist to direct the design, a real artist to ply the needle.
