The Rundāle Palace Museum has published a new book Ancient Lace: 16th–18th Century written by Lauma Lancmane, the long-time employee of the Museum. The catalogue is currently the most extensive overview of the lace collection of the Rundāle Palace Museum, uncovering another significant part of the Museum collections and highlighting the development of lace over three centuries.
The book is a systematic compilation of information about the lacemaking traditions from early openwork embroideries at the end of the 16th century to the extensive diversity of lace in the 18th century. The history and regional differences of embroideries, needle or sewn lace, and also plaited or pillow lace are outlined in individual chapters. One chapter is dedicated to metallic lace which is a rare and artistically expressive type of lace.
The objective of the catalogue is to showcase the diverse lace patterns and also to reveal the complex techniques. Therefore, the publication contains photographs of many magnified samples, allowing to see the delicacy of lace and to identify their origin according to the techniques characteristic to specific manufactories. The book also includes images of the portrait collection of the Museum with lace motifs, and a glossary in four languages.
The new catalogue examines 130 lace samples. However, there are more than 150 units in the lace collection of the Rundāle Palace Museum. Although the collection mainly consists of lace dating from the 17th and 18th century, there is also lacy embroidery from the end of the 16th century. Expansion of the collection in the 21st century was particularly facilitated by the European auction houses as they offered excellent samples of early lace from famous private collections, inter alia, the collection of Margaret Simeon. Meanwhile, the appreciation shown by the lace expert Dagmāra Prīberga for the oldest samples of the Museum collection provided encouragement for systematically supplementing the collection.
The book is bilingual, with texts in Latvian and English, and contains many photographs, including magnified lace fragments. The publication Ancient Lace: 16th–18th Century will be available for purchase at the cashier’s office of the Museum from 6 December. The price of the book at the cashier’s office of the Museum – EUR 25.00.