Lunchtime Lectures: 'Such a Revered Name': the Ever-Inspiring Designs of Anna Maria Garthwaite

Earlier this year, and for the first time since 2002, the V&A acquired a dress fabric woven after a design by Anna Maria Garthwaite (1690-1763). She was among the leading practitioners in the Spitalfields community of pattern drawers, celebrated during her lifetime for ‘succeeding in introducing the principles of painting into the loom’. Almost miraculously, the greater part of her impressive œuvre, comprising many hundreds of watercolours and drawings of designs covering the period from 1726 to 1756, has survived and is held by the V&A.

The latest Garthwaite addition to the national collection of textiles makes a splendid occasion to reflect on her legacy thanks to which she has become a household name, even though we know so little about her life.

Dr Silvija Banić has been Curator of Textiles before 1800 at the V&A since 2018. She was previously a post-doctoral fellow at the Giorgio Cini Foundation, Venice, where she researched 17th- and 18th-century Venetian and Lyonnais textiles. She has also undertaken extensive research into historic textiles in Croatia and Italy and has published extensively on the subject.