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Stitches from Paintings Past: What Art Can Tell Us About Historical Knitting
This extended version of Carol J. Sulcoski’s article from PieceWork Fall 2025 includes even more fine and fascinating paintings.
This extended version of Carol J. Sulcoski’s article from PieceWork Fall 2025 includes even more fine and fascinating paintings. <a href="https://pieceworkmagazine.com/stitches-from-paintings-past-what-art-can-tell-us-about-historical-knitting/">Continue reading.</a>
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Long before there was photography to record images of the world, artists captured glimpses of their times in painting, tapestries, and other forms of art. As we research the history of knitting, art can fill in gaps left by spotty historical records. Wool yarn and wooden needles decompose, but an oil painting has staying power. As one art student put it, “Art from the past holds clues to life in the past. By looking at a work of art’s symbolism, colors, and materials, we can learn about the culture that produced it” (see note 1).
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Long before there was photography to record images of the world, artists captured glimpses of their times in painting, tapestries, and other forms of art. As we research the history of knitting, art can fill in gaps left by spotty historical records. Wool yarn and wooden needles decompose, but an oil painting has staying power. As one art student put it, “Art from the past holds clues to life in the past. By looking at a work of art’s symbolism, colors, and materials, we can learn about the culture that produced it” (see note 1).
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Knitting Madonnas
We don’t know exactly when or where knitting was “invented,” and it may well be that the craft developed at different times in different places. By studying early works of art, however, we can glean information about knitting in past times.
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Take, for example, the category of artworks christened “knitting Madonnas.” Several pieces of medieval art depict Mary, mother of Jesus, with knitting needles in her hands. Perhaps the best known was painted in the late fourteenth century by the German master Bertram of Minden. The image is part of an altarpiece triptych and shows a seated Mary knitting a red shirt. She appears to be nearly finished with the garment, ready to bind off the neckline stitches.
Several Italian artists also depict Mary in the act of knitting. In The Madonna of Humility by Vitale da Bologna, Mary sits on a red bench with baby Jesus by her side. In one hand, the baby holds a bobbin or spool of yarn; his other hand grasps the end of one of Mary’s knitting needles. Although a little more difficult to make out, Mary’s knitting features a swirling or floral pattern in gold against a green background.
The knitting Madonnas are generally regarded as the earliest known representation of knitting in art. From them, we can deduce a few things about knitting history. First, we know that, by the 1300s to 1400s, knitting was a well-known craft in Italy and Germany where these artists worked. We also know that the artists were familiar with knitting in the round, with the work divided among four or five needles. The floral pattern knitted by the Madonna of Humility suggests that knitters were using more than one color in the same piece of knitting and could indicate that stranded patterning was being done at this time.
We can also learn, as historian Richard Rutt pointed out, about the technical process that fourteenth-century knitters used. Mary knits by holding the working needles under the palms of her hands, with the working yarn held in the right hand. Her needles are straight, not hooked like needle sets found in Türkiye (formerly Turkey) and the Middle East around the same period (see note 2).
The religious and symbolic aspects of these paintings tell us a few things about western European culture. Mary was a role model for Christian women, the ultimate symbol of virtue, femininity, and motherhood. Knitting embodied these ideals. One knitting historian points out that certain translations of the Bible suggest that Christ wore a seamless tunic at his crucifixion, leading to the folk belief that seamless garments provided special protection or power to the wearer (see note 3). The symbolism of a seamless garment may explain its prominence in these depictions of the Madonna and does not necessarily suggest that circular knitting was dominant or especially popular.
The fact that knitting is shown in the context of religious imagery also makes it difficult to draw conclusions about the social context of knitting at the time. We don’t know which social classes knitted, how widespread knitting (or at least circular knitting) was, or how expensive or cheap needles and yarn were.
Knitting’s Role in Women’s Lives
When I searched for paintings that depict knitters, the French painter Jean-François Millet was inescapable. Millet was part of the Barbizon school, a group of French painters who gathered in the rural areas near Fontainebleau to paint natural scenes. These artists were Realists—they depicted everyday life and landscapes with a focus on details and accuracy. Their approach was matter of fact rather than emotional and idealized as in the works of the Romantic artists.
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Millet frequently painted rural workers in their natural landscape, using muted colors and a somewhat gritty style. Consider The Knitting Lesson, painted in 1869, depicting a mother who has put down her own work to help her daughter with her knitting. The plain clothing, the mother’s hands gnarled by work, and the tender age of the knitter tell us that this knitting was not done for pleasure but was necessary household work. Notice how dark the room is, making accurate knitting more difficult. The daughter appears to be knitting a sock on four needles with the white yarn tensioned over her right index finger. Millet painted several versions of the scene, each underscoring the mother’s devotion, handing down a traditional and necessary skill without ignoring the rough reality of their lives.
Another favorite subject of Millet was a shepherdess knitting while her flock grazes nearby. The Knitting Shepherdess (1856–1857) stands by a small copse of trees, intent on her sock knitting. She’s finishing a large stocking in dark brown yarn, probably for a husband, brother, or father. Millet imbues her with grace and dignity, but there is also a gentle melancholy, a loneliness, about the work.
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Painting her sister working on a small project, Mary Cassatt depicts an intently focused crafter in Lydia Crocheting in the Garden at Marly,1880. Metropolitan Museum of Art, object no. 65.184.
The fashionably dressed knitter in Young Woman Knitting by Berthe Morisot, ca. 1883, sits in a manicured garden, head bowed over her work. Metropolitan Museum of Art, object no. 67.187.89.
In contrast to the leisured needlewomen in Lydia Crocheting in the Garden at Marly and Young Woman Knitting, the woman in Children in a Garden, The Nurse, by Mary Cassatt, 1878, is at work minding her charges as she knits. Museum of Fine Arts Houston, object no. 2001.471.
Compare the Realists’ treatment of knitting with that of the Impressionists, particularly Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot. The only woman allowed to exhibit with the core group of Impressionists, Cassatt frequently painted scenes of women engaged in needlework—crochet, knitting, embroidery. But Cassatt’s craftswomen are shown in a strikingly different milieu. In one painting, Cassatt shows her sister Lydia seated in a garden, crocheting. She’s wearing white lacy gloves and a hat with her blue dress. Instead of appearing against a lonely rural vista, she is surrounded by the lush greenery of a garden. Another Cassatt work depicts a maid or nanny seated on a bench with her needlework while a toddler plays nearby and a baby naps in a carriage—a peaceful slice of bourgeois life.
Fellow Impressionist Berthe Morisot also painted the women she saw around her in casual, often intimate scenes. In “Young Woman Knitting,” Morisot’s subject is a woman who is clearly of the bourgeois or middle class knitting something small and white while sitting on a gold chair on a garden path. No practical socks for these women; they are absorbed in their work, but their handiwork is of the artistic or fancy rather than pragmatic or rustic kind.
Cassatt and Morisot focused on subjects considered “proper” for a gentlewoman to paint, so their paintings were inspired by their sisters, nieces, and nephews, and women in their households. As one commentator remarked of Cassatt, “She also highlighted the agency, intellect, and inner lives of women by showing them deeply engaged in their pursuits” (see note 4). Knitting in a light-filled room or garden for pleasure is a far cry from Millet’s dark rooms and muddy landscapes. Luminous colors and the serene feel of the scenes show that for bourgeois women in France, needlework was a pleasure rather than a necessity, a leisure activity rather than work necessary to clothe their families.
A Treasury of Norwegian Knitting Patterns
Art can also tell us some very concrete things about knitting design, including a visual record of specific patterns. In mid-nineteenth-century Norway, a movement called Nasjonalromantikken (Norwegian Romantic) sought to define and celebrate Norwegian national identity. Painters such as Adolph Tidemand (1814–1876) and Carl Sundt-Hansen (1841–1907) studied Norwegian folk life and depicted Norwegians wearing their folk costumes or everyday clothing. Tidemand, historian Annemor Sundbø explains, “became a type of researcher into ethnology and ethnography” (see note 5).
The Norwegian Romantics tended to cast their subjects in a rosy light so that buyers would enjoy seeing them on their middle- or upper-class walls. Apart from the pleasing aesthetics, Tideman hoped to encourage Norwegians to be proud of their heritage, writes Sundbø. At a time when photographs were only black and white, these paintings capture the bright colors of many knitted and nonknitted garments.
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These paintings offer clues about the development of certain Norwegian knitting traditions. For example, Adolph Tidemand often painted striped sweaters on carpenters and fishermen. In his Low Church Devotion (1848), we see a man wearing a striped sweater, while the man holding a book wears a jacket with bands of patterning at shoulder and elbow. The striped sweater may be a precursor to Fana-style sweaters with their horizontal motifs.
Some paintings from this period are so detailed that a knitter could create a chart of the pattern simply by looking at the painting. Sundt-Hansen painted a young boy from Setesdal in 1904 wearing a blue sweater with white patterns at the cuff. You can see rows of checkerboard stitches divided by horizontal stripes, with zigzag colorwork close to the cuff.
Likewise, Sundt-Hansen’s Setesdal Peasant with Pipe (1900) is nearly photographic in its rendering of the stitchwork. A classic lice pattern appears on the middle portion of the sleeve, there are horizontal shoulder bands with zigzag patterning, and bands at the top of the shoulder create 90-degree angles with the shoulder bands.
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Norwegian artists didn’t confine themselves to sweaters with stranded knitwork. We can see patterned socks knitted in the round and a red cap with ribbed brim and a pointed top, to give just two examples.
It isn’t easy to discover the history of knitting traditions or techniques. Thank goodness for these talented artists who left clues in their works for us to follow.
Notes
- “Why Study Art from the Past?” Metropolitan Museum of Art, January 20, 2012, metmuseum.org/perspectives/studying-art-from-the-past, accessed December 28, 2024 (author identified only as “Kristen”).
- Richard Rutt, A History of Hand Knitting (Interweave, 1987), 50.
- Annemor Sundbø, Knitting in Art, trans. Carol Huebscher Rhoades (Torridal Tweed, 2010), 116–18.
- Antonia Smith, “5 Things to Know about Impressionist Mary Cassatt,” Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, September 19, 2024, famsf.org/stories/5-things-to-know-impressionist-mary-cassatt.
- Sundbø, Knitting in Art, 41.
Carol J. Sulcoski is a knitting author, designer, and teacher. She has written seven knitting books, including Knitting Ephemera, which is full of knitting facts, history, and trivia. Her articles have appeared in publications including Vogue Knitting, Modern Daily Knitting, and Noro Magazine, as well as on the Craft Industry Alliance website and elsewhere. She lives outside Philadelphia and teaches at knitting events, knitting shops, and guilds. Her website is blackbunnyfibers.com.
