In the first of these two articles considering the reading of sewing in paintings, I looked at sewing for a purpose. More commonly, sewing is seen in its own right, as an activity performed almost exclusively by women of every age and class.

In Anna Ancher’s Two Little Girls Being Taught How to Sew from 1910, the girls’ mother/teacher stands sewing in the rich light from a window to the right. Cast shadows on the plain pale lemon wall behind are complex: the sun is low in the sky, and those shadows fall from a large houseplant at the right, and external branches too.

Hans Andersen Brendekilde’s sentimental rustic scene of Two Girls with Needlework Sitting in a Farmyard (1902) shows two young girls who are clean, well-dressed, and engaged in this light domestic task typical of the middle class. In the distance is a farmyard cat, and a woman is kneeling on a doorstep giving it a good scrub.

Sewing could also be a social activity, as seen in Eugene de Blaas’ Friendly Gossips from 1901. These three young women chat and joke together while they work through their sewing and repair baskets. They’re most probably unmarried daughter(s) and friend(s) within a middle class home, and the young man peering cautiously round the door looks as if he has come to woo one of them.

Women of wealthy families appear to have spent much of their time engaged in activities intended to pass the time. Gustave Caillebotte’s Portraits in the Countryside (1876) shows, from left to right, the artist’s cousin Marie, his aunt, a family friend Madame Hue, and the artist’s mother.

Three of the four are engaged in needlework, although it isn’t clear precisely what. Caillebotte’s mother is the exception: sitting in the distance, she is reading a book. Not only are these women sewing their lives away, waiting for the next event on their social calendar, but they sit apart, and concentrate on their work, without talking to one another. Their sewing provides them with a small world of their own, whose only hurt could be the infrequent prick of a needle.

For others, sewing is their profession.

Judging by the sheer volume of garments in Hans Best’s undated Sewing Women in the Room, these two women are professional seamstresses working at home, sharing the single sewing machine.

Anna Ancher makes the most of the light in her Sewing a Dress for a Costume Party of 1920. These three women look rather older than the average seamstress, and they’re working with the materials for a single dress. One of them performs the larger-scale sewing at the machine, while the others progress the manual work.

With sewing machines, clothing could also be made on a more industrial scale. When sewing by hand, homeworking had been the order of the day, and there’s no value in pooling those workers into a factory. Once seamstresses were working with sewing machines, the situation was reversed, and many came to be employed in factories or sewing mills. Karl Armbrust’s Interior of a Sewing Mill with Seamstresses at Work from 1927 shows what became commonplace in garment manufacture. These women didn’t need the skills of those sewing by hand, and were consequently paid a pittance.

I conclude with two oddities.

Paul Gauguin’s Study of a Nude (Suzanne Sewing) from 1880 is thoroughly odd: the model is undeniably sewing, with a thimble on the middle finger of her right hand, so why is she not clothed? It’s perhaps understandable that the artist’s wife is recorded as refusing to allow this painting to be hung on the wall of their home.

Félix Vallotton’s Interior, Bedroom with Two Figures from 1904 is one of his series of disturbing domestic interiors, with an incomplete narrative. The lady of the house is standing over her maid as the latter is sewing up her evening gown, in her bedroom. The mistress stands with her back to the viewer, and her face is only revealed in her reflection in the large mirror on the wardrobe at the back of the room, where the maid is all but invisible. These three figures appear in perspective recession, and to the right of the wardrobe is a doorway, presumably leading through to the master’s bedroom. Are these just running repairs made before or after a night out, or is there something else going on?

Sewing pieces of textile or other sheet materials dates back to the Stone Age if not before, and needles fashioned from bone are among man’s oldest tools. Until the nineteenth century, all forms of sewing were performed using the hands. Since then machines have gradually become available, and were popularised in the twentieth century, although a great deal of sewing is still done by hand. Across much of Europe and the Western world, sewing has traditionally been one of the key skills of women, although it has also been a professional task for men from sailors to surgeons. This article looks at those whose sewing goes beyond simply joining fabrics using thread, and tomorrow’s looks more broadly at sewing as an activity.

Although weaving has played an important role in several classical myths, sewing wasn’t as prominent. Even in Christian religious painting, it has only become a feature in more recent times.

In Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s early pre-Raphaelite painting of The Girlhood of Mary Virgin (1848–9), the young Mary is embroidering with her mother, Saint Anne, while her father, Saint Joachim, prunes a vine, by that time a thoroughly socially-acceptable activity for a gentleman. Rosetti uses Mary’s embroidery to introduce the symbolic colour red, signifying the Passion to come, and this slow, painstaking activity as a symbol of the demands of motherhood.

The most common narrative role of sewing in paintings is that of a woman supporting a cause or a person.

The patriot leader Giuseppe Garibaldi adopted the red shirt as an improvised uniform for his supporters, particularly the Garibaldini, who followed him in the Expedition of the Thousand of 1860, that led to unification of Italy. Odoardo Borrani’s Sewing Red Shirts for Volunteers (1863) shows four middle-class lady supporters eagerly doing their bit for Garibaldi’s cause.

In Edmund Blair Leighton’s Stitching the Standard from 1911, a young princess sits in a cutout at the top of a castle wall, sewing the black and gold flag to be flown from the castle. She comes straight from Arthurian legend, or a fairy tale, perhaps.

Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale shows Elaine of Astolat in her illustration for the 1913 edition of Tennyson’s account of this story in his Idylls of the King. She sits sewing in the family castle, guarding Sir Lancelot’s shield.

Mothers, wives and daughters of fishermen provided their shoreside support, as shown by Anna Ancher in this Fisherman’s Wife Sewing from 1890.

Joaquín Sorolla’s Sewing the Sail from 1896 shows a scene on a patio at Valencia’s El Cabañal beach, during the Sorolla family holiday in the summer of that year. Although it may look a spontaneous study of the effects of dappled light, Sorolla composed this carefully with the aid of at least two drawings and a sketch. It shows the whole family engaged in one of the more technically challenging supporting tasks ashore.

Just as fishermen’s wives weren’t allowed to go to sea, other women sewing in supporting roles were also left behind. In the case of Wenzel Tornøe’s Seamstress, Whit Sunday Morning of 1882, that may not have been intentional. This seamstress had been engaged in making costumes to be worn for the Danish festivities of Pentecost (Whitsun), when many Danes rise early to go out and see the sun dance at dawn. By the time the festival morning has arrived, she has fallen asleep over her work, exhausted, with an oil lamp still lit beside her.

Harriet Backer’s Kone som syr (Woman Sewing) (1890) takes us back to more familiar daytime lighting, as a woman (a wife in the Norwegian title) sits at her sewing. This appears to have been a quick oil sketch, with its gestural depictions of potted plants, table, and chair, going beyond Impressionism.