VIII The Modern Brussels Laces and Mechlin
Modern Brussels, Point Gaze—Ghent—Duchesse Point—Mechlin (the Queen of Laces).
Magnificent laces are still made at Brussels, but almost wholly on a machine-made ground, the workers and merchants apparently finding the old hand-made ground unprofitable. The machine-made ground is cheap, and often of mixed flax and cotton instead of being of purely Flanders flax thread, as in the old days. Both quality and colour suffer from this admixture, the lace washing badly and wearing worse.
The most common lace is the Point Applique, in which the sprays, groups, and borders on the design are made separately by hand on the pillow, and are afterwards applied by tiny stitchings to the machine-made net. Some qualities are better than others. In the better class the sprays are appliqued to the net, which is then cut away and the interstices of the design filled in with hand-made modes and brides, making a very pretty and showy lace. The best lace made in Brussels now is Point Gaze in which the finest modern lace is produced. Its chief characteristics are its superb designs, repeating many of the fine Renaissance patterns, its clear ground, and its use of shading in leaves and flowers, which, while it adds much to the sumptuous effect, is possibly too naturalistic. This lace is a mixture of hand and machine lace, the ground being of the best machine net, the flowers and sprays frequently needle made, the various fillings being composed of a variety of designs, and the shading often being produced in the needle-darning as in modern Ghent and Limerick. Point de Gaze is costly, but it has the reputation of appearing “worth its money” to which few other laces of the present day can aspire.
Other lace-making towns in Belgium and Flanders are—
Ghent which produces a fine machine-made net, worked and embroidered in exact imitation of the earliest Limerick lace. So real is this imitation that a fine flounce of 4 yds. 32 in. wide was sold at a London auction-room a few months ago, as “real old Limerick,” for £60!
Ghent executes vast quantities of hand-made imitations of Valenciennes, a good and durable lace, but much more expensive than the machine-made varieties which flood the shops as “real Val.”
Perhaps the only other lace worth mentioning in smaller and later varieties is that known as “Duchesse point” or “Bruges,” which while being a showy, decorative, and cheap lace, is anything but satisfactory either in design, manufacture, or wear. It is largely composed of cotton, is heavy and cumbrous in design, and after washing becomes thick and clumsy. It is pillow-made, the flowers being made on the cushion and afterwards united by coarse and few brides.
Almost equal in favour with old Brussels lace was Mechlin which was aptly termed “the Queen of Laces.” Old Mechlin was wondrously fine, and transparent. It is often spoken of as “Point de Malines” which, of course, is entirely wrong, as it is not Point at all—being made entirely, all at one time, or in one piece, on the pillow. Much of the lace known under the general name of Flemish Point is really Malines or Mechlin, the only difference being the fine silvery thread which runs all through the designs of real Mechlin. The earliest date of the manufacture of Mechlin is unknown, but in 1681, it is recorded, that the people of Malines busied themselves with making a white lace known as Mechlin. It became a fashionable lace in England in 1699, Queen Mary using it considerably and Queen Anne buying it largely, in one instance purchasing 83 yards of it for £247.
It has always remained a favourite lace with English royalties, Queen Charlotte almost exclusively using it. The other day I discovered in a bric-à-brac shop about twenty yards of it, old and discoloured, it is true, which came directly from Queen Caroline, the ill-used wife of George IV. In the earlier Mechlin, although pillow-made, the introduction of the “brides with picots,” and also the may-flower patterns of Brussels, helped to make it more decorative. The ground or réseau was very similar to Brussels hand-made, but the hexagonal mesh is shorter, as reference to the diagram of réseaux will show.
The exquisite “lightness” of Mechlin, so specially adapted to “quillings” and “pleatings,” accounted for its popularity. It was specially suitable to the lawns and muslins of the eighteenth century, but little of this lace is left owing, no doubt, to its great favour except the ubiquitous “lappets,” for which it was no doubt “the Queen of Lace.”
The immediate cause of its extinction was the introduction of Blonde laces, and later its final overthrow came from its being the easiest lace to reproduce by machinery.