Needlepoint Embroidery

Needlepoint embroidery technique represents a particularly European adaptation of the Oriental carpet. As a medium used to produce copies of rare and precious knotted carpets from the Middle East, needlepoint can be traced back at least to the sixteenth century in England and the Low Countries, where "Small-Pattern Holbein" and other classical Turkish designs were reproduced in this way. English needlepoint production continued to supply interesting reinterpretations of Oriental prototypes right up into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when it also began to focus more on designs drawn form the Arts and Crafts Movement. From the eighteenth century on, English needlepoint competed as well with contemporary French petit-point embroidery working in a Neo-Classical idiom related to the designs of Aubusson tapestry. Beyond England and France, needlepoint carpets are known from various other parts of Europe, like the Ukraine, where the technique was applied to patterns from vernacular folk art.