Margaret Watkins moved to New York City in 1915 to work with Alice Boughton (1866–1943) as an assistant in her portrait studio, a move which enabled many useful contacts and  introductions. Like many in her artistic circle, she was also influenced by Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946) and his determination to have photography recognised as an art form on par with painting, sculpture, and traditional print-making. She lived a full and creative life in NYC, studying then teaching at the Clarence H White School (above). 

Margaret Atkins was "brought up on pictures and music" in a creative home in Hamilton, Ontario. But when her father went bankrupt she was taken out of school at the age of 15 to learn home-making skills, and also sold her hand-made "hand-wipers and pudding tidies". For the rest of her life would earn her own living, seeing photography as a craft skill as much as an art, but the domestic remained an important element in her work. In 1919 she began her influential series of still lifes; this is Domestic Symphony (1919, various collections).

This week on the Post we have the work of Canadian photographer Margaret Watkins (1884-1969), one of the first art photographers to work in advertising. Her life story is fascinating, from a cultivated and initially prosperous family life in Ontario, to success and recognition in New York City, to later obscurity in Glasgow. This is 'Untitled (Verna Skelton Posing for Cutex Advertisement), New York, 1924' which illustrates Margaret Watkins' technical and artistic skills. It blends aspects of Jacobean and Pre-Raphaelite portraiture, exquisite textiles, and the element of surprise that this is in fact an advert for nail-care products.

Now that lace doilies, tablecloths, veils, christening robes, and wedding dresses like this one in After The Wedding (mid-C20, Lakeland Museum) by Joseph Hardman, are all on the wane, there remains only a glimmer of optimism for the lace industry in the form of fashion, couture houses, and the occasional royal wedding (the lace in Catherine Middleton's wedding dress was discussed in great detail). For many people, though, the perception of the "chaste" Nottingham lace curtain as a symbol of bourgeois, dull, conventional life as articulated by EM Forster in his unfinished novel Nottingham Lace (1901) and in A Room with a View has altered tastes and thus demand for this once-important textile. 

Nottingham and Calais lace made on huge Leavers machines replaced the traditional hand-made lace from cottage industries in places such as Honiton and Brussels. This was made either with multiple threads on bobbins on a pillow as here in The Lace-Maker (Mrs Newell Making Lace) (c1920, The Higgins) by Charles Spencelayh (1865-1958) or using a needle and single thread method. Despite a short revival thanks to Queen Victoria's wedding dress, by 1870 almost every type of handmade lace could be copied by machine, leading to the almost total disappearance of the handmade lace industry in England by 1900. Today, organisations such as the Lace Guild are keeping the skills alive, but on a very small scale.

It is interesting to compare the fate of Nottingham lace production with that of Calais which was the other important centre of high-quality, machine-made European lace. While the know-how and skills in Nottingham are on the verge of being lost completely, the French have given the Calais-Caudry name protected status by awarding it the first Indication Géographique des Hauts-de-France and is determined to preserve its heritage. Calais is now the self-styled "city of lace and fashion" and has a lace museum in a former factory. On one wall is this 2020 mural - based on a 1894 design - by NeSpoon, a Polish artist who has done many lace murals around the world inspired by local traditions and yet, bafflingly, there isn't one in Nottingham.

This photo of a finishing room in a Nottingham factory gives an idea of the scale of production and the number of workers employed in the city's industry (25,000 at its peak in the 1890s). The complex patterns were woven on Leavers lace machines invented by the local John Levers in 1813, but the advent of cheaper lace in the mid-C19 onwards made on Raschel machines and the shift to production in China and elsewhere, meant that the demand for superior quality Nottingham lace declined dramatically during the C20.