A beautifully worked petit point handbag made in the 1920s when hand-stitched accessories were immensely popular and a good way to show off stitching skills. Petit point is fine tent stitch worked on canvas, rather like a small-scale needlepoint, and well-suited to finely detailed, lighter items. The maker was then able to choose the handles to match, in the days when haberdasheries were many and thriving.

This week's subject is needlepoint, the genteel pastime of so many characters in Victorian novels such as Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford and target of a great deal of derisory commentary in Punch. But the fact remains that needlepoint, which is quite different to tapestry although often labelled as such, was enormously popular in the nineteenth-century and a huge commercial success. The period was awash with colourful Berlin wool-work slippers, antimacassars, butterfly braces, smoking caps, screens and needle books, stitched mostly by women from charts like this (c1850).  

The School Prints posters are still selling well through Goldmark and Merivale Editions who say they are "now recognised as a high water mark of the post-war artistic exuberance and optimism that culminated in the Festival of Britain." Ruth Artmonsky has written a useful book on the prints, and in 2018 The Hepworth launched a new series for schools. This is Grey Horses by Tom Gentleman, and the small boy in blue admiring the McMullen's brewery horses in Hertford is his son, the well-known artist and designer David Gentleman.

Window Plants (1945, Series One, No 4, Tate)) by John Nash (1893-1977) is still popular as a print and greetings card. Today it appeals to an older audience, but as a print on a school wall it would have the potential to stimulate all sorts of narratives and descriptive language. Nash's humour, interest in plants, and his skill as a lithographer make this a classic. 

The School Prints scheme's variety of subject matter introduced school children to all sorts of scenes, places, and culture they may not have previously encountered, but never in a didactic or patronising way. This is Ballet (First Series, No 10) by Charles Mozley (1914-91) who was a well-known poster and book-jacket designer and illustrator.

Each of the School Prints lithographs had a drawn, or clever trompe l'oeil, frame so they could be easily pinned up and save schools the cost of actual framing. This is Tractor (First Series, no 3) by Kenneth Rowntree (1915-97), one of the Great Bardfield artists. Rowntree's skills as a muralist meant he understood art for public places and this, together with his interest in everyday scenes, made Tractor one of the most popular in the series. 

For the back-to-school week we have lithographs from the marvellous and influential School Prints scheme. In the early 1940s, Brenda Rawnsley (1916-2007) had the idea of bringing contemporary art to young children who might otherwise not see it. She commissioned a number of the most important living artists, editioned large numbers of original lithographs - twenty-four in total - and sold them cheaply to schools. This is Town Centre (First Series, no 7), a lively study of Bristol, by Phyllis Ginger (1907-2005)