Plate 103.

Chalice-veil. Designed and embroidered from a number of pieces of sixteenth-century Italian cut-work—reticella and punto reale—by Miss Margaret Taylor Johnstone, of New York and Paris. Exhibited at the Société Nationale des Beaux Arts, and also at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, in the early years of this century. It is signed M. T. J. in the border. Original photograph reduced one-third.

Some thirty years ago Miss Johnstone gathered together a little class of workers at the Society of Decorative Art in New York City and taught them these stitches. The work prospered, with the aid of designs found in various public and private collections, and continued for over a quarter of a century, when this association, which had been the mother-society of beautiful embroidery in New York, ceased to exist. Miss Johnstone also prepared the rearrangement of the Lace Collection in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, in 1906–1907, on lines suggested by her to the expert, Frau Kubasek, of Vienna, who was brought to New York by the Museum for this purpose. She brought with her a trunk of four hundred specimens of embroidery and lace collected by Miss Johnstone from friends in Paris and New York, and labelled and classified according to her own extended classification. These specimens were accepted for the Museum by the Director, Sir Caspar Purdon Clarke, whose love of decorative art was a benefit to the Museum. Since that time the collection of laces has so increased that it is probably surpassed only by that in the Victoria and Albert Museum, of London.