The ‘Devil’s Firescreen’ cosy up on a winter’s night?
Now that the winter nights are truly in, I have been pondering over a new embroidery project to start to occupy me in this cold nights. So I looked through some of my research pictures & came across this strange image of an embroidery fire-screen I captured last year on my visit to the Witches Museum in Boscastle. As you can see it’s a very curious item with no information as to why the maker choose this design? What is for fun? Or serious intent?
Overall it’s actually a very attractive design despite it’s ‘content’ which may affect the nervous, though I am not one of those so much, there are 2 devils riding broomsticks (which I’ve never seen before..) one on horse back with two displayed at the top all kind of joined together in a ‘chain’. It kind of looks like the devil on horseback is coming home triumphantly ironically like pictures of Matthew Hopkins. Whoever made it certainly put quite a bit of thought into the design so were they into the dark-side? Or merely playing with their relatives & visitors by having such a provocative design on show? Either way it does rather display a ‘devil may care attitude’ especially for England in the 1850’s!