Still hemmed in by all sorts of restrictions, still valued for looks and decorative skills, still steered toward passive accomplishments, for women it was the ultimate escape: total freedom, total mastery — no interference.
Instead they demonstrated their taste and skill by making decorative objects: embroidered handkerchiefs and slippers, crocheted lace for edgings and trimmings, little net purses, doilies and runners for tables, and fancy antimacassars for sofas and chairs.
An exhibition of sumptuous jewelry, gold and silver bowls, lavishly engraved icon covers and diamond-encrusted images of saints, now on display at the Field Museum here, is a testament to the skill of Russian decorative artists over the last 10 centuries.
Although by the early 1800s patchwork quilts had appeared in other countries, particularly England, they flourished in 19th-century America as both bedding and decorative showpieces of the needlewoman's skill.
They made portraits of family members and friends or applied their skills to objects both decorative and functional: crewel bedspreads, festively patterned silk quilts, and tabletops painted with still lifes of fruit and flowers.
Ms. Kuvin Oren, 39, of Woodbridge, Conn., was working on her doctoral dissertation in psychiatric epidemiology when her skill in making ketubot -- decorative Jewish marriage contracts -- became a sideline, then full-time work.
As a member of the mercantile elite of Kyoto, Koetsu was connected to artists and artisans of all kinds, and also trained in a discipline, sword connoisseurship, that involved a series of skills, effects and materials both decorative and practical.
Hexi painting was historically documented as the most sophisticated decorative art representing the highest levels of technological knowledge and skills for decorating the Chinese Qing (1644 1911 AD) imperial architecture.
Textual analysis points out that Hexi, a historically recorded term, refers to a highly organized and specialized painting and decorative technique that incorporates all the best-known technical skills (carving, coloring, embossing, etc).
Considering this possibility, the interpretation that Hexi is a decorative art that "incorporates all the best-known technical skills" seems to make some sense, even though more analytical studies are needed to test whether each feature really is technologically "the best" compared to other contemporaneous techniques and methods of the same kind.
