Overview
At the centre of this embroidered rug is a St Bernard dog, sitting against a red background patterned with roses and crosses. There are multi-coloured flowers in the corners of the rug, and a fawn-coloured border runs around it. The embroidery is in wool on double-weave linen canvas; the eye of the St Bernard is glass; and the back of the rug is lined with linen.
It’s astonishing that a fifteen-year-old, Mary Hannah Tyer, created this piece. The embroidery is a technique known as Berlin wool work, and many areas of the rug are worked in plush stitch – a particularly complex stitch. Some parts of the rug, for instance the flowers and the dog, have been sculpted by shearing, creating different levels to the surface, and giving a slightly three-dimensional look.
Tyer entered the rug in the juvenile class (under 16 years) of the Home Industry Branch of the 1885 New Zealand Industrial Exhibition. According to an exhibition catalogue, the Home Industry Branch was ‘all industries developed with small expenditure within the schools and homes of the colony’.
Julius Vogel, the Colonial Treasurer at the time and instigator of the Industrial Exhibition, believed that the home industries were as important as any commercial industries, and that New Zealand families were as creative in the home as they were in the workplace.
Mary Tyer’s rug is a prime example of the type of excellent craftwork that Vogel hoped the exhibition would promote. And this rug wasn’t the only piece she entered. She displayed lacework, leatherwork, and an impressive bouquet of embroidered flowers. For these exhibits, she won numerous prizes.
The commemorative catalogue that was published for the Industrial Exhibition gave her a special mention: ‘Amongst the juvenile exhibitors, the foremost is unquestionably MARY H. TYER . . . the number of articles in her case is astounding, and it is not too much to say that Miss Tyer is within herself the very personification of ‘home industry’. (1)
Mary Tyer came from an enterprising family. Her parents, Alfred and Hannah Tyer, were among the first farmers in Johnsonville, just out of Wellington. Alfred Tyer was quite an entrepreneur – a pioneering exporter of hides, skins, tallow, and meat.
Mary Tyer was probably the eldest of twelve children, and went to Mrs Swainson’s school for girls on Fitzherbert Terrace. In 1893, when Tyer was in her early twenties, she married James Thomas Quin, a stationmaster. Quin must have been proud of his wife and her achievements, because several years later, when invited to enter a short biography about himself in The Cyclopaedia of New Zealand he devoted nearly half of it to talking about her successes in the New Zealand Industrial Exhibition!
Reference
(1) (1886). The Official Record of the New Zealand Industrial Exhibition 1885.
Wellington: Government Printer. p 182
Text originally published in Tai Awatea, Te Papa's onfloor multimedia database (1998).