An egg at Easter

I had a passing thought early this morning about the decoration of eggs for Easter, and, (recalling Kirsten Olsson’s iconic ägget, which I love, and wrote about in my Yokes book), about how traditional decorative practices might inspire other types of design.

I love a decorated egg, but what kinds of patterns and motifs, materials and techniques have such designs traditionally involved? And which cultures and communities have shared such distinctive practices? Interested to find out more, I headed straight to the British Museum collections and typed the words “decorated egg” into the search box.

Several egg-cellent and very happy hours have ensued.

I discovered decorative Easter eggs formed from many different (non eggy) materials. There were beautiful Swedish papier maché eggs, just like the one which had inspired Kerstin Olsson.

As well as eggs made of wood . . .

. . . and glass.

In the main, though, the Easter eggs in the British museum are of the conventional eggy sort – that is – laid by actual hens, ducks and occasionally geese . . .

. . .and then decorated with a wide variety of materials.

Some are covered with intricate textile designs, using ric-rac or wool

. . . and there are many beautiful examples decorated with straw appliqué

But most have been coloured (with natural dyes or paint) and then decorated using a wide variety of techniques

hand painting

batik (wax resistence) decorating

scratch resistance

acid etching

and transfer / resistance . . .

In this last technique, leaves or flowers are stuck to the surface of the egg, creating a stencil which blocks out the dye or colouring

the negative-imprinting effect is similar to a cyanotype, and is particularly beautiful.

As I poked around the collection, I soon found myself gravitating to particular types of pattern and motif . . .

. . .enjoying eggs which reminded me of (knitted) yokes or hat crowns . . .

and being drawn to eggs whose decorative geometry felt particularly rhythmic

. . . or knitterly . . .

Many eggs stood out to me simply for possessing their own unique beauty

while others seemed particularly distinctive examples of an aesthetic of simplicity . . .

or decorative excess (chutzpah, even)

I love this colourful egg, for example, which has been deftly painted with Mondrian-like geometric patterns on one side. . .

. . and swirly folksy-florals on the other.

an virtuosic egg of two halves!

I began to discover that different decorative styles of egg were highly specific, often being created in particular places

. . . by particular groups of people.

whose distinctive styles of egg decoration might be expressive of regional and local traditions.

In some places, eggs might be exchanged as love tokens

or be decorated with particular motifs . .

which carried recognisable symbolism, in the realms of religion, folk art and popular culture.

Easter eggs often suggested spring and growth, abundance and fertility in general terms . . .

even as they commemorated the familiar Christian festival.

Through examining the acquisition notes associated with each egg-example in the British Museum collection, I discovered that some styles of egg decoration were highly specific to specific locales and communities . .

. . .and that, in the many cases where such communities had migrated . . .

. . . or been displaced . . .

. . .that the decoration of eggs – a shared practice, creating objects decorated with the motifs or patterns familiar to ones homeland — might become an important expression of community . . .

. . . and solidarity

among groups of refugees.

The eggs in the British Museum collection were so beautiful

and had so many important stories to tell.

As I continued searching, browsing, looking at decorative Easter eggs, I realised that the sense of cohesion I felt about the British Museum collection (despite the many disparate styles represented within it) was not at all incidental.

This egg collection felt cohesive because it was largely the work of one woman, whose name was Venetia Newall.

Born in London in 1935, Newall was evacuated from her English home in the early years of the second world war, and grew up, away from home with her paternal grandmother in the United States

After peace was declared in 1945, she returned to the UK, and went on to study literature at St Andrews.

She married a journalist, who had grown up in the north of England.

. . . and who wrote for the Times about central and Eastern Europe, and the new cold war. While travelling around Europe with her husband, Newall began to develop an interest in the decorative Easter eggs she had spotted being sold by craftswomen and market traders in many different locations.

She began to collect the eggs, learning more about the stories and traditions of their making, eventually producing An Egg at Easter, which was published in 1971, and received a doctoral award from St Andrews.

As well as writing what is still the definitive tome on the subject of decorative eggs, Newall was an inspiring feminist academic, shaking up the rather stuffy and old-fashioned Folklore Society with her “unsuitable” 1960s mod attire, and eventually transforming and modernising research into British and European folk traditions alongside other innovative women like Katharine Briggs and Hilda Davidson.

Newall’s work often shone a light on the experiences of refugees and those displaced by war.

Newall was an Anglo-Catholic, but she was always interested in many different spiritual traditions and cultures, promoting interfaith understanding through her work on the council of Christians and Jews, and ensuring that Britain’s immigrant cultures were included in contemporary folklore research, organising London conferences with titles like Folklore and Anti-Semitism and Black Britains: Jamaicans and their Folklore.

Newall also became a lifelong campaigner for LGBT rights (after losing a friend who took his own life, after being blackmailed as a gay man, when homosexuality was “illegal”). Her 1986 presidential address to the Folklore Society – delivered at the height of the AIDS crisis – focussed on the history of anti LGBT discrimination, drawing examples from medieval folklore to the discriminatory slurs then being scrawled on the walls of contemporary US bathrooms.

By any measure, then, Venetia Newall was, then, a very good egg indeed. I’ve so enjoyed discovering her marvellous collection, and finding out about her inspiring life and work. Today definitely seems an appropriate one to reflect upon the powerful example of passion, generosity, and inclusivity she provides.

All images of Venetia Newall’s egg collection © The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence. You can explore the collection here

Read Newall’s An Egg at Easter (and other works) on the Internet Archive.

If you liked this post about one of my (many) British Museum rabbit holes, you might also like this post about discovering the collection of F Laura Cannan