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Quilts 1700-2010
Museums & Attractions
Also on at V&A
- The House of Annie Lennox, Until Sun Feb 26
- Queen Elizabeth II by Cecil Beaton: A Diamond Jubilee Celebration, Until Sun Apr 22
- Photographs Gallery,
- Golden Spider Silk, Until Tue Jun 5
- On Eagle's Wings: British Adventure Comics 1950-1969, Until Sun May 27
- Rabindranath Tagore: Poet and Painter, Until Sun Mar 4
Exhibitions & attractions open today
- The Queue, Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Museum
- Brothers in Arms, Royal Air Force Museum
- CLOSED TILL FURTHER NOTICE: HMS Belfast, HMS Belfast
- Gunners Today, Firepower: Royal Artillery Museum
- Broadwater Farm: The Story of a Community 1967-2010, Bruce Castle Museum
- The De Morgan Centre, The De Morgan Centre
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'George III Reviewing the Troops'
Time Out says Rate it
Displayed against vivid walls or stretched out on bed-shaped plinths, 65 quilts covering 300 years of quiltmaking tell stories from every corner of society. Ornate eighteenth-century patchwork hangings displayed on a four poster were made to flaunt the owner's wealth at a time when the bedroom of a well-to-do home was a public place. In contrast, the women who in 1841 stitched The Rajah Quilt were convicts being transported to Van Dieman's Land (now Tasmania) aboard HMS Rajah. Paintings and other exhibits provide context for quilts that are sometimes poignant or witty and the exhibition spreads its net wide enough to encompass quilts from different parts of Britain that show how the materials that were locally available influenced the predominant style of an area. Works by contemporary artists including Grayson Perry and Jennifer Vickers sit alongside the historical quilts and, at once barbed and beguiling, Tracey Emin's installation 'To Meet My Past' (2003), an elaborate bed dressed with blankets, sheets, duvet and curtains bearing stitched and appliquéed text, provides the show's final flourish.
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The V&A houses one of the world's greatest collections of decorative arts, in such varied fields as ceramics, sculpture, portrait miniatures and...
Read full venue reviewTransport South Kensington
020 7942 2000, bookings 08445 791940
10am-5.45pm daily, until 10pm Fri (selected galleries only)
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