The experiment conducted by the Omega Workshops and the Rebel Art Centre was as much about enhancing the status of applied art as it was about undermining and seeking to replace the bland accomplishments of nineteenth-century academic painting. Textiles like this robe helped to realise this project, injecting a brightness and zest into visual arts which was altogether unfamiliar at the time.

Examples of this type of textile are exceptionally rare. They were all designed by Lewis, though there is an active scholarly debate about whether they originated from the Omega Workshops before October 1913, when Lewis and his companions famously stormed out of Roger Fry’s organisation, or the Rebel Art Centre, which Lewis established with Kate Lechmere in spring 1914. Only three other examples are known: a fragmentary textile, block printed with similar animal and mythological motifs (fig. 1); another robe, dated to approximately 1914, which use the same format of parallel bands of colour interspersed with embroidery and colourful block-printed motifs; and a bedspread (fig. 2).

Each textile of this kind uses similar animal motifs. All three use the fox motif (fig. 3), for example, which was evidently printed using the same block. In this case, the creature’s trailing whiskers create a visual echo of its sinuous, arching spine. A counterpoint is provided by the surrounding decorative lines: an arcing tree trunk running from top to bottom, which passes behind the animal, with a trailing branch studded with leaves, and four consecutive arcing lines beneath its feet.