This bedspread is a significant example of avant-garde textile design in pre-war Britain. It was made in either the Omega Workshops (1913-19) or the Rebel Art Centre (1914), and its design is attributed to Percy Wyndham Lewis, the self-proclaimed leader of a vigorous modernist movement characterised by Cubist inflections and a hatred of convention. He worked in the Omega Workshops with Roger Fry before seceding to create his own company, the Rebel Art Centre. Both collectives sought to elide fine art and decorative craft, using handicraft techniques in oil painting and sophisticated abstract schema in applied arts like textiles, furniture and ceramics. Most of the artists who worked in the Omega Workshops had already been involved with decorative work; Fry had assembled a team of artists including Frederick Etchells, Duncan Grant and Albert Rutherston to create dining-hall murals at the Borough Polytechnic in 1911, most of who went on to work at the Omega Workshops, while Lewis (along with Charles Ginner, Spencer Gore and Jacob Epstein) were likewise involved with providing interior decorations for a London cabaret club, the Cave of the Golden Calf, in 1913. 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 bedspread 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); and two robes, dated to approximately 1914, which use the same format of parallel bands of colour interspersed with embroidery and colourful block-printed motifs (fig. 2). Each textile 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. The Omega Workshops produced a wide variety of wares, both undertaking commissions and producing items for general sale. The size of this bedspread and the fact that it is unique indicate that it was a bespoke piece, designed to a commission. Writing in a prospectus for the Workshops in 1913, Roger Fry described the kind of objects that they could produce for clients. As he wrote, the artists who worked there undertake almost all kinds of decorative design [...]. Actuated by the same idea of substituting wherever possible the directly expressive quality of the artist's handling for the deadness of mechanical reproduction, they have turned their attention to hand dyeing and have produced a number of dyed curtains, bedspreads, cushion covers, etc., in all of which they employ their power of invention with the utmost freedom and spontaneity of which they are capable. The bedspread may have been one of those produced in the workshops at 33 Fitzroy Square and referred to here by Fry. Though Lewis’s personal style of harsh, jagged figure types, strongly apparent in his Timon drawings of 1912, was not used here, it has been noted that ‘Lewis’s few identifiable contributions to the Workshops show him attempting to suppress his own inveterate harshness in favour of a playful charm that would have gratified Bloomsbury taste.’ One such example of Lewis’s work for the Omega Workshops is the design of several lightshades (fig. 4). Moreover, though neither the bedspread nor the fabric or robes were included in the Workshops’ promotional literature at the time, such products were evidently on sale there. One trade catalogue describes ‘silks hand-printed by our artists’ as being for sale, as well as ‘Bedspreads, Chair Covers, Silks, etc., hand-dyed to order in the Workshops at moderate prices’. Similar wares were also available to purchase from the Omega Workshops’ rival, the Rebel Art Centre. Though the latter organisation’s style was different and though it afforded more latitude for artistic individuality, many of its ideas were derived from those of Fry’s company. It is notable that the block-printed patterns on the bedspread use animal motifs. The decorative possibilities of animal forms were explored extensively by Omega artists like Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell. A mixture of sources inspired this interest in animals. Several early Christian mosaics depict animals, such as those found in S. Vitale, Ravenna, and these murals were of direct interest to Grant whose painting The Ass (fig. 5) uses a mosaic style of seam-like broken lines and schematic areas of light and shadow. Several of the animals on this bedspread use the same broken silhouettes as those found in Grant’s painting (fig. 6). The discovery of pre-historic cave paintings in Dordogne in 1901 also lent a contemporary aspect to animal imagery. These discoveries were referred to by the sculptor and Lewis’s fellow Vorticist, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, in his article for Blast in 1914, where he stated: ‘Out of the minds primordially preoccupied with animals Font-de-Gaumes gained its procession of horses carved in the rock.’ The lines of animals stamped across this linen textile bedspread bear passing comparison to the ‘procession’ described by Brzeska. The bedspread may relate indirectly to a nursery and model bedroom which were designed by artists of the Omega Workshops in December 1913 (fig. 7). ‘The nursery, with panels by Vanessa [Bell] which she believed were ‘a most truthful portrait of Indian and African animal life’, and a ceiling painted by Winifred Gill, was complete with jointed wooden toys by Roger [Fry] and a doll’s house.’ These toy animals were illustrated in a trade catalogue of the period (fig. 8), which lists the available animals as camels, rhinoceroses, elephants and tigers. Tropical colour, animals and settings were a topic of express interest to Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant a short time before undertaking designs for the nursery. In a letter of 1912, Bell described an afternoon when Grant ‘lay on the floor and talked [… of] how we are to turn my studio into a tropical forest with great red figures on the walls, a blue ceiling with birds of paradise floating from it (my idea), and curtains each one different.’ Both for Grant and Bell, as well as for Lewis, orientalist ideas about the excitement of far-flung regions pervaded artists’ work at this time. These ideas evidently informed the bright colour and tropical animals seen on this unique bedspread. * Despite its evident connections to the work of the Omega Workshops, the bedspread is in keeping with the effervescent style of interior design espoused by the Rebel Art Centre. The organisation was unofficially established at 38 Great Ormond Street in spring 1914. The space itself consisted of two downstairs rooms knocked together and was decorated with long curtains of ‘crocus gold’, scarlet-coloured doors, ‘dreamy blue’ carpets, walls of ‘pale lemon’, and a nine-foot-long divan covered with material of red, white and blue stripes. A photograph from the time shows Kate Lechmere, the Centre’s main financial supporter, sewing curtains (fig. 9). A similar scene may have been enacted for the embroidering and hand-printing of the bedspread. The triple presence of textiles, mural and easel painting in the photograph evokes the bringing together of different creative media under a single roof, which underpinned the aims of the Centre. This photograph also shows the aforementioned divan. The large mattress was covered in a fabric striped with red, white and blue, which was purchased from Liberty & Co. – one of the pioneering, colourful and sometimes adventurous fabric retailers at the time. It was their textiles which the Omega Workshops and the Rebel Art Centre had to compete with, and which bedspreads like this were designed to overtake in terms of colour, design and pattern. The Centre functioned for a matter of just four months. Its programme was erratic, with occasional talks by guest lecturers, planned exhibitions and the unrealised promise of an art school. As Richard Cork has noted, ‘despite all the excitement, it swiftly became apparent that these quixotic artists were not temperamentally suited to the practical business of running an organization like the Great Ormond Street atelier.’ It produced relatively little, but this rare bedspread and the related textiles seem to represent a ‘house style’ of the short-lived organisation – a small group of works, forged in the furnace of radical invention and modernist creativity. The Rebel Art Centre was of profound importance to the emergence of a controversial, provocative avant-garde in Britain. Though its achievements were soon to be overshadowed by the outbreak of war in 1914, its place in twentieth-century art history cannot be overstated and these rare textiles provide an important connection to this august, transitory body of artists.