Life and work

Anna Maria Garthwaite was the daughter of the Reverend Ephraim Garthwaite (1647-1719) of Grantham, Lincolnshire, who was rector of nearby Harston, Leicestershire, at the time of her birth, and his wife Rejoyce Hausted. Anna Maria left Grantham to live in York with her twice-widowed sister Mary from 1726 to 1728 They relocated to a house in Princes Street (now Princelet Street) in the silk-weaving district of Spitalfields east of the City of London in 1728, and Anna Maria created over 1000 designs for woven silks there over the next three decades. Some 874 of her original designs in watercolour from the 1720s through 1756 have survived and are now in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum. Many of these designs are dated and annotated with weaving instructions and the names of the weavers to whom they were sold.

Garthwaite's work is closely associated with the mid-18th century fashion for flowered woven silks in the Roccoco style, with its new emphasis on asymmetrical structures and sinuous C- and S-curves. She adapted the points rentres technique developed by the French silk designer Jean Revel in the 1730s for representing near-three-dimensional floral patterns through careful shading.