This is a design for a woven silk by Anna Maria Garthwaite. Garthwaite was the daughter of a clergyman, born in 1690. She is unlikely to have received the formal technical training usually considered necessary to take up such a profession, but in her later adult life she became a successful freelance textile designer who lived and worked in Spitalfields from about 1730 until her death in 1763. She was one of the leading pattern drawers in the English silk industry, producing as many as eighty designs a year to commissions from master weavers and mercers. Her interest in natural form and talent for depicting it characterised her designs throughout her working life.