Monday, January 28, 2019

Panels/Not Panels

Panel #1

What exactly are we discussing here at Chintz Panel Quilts? We have a definition we agree upon and we thought we'd clarify it by explaining what we are NOT gathering information on.

One of our first definitions is "chintz"---a multicolored print.

Panel #3
Trophy of Arms

Many of the panels we find are printed in what was called full chintz or whole chintz style with 
pink, red, blue, green, orange, yellow, brown and purple on a white ground. The purples might fade to brown; the greens to blue.

Others like Panel #13 are more limited in color.
Was the blue ever green? The brown ever purple?
Probably not.

Textile meaning changes over the years and today chintz generally means a multi-colored, large-scale furnishing-style print. The surface glaze is a side factor. Since that glaze disappears with washing and wear we don't consider it in our definition.

A toile about how toiles are printed, by Jean Baptiste Huet (1745-1811)

Multi-color chintzes are different from toiles, which today tends to mean a monochrome furnishing print with figures drawn in lines rather than shapes of color. Toiles originally were printed with large copper plates but by 1800 printers were experimenting with faster, simpler copper cylinders. It's a look rather than a process that defines toiles today.

Toile-style monochrome fruit basket print with
a short repeat indicating it was printed by roller rather
than plate.

We are NOT filing information on quilts with toiles. It's a bigger category and toile style bedcoverings go back earlier than chintz panel quilts.

The basket print above shows another style we do not keep track of here---yardage of continuous
images---NOT meant as decorating panels. Quilters may have cut the baskets out of this repeat design to use with Broderie-Perse style applique but we have never given this yardage a number. We need to keep the definition narrow because there is an enormous potential pool of clever seamstresses cutting panel-like applique from yardage.

A fashion for rococo scrolls offers many possibilities for fussy cutting.

Portuguese stripe from the Cooper-Hewitt collection
And then there are the Portuguese stripes with animals and urns.
Not going there either.

Some prints are on the fuzzy edges of our definition.
We are going to give this one a number and collect
examples of quilts where the wreaths are found.


A snapshot of a length of yardage featuring Panel #32.  We don't have many photos of the repeats
but we believe this is how most of our panels were printed, meant to be cut and isolated rather than
used as yardage.

Medallion quilt, 72" x 60", About 1820.
Collected by Sally Casey Thayer about 100 years ago.
Collection of the Spencer Museum of Art

One style of  panel-like textiles is single-color kerchiefs such as the one featured in this
small quilt possibly made for a child.

Years ago a curator at Spencer wrote to Florence Montgomery and asked for her opinion about this quilt. She was kind enough to answer (Barbara volunteers there) that the panel was a child's teaching handkerchief or bandana offering several moral lessons.

Here's the same handkerchief in red from the collection of
the Textile Museum of Canada.

Images include activities for good boys and bad boys like "Going to Church" and "Getting their Tasks" or "Idling with their Kite" and "Playing at Shufle Cap," 


Many handkerchiefs with pious advice were printed in the early 19th century. We hope someone, somewhere is giving each textile a number and filing every photo of the kerchief they can find.
But it is not us.

Our late friend Sue Hannah started a list of commemorative kerchiefs that Joyce Gross published in Quilters Journal decades ago. Early 19th-century monochromes include mourning panels, political textiles, Masonic kerchiefs, and celebrity prints.

We have records of antislavery handkerchiefs but have never seen one incorporated into a quilt.

An early quilt with an even earlier monochromatic Masonic bandana 
at the Noah Webster house in Massachusetts

Similar style from the collection of the Winterthur Museum.
The central square features the U.S. Founders with Washington in the center.


Many Washington memorial textiles mourned his death in 1799, at a time when these monochrome panels were quite the fashion, commemorating everything from battles to British royal celebrations.

Some of the textiles are more like print broadsides.
This Washington panel offers an image of George Washington
as a truthful president, once considered a virtue.

The same printers who did newspapers and job printing
were probably responsible for these wordy textiles.


The Smithsonian's Treaty of Pilnitz quilt features a monochrome
kerchief in the center recalling an arcane agreement between 
Prussia and the Holy Roman Empire in 1791.

Celebration of King George III's Golden Jubilee about 1810
from Dorothy Osler's book

Now this is what we are talking about! A multicolored image printed
in isolation, looking as if it was meant to be cut out and used in furnishings.
It has a number (#24) and a post:

If you want to read more about monochrome commemoratives the Smithsonian's long-out-of-print book Threads of History: Americana Recorded on Cloth by Herbert Ridgway Collins is a great source.
Here's a post from Barbara's 1812 Quilts blog about the early commemorative bandanas:

Tuesday, January 15, 2019

Panel #6: Basket with a Primrose Pair

Panel #6
A small rectangle with an oval ring framing a wicker basket full of flowers,
including a pair of white primroses in the center. The picture is from
the center of a crib quilt in Polly Mello's collection.


Trimmed, it's the perfect Broderie Perse shortcut.

As in this top from the Historic Columbia Foundation in South Carolina with
 panel #2 in the center.
Historic Columbia has two bedcovers with Panel #6.

All we have of this one is a photo of a photocopy....
The piece has 12 examples of Panel #12

The pair of white flowers catches your eye and we've found it in 15 quilts.

Primroses or Aucricula were a popular bloom in
early-19th-century England.

Collection of the Charleston Museum
Panels 3, 5 and 6 (on the north/south points) framed by a stripe of large tropical birds.

Another South Carolina quilt top, this one attributed to Hannah Noland Henderson. She died in 1890 and is buried in Pomaria, Newberry County, South Carolina, near the Broad River northwest of Columbia.

The butterflies are probably cut from Panel #32
and that floating oval lozenge shape is cut from this stripe also
seen in several Carolina chintz quilts


Quilt with inscription "Sally Roxana Caldwell 1833" on the reverse.
She lived in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Collection of the Mint Museum.

See a post about Sarah Roxana Caldwell here:
http://civilwarquilts.blogspot.com/2018/10/the-caldwells-hard-shell-secessionists.html

The inner border is strips of the panel fabric, showing the repeat,
which seems to be the standard way of printing the panels. We
don't know how many panels appeared across the width.


One of four chintz applique quilts attributed to

Ann Adeline Orr Parks (1803-1835), also of Charlotte,
  documented in the North Carolina project

The central panel is the fruit basket #5.
Four copies of a trimmed Panel #6 are in the corners

These two quilts from Charlotte are attributed to women of approximately the same age whose husbands were of the same political circles and economic class. Parks was a store owner; Caldwell a doctor.
See a post about the Parks family here:
http://womensworkquilts.blogspot.com/2018/12/ann-adeline-orr-parks-family-in-fabric.html


Panel #6 is the central feature of a beautiful quilt
that descended in the Bull family, confiscated during the Civil War
when Union troops under General Wm. T. Sherman marched in Georgia
and the Carolinas.




Read the story of this quilt here:

Quilt attributed to the Lillington family, perhaps 
Pender County, North Carolina.

The trimmed basket is in the center of this one documented in the North Carolina project. We don't see too many Southern panel quilts with cut out corners.

Two copies of panel #6 in a supporting role to the larger panel #2

We don't know much about this quilt from a Skinner auction.

Or about this one in the collection of the Atlanta History Center.


And nothing about this one with four trimmed oval panels framing the center.
We can guess it's a Carolina quilt, however. 

That is, unless it's from Baltimore.

In his 1945 book William Rush Dunton showed three closely related, unfinished bedcovers
from different Maryland families.



Each has 8 copies of Panel #6 framed by arcs

The Lassotovich quilt in Dunton's Plate 73
 was loaned by a great-granddaughter to the 
Baltimore Museum of Art where a color photo was taken.

These remarkably similar quilts still mystify quilt historians.

In her 2018 paper "The Chintz Gardens of Achsah Goodwin Wilkins" for the American Quilt Study Group Ronda Harrell McAllen discussed research into the Goodwin and Wilkins family and the quilts attributed to them. She found that family members left inventories with their wills indicating the family had 72 quilts in their possession at the time the wills were read---"extraordinary, even for very wealthy families...."

Colonial Williamsburg curators Linda Eaton (left) and Kim Ivey discussing
a related Baltimore piece with Ronda (right). 

This crib quilt is in Polly Mello's collection (see the top of the page). It's 32 1/2" x 36 3/4".
The style not quite so distinctive that we can link it to a region.


And one last quilt. Our only example that looks to be British
by style---all those hexagons.
We found it pictured in the book Quilts Around the World.
Here's a preview of the book:

What We've Learned from Panel # 6

Our guess is the Baltimore quilts were made by professional seamstresses (free or enslaved) to formula constructions in connection with stores selling fabrics, the same business model we propose for the Carolina quilts. Someone (more than one someone) had a good deal of chintz panel fabric, a fashionable design sense and a crew of skillful needlewomen.

An imaginary sewing factory in Charleston with the standard medallion model
in sight.


While Ann Adeline Orr Parks's medallion above is made to a Carolina formula pattern, the Lassotovitch quilt is made to a Baltimore formula.

A Baltimore Formula

More complex with more variety in the chintzes and a lot more
needlework.


Here are a few other spreads from Dr. Dunton's book based on the same
general formula but using different panels and chintzes


Unfinished. Perhaps you could buy these tops basted.

This one, one of two from the Glenn family, is
missing 6 of the large swags.

The Adams-Coffyn family had two of these spreads in 1945. 


This chintz applique was recently donated
to the DAR Museum by the Volckening family. A photo from Bill's blog.
Fits the formula perfectly

Now that we have a pattern all we need is a lot of chintz swags.