Tuesday, September 17, 2019

Small Floral Panels: #9 and #17

Panel #17

The last of the panels: Two small florals often seen scattered about a central, larger panel. 

Panel #17 is a circular bouquet with lilies, perhaps a Turk's Cap Lily
Lilium superbum....

also called a Tiger Lily.
The panel is smaller than most in the files.

It's the round corner image in this tree-of-life quilt from the collection of Old Sturbridge Village. The photo is from the Massachusetts Project and the Quilt Index. Little is known about this beautiful quilt; the mother of the donor bought it in Massachusetts in 1969.

Dealer Cindy Rennels sold this quilt a few years ago to Violet Vaughnes.
It looks more like an American pieced medallion with a cut-out chintz
or Broderie Perse center than a British frame quilt.

In the center four trimmed versions of Panel #17....

With triangular corners appliqued around each.
More corners than nosegays so they must have been
leftovers from another project.



Attributed to Mary Amelia or Eleanora Roche of Baltimore
Pictured in the book A Maryland Album.

Center panel is  #14 with the blue ribbon

Authors Gloria Seaman Allen and Nancy Gibson Tuckhorn noted the twelve block-printed medallions here "resemble motifs in an English cotton print produced at the Bannister Hall Printworks around 1826."


Quilt in similar style from the Charlotte (NC)
Museum of History with Panel #17 as the small circular images.
Could those be its corners floating like small birds through the composition?

Other panels in this quilt are #6 and #16


Another shot of that terrific border stripe

We love the term cabbage for the leftover pieces. 

1812 portrait of a tailor with a cabbage for a head.

Style in the quilts above seem to be a kind of cabbage salad. Below a completely different style in what looks to be more a British frame quilt than an American chintz applique.

Collection of Marjorie Childress

Four of panel #17 are in the corners framing the central panel #1

This is an odd piece. Techniques are unusual (appliqueing the panel where one would guess it was pieced). The quilt seems to have significant, fairly recent repairs.

Free-form spotty shapes are mid-20th-century patches that appear to be covering something else---probably a disintegrating fabric.

And although it's dated "Ann Price 1824" we are guessing that year is the date
of the woven textile that forms the base of the piece rather than when the chintzes were added---
appliqued atop an old bedcover.

But it's probably not much later than 1824.

Panel #9

Panel #9
Panel #9, an oval bouquet of roses and tulips with other florals is larger. Is that a ranunculus in the center?


.

Collector Lenna DeMarco has a pair of pillow covers with Panel #9 framed by a striped border, 
giving us a good view of the panel with its corners.


The only other full view (well, half a full view) of the panel is from
the collection of the Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum


In the two quilts below Panel #9 accents the central round Panel #2 (at right) drawn in similar style. Was the smaller panel a companion pieces to the larger design?

From an auction at Skinner's
Many small panels

Collection of Andrea Frazier

Panel #9 alternates with one of similar scale inside the
swags in this basted example William Dunton showed
from Baltimore. The center panel is the fruit basket #5.


What have we learned from these small panels?


How cleverly seamstresses made use of every scrap and what a lot of scraps some of them had.

Illustration of a French sewing workshop about 1890

The cabbage on the floor

Next: Conclusions

1 comment:

  1. Love the cabbage on the floor! It's like the kitchen after hubby has been making dinner.

    ReplyDelete