Monday, April 22, 2019

Dark Panels and Scroll Edges


British quilt historian Bridget Long has in her collection a patchwork top featuring this dark panel with a scroll border. She showed it in the Elegant Geometry exhibit she curated for the International Quilt Study Center and Museum a few years ago.

The panel is the central focus in a hexagon design, a lovely example of British style.

We have three examples of bedcovers with this scroll. Kay and Lori Lee Triplett have
another British top in their collection with two panels at the top edge here.


Another example of British style, a frame quilt with pieced borders, a good deal of chintz and white as a minor accent. The rectangular pieces in the final side borders are a good clue to a British quilt. American quiltmakers did not piece borders of rectangles in that fashion in the early 19th century.

The unknown seamstress pieced two panel scraps together
to get one whole, a nice job of matching.

In their book on Chintz Quilts they call this the Scroll Medallion with Black Background.

We have detail shots of a third British bedcover sold at Christie's.

Different British style, this one featuring the unconfined applique shapes
typical of British applique. Here white becomes an important background.

We have only one other scroll-edged panel and only one example of it.
This one with a brick-red background was found in North America on 
Canada's Prince Edward Island.


Again we have a frame quilt of pieced borders (appliqued stars) but with an overall color scheme of pale pinks, blues and purples---British taste.

What Have We Learned From the Dark Panels?

It's no surprise that 19th-century British and U.S. American quiltmakers had distinctive styles. We've described a few characteristics above.
British Style


Frame quilts with pieced borders


Hexagon and other paper-pieced mosaics


Applique pieces tossed about without formal symmetries


But we also see another style idea, a preference for dark ground panels like
the Wellington panel we discussed a few weeks ago.
See that post here:

Americans favored the light ground panels, like the fruit basket
in this quilt by Ann Adeline Parks Orr from the North Carolina project.

Trophy of arms panel in a bedcover in the Newark Museum.

Fruit panel in a bedcover from a Wooley & Wallis auction in Salisbury, England

When British quilters used the light-ground panels they tended to use them in different fashion. Style characteristics enable us to determine pretty quickly if a quilt looks British or looks American.

When American quiltmakers used the dark ground panels......
But.....we have only two quilts in our U.S. files with dark ground panels:

Philadelphia Museum of Art
When we saw this small piece in Philadelphia we were quite surprised. Where was it made?
It really doesn't follow any style formula.


International Quilt Study Center and Museum 

If it's a dark-ground panel it's probably British.

Dark ground panel in the lower border of the Fife Coverlet in the collection
of the British Quilters' Guild.

Penny Tucker sent a photo of a bouquet with a blue bow from Wales.

But here's another exception:

This certainly looks like a dark ground panel in the center of a very
American strip quilt in the collection of Mary Koval.

The white shape at the top of the oval seems to be a rip in the fabric

This album is attributed to the Wistar family of Philadelphia
1840s.

Sunday, April 7, 2019

Wreath of Roses: Panel #42


Yardage from the Textile Museum of Canada
Panel #42

Here we have a different variety of panel---different style, different printing techniques and different time period.

And from the Winterthur Museum: 1840-1850

Curator Florence Montgomery described this piece in the Winterthur collection as roller-printed with "impressionistic shading of flowers...and characteristic dotted backgrounds in black or blue."

The background has tiny blue dots shading and outlining some
of the figures.

Snoddy-Black Family Quilt

A while ago Barbara did a post on these two nearly identical wholecloth quilts---
one attributed to Rosa Benson Snoddy and one by an unknown maker in the collection
of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Rosa's may be in a pinker colorway than the other examples we've found or that may be a photograph color shift. Barbara wonders if  the pair was made by professional quiltmakers in South Carolina about 1850.
http://womensworkquilts.blogspot.com/2018/05/a-pair-of-panel-quilts.html

Every other example we have is more in this greenish/yellowish colorway.

An album quilt dated 1843, the only dated example so far....

Collection of the Shelburne Museum

About the same time as this chintz appliqued album
attributed to the Ridgley family of Baltimore.

Perhaps the very rich Ridgeley family presided over by
Eliza Ridgeley (1803-1867), painted by Thomas Sully.

Collection of the Morris Museum
from the Tabor family of  Madison, New Jersey

The New Jersey project photographed this sampler
with four of the large wreaths and several of the smaller.


The wreath fabric seems prone to fade.

Maria Louisa Harris Key (1804-1879), St. Mary's County, Maryland
Maryland Historical Society

Maria Louisa used the large and small wreaths to good effect.

Cow Hollow Antiques had a two-sided whole cloth quilt for sale
with one side the print in question, but there are more colors in this print


A later reproduction?


What Can We Learn From Panel # 42?

This is one of the few prints we've classified as a panel that is roller-printed rather than block-printed. It was also printed at a later date---it seems to have been available after 1843 and used in the mid-century quilts near the time it was printed.

Winterthur has a similar wreath fabric, which Montgomery also classified as an English roller-printed cotton and gave the narrow date of 1852-1856. We haven't found any quilts using this brown-ground 
print.

There seems to have been a mid-century fashion for tan, blue and green wreaths. The bird wreath in the same colors is from the center of a medallion in the collection of the International Quilt Study Center & Museum, which attributes the quilt to North Carolina, 1820-1840. That may be a little early, based on the fabric style.


The first interest in wreath panels printed by woodblocks seems to be in the teens. We see a revival of  wreaths as a repeat twenty or thirty years later done by roller or cylinder printing, perhaps a response to the continuing interest in using the older panels in patchwork after 1825.