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.

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