Ladder Back Chairs

These illustrations from the first half of the 20th century amuse me no end in colonial silliness. We have a woman in old-fashioned dress holding a thoroughly modern version of a crazy quilt.

The whole Colonial Revival movement was about establishing an "authentic" American sentiment,

but messages were mixed----old fashioned or modern? You could have it both ways.

Especially if you were illustrating quilt pattern publications.

Edith Crumb feature in the Detroit News.

I don't see a signature on the drawing. Edith Crumb used a couple of

ladder back chair illustrations to illustrate articles for her 

Quilt Club Corner Column

A silhouette 

Ruby McKim illustration

Who originated the fashion for colonial quiltmakers

in ladder back chairs?

Woman's World magazine used this quilt with an odd chair

for its quilt features.

UPDATE: Our New England expert Pam Weeks tells me it's a comb-back Windsor chair.

Another variation for the cover of a Woman's World pattern catalog in 1930.

Mary Sherwood Wright Jones for

Needlecraft September, 1928

Note the braided rag rug under her colonial feet.

From Grandmother Clark

Here's the weirdest combination of colonial and modern.

The crazy quilter looks to be living in a cell but it's just a

Bauhaus modern concrete bedroom with steel casement windows.

Maybe she's hemming drapes.

So who originated the cliche?

Got to be Wallace Nutting who did staged photos

of colonial interiors: Braided rug and wooden chairs a

standard prop in these framed photos extremely popular in the teens and 1920s.

See a post at my Woman's Work blog on Nutting and his wife Mariet

who was the art director on these influential glimpses of our "authentic" history.

https://womensworkquilts.blogspot.com/2019/09/colonial-confusion-nuttings.html