Birds & Spiders #4: The Fabric & Conclusions

The DAR Museum has two related pieces of chintz. 

This one, possibly made into a bolster cover, is

an arborescent with floral and pomegranates but no birds.

The other has the two birds on either side of the tree branch.

(The repeat is reversed in this one.)

Designs are different but elements are the same;

was one a pirated copy of the other design?  (Early 19th-century

English prints were only copyright for a couple of months.)

Tree of Life from the Bird & Spider chintz in the DAR Collection

18th-century palampore from India's Coromandel Coast 

in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum

http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O481921/palampore-unknown/

The cliche about tree of life quilts is that they were inspired

by Indian imagery in palampores....

Scholar Viewing a Waterfall, Ma Yuan, about 1200

Metropolitan Museum of Art

https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/1973.120.9/

And a Chinese view of landscape.

Tree of Life bedcover, Atlanta History Center

However, that world view must have been filtered through European sources, the imagery available to craftsmen in England who printed the fabric and applique artists in America who stitched the quilts.

Flight Into Egypt panel attributed to Sarah Warner Williams

About 1810-1830

Collection: Winterthur Museum

The bird chintz we have been discussing is an excellent example. English prints like this one from the productive London printer J. Hinton interpreted Asian design, influencing calico printers and quiltmakers.

The piece in the center of Carolyn Miller's quilt is an uncut print with the birds.

We also find quilts made from the related chintz without the birds. 

Arborescent print with a floral and to the side a brown pomegranate.

This one includes peonies the gnarly tree and pomegranates.

 No birds, no spider.

Wholecloth quilt in the collection of the International

Quilt Museum. 102 x 105 inches 

Three widths of the chintz means that the repeats are about a yard wide.

https://www.internationalquiltmuseum.org/quilt/20060500001

The Winterthur Museum has a length of yardage.

Notice how some of the brown pomegranates are awkwardly off to the right side

kind of floating.....

while others are incorporated into the overall design.

Detail from a top in the collection of the

Los Angeles Museum of Art

The tree of life with familiar florals and pomegranates is rather abruptly connected to

a base with different birds.

Sixteenth-century watercolor of a pomegranate

by Jacques Le Moyne De Morgues.

Collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum

Catherine Parker Custis's quilt at the DAR Museum: pomegranates

cut from the bird & spider chintz.

Pomegranates that look to be from a different chintz in a medallion

in Jane Lury's collection

And in the other quilt in Jane's collection

We are all guessing there were several variations on the chintzes with more

than one bird print (is one reversed?), a couple of pomegranate designs, etc.

When Mount Vernon curators reworked their chintz bedroom a few years ago they commissioned Windham fabrics to interpret the piece in the collection of the Winterthur, brightening the reproduction in "vividness of the color and the saturation," according to Associate Curator Amanda Isaac.

The scale appears larger than the original.

https://jennifersergent.com/events/celebrating-chintz-at-mount-vernon/

Johanna Christina Miller, Savannah

Georgia Quilts

What have we learned from examining this ubiquitous chintz and the many surviving quilts made from it?

1) The bird & pomegranate arborescent chintzes printed in England were widely available up and down the east coast of the U.S. in the early 19th century --- perhaps 1820-1840. We see quilts with connections.

2) Quiltmakers from Massachusetts down to Savannah, Georgia (and perhaps into the Bahamas) made quilts as shown in the quilts with family histories.

3) Nearly every one of the quilts found using the Bird & Spider chintz arranged the designs into a tree of life format (no baskets, no wreaths).

A few trees

Questions?

1) How was this design standard communicated to such a geographically disparate group of quiltmakers?

2) Or were the quilts (basted, finished tops or finished quilts) from a single professional workshop which had a good supply of Bird & Spider fabric and many seamstresses with the skills to snip out the design elements and stitch them to a backing.

The chintz in the center of collector Carolyn Miller's medallion

And that is the end of the posts on Birds with a Spider for Lunch.