Caracos Around the World

 

Fries Museum, Netherlands

Caraco

 This post is about a fashion that is ready for revival: The Caraco. 

Caraco seems to be a French word for a tight fitting jacket. In the Netherlands they are called kassakeintje. probably a translation of a French word Casaquin.

In her book about French seamstresses Fabricating Women, Clare Haru Crowston 

distinguishes between a caraco and its longer version a casaquin. As with most textile terms

there is confusion and change in meaning over the decades,

National Gallery, London

Madame Pompadour at her Tambour Frame

by Francois-Hubert Drouais, 1763-1764 (detail)

This portrait of the Marquise de Pompadour Jeanne Antoinette Poisson in an Indian chintz jacket and skirt was finished shortly after her death from tuberculosis at the age of 42. Her outer garment may be a

longer floor-length robe, a wentje in Dutch or banyan in several languages from a Gujarti Indian word through Portuguese.

Rather than analyzing the length of a jacket here we are calling them all caracos and showing a variety from museums around the world.

About forty years after Madame P was wearing the fashion, an English periodical tells readers fashionable French women

"may give the ton to all the women of Europe" in their caracos.

The Victoria & Albert Museum has a caraco and

skirt similar to Mme. Pompadour's without the added lace trim.

They date it to 1750.

Painting of a fashionable woman in

the Netherlands in a red-ground caraco

Tapi Museum, India

A green ground chintz

Similar green ground chintz in a French museum

Metropolitan Museum in New York,

worn in the Netherlands

Another from the Musee de la Mode in Arles

The blue may once have been an overdyed green

as the yellow dyes were fugitive while the indigo

blue was not.

Fashion Museum, Antwerp, Belgium

Plum-ground chintz

Source unknown

Mme. Pompadour preferred the white ground caraco,

which is the showiest version.

And here's the showiest of the showy white ground jackets:

RijksMuseum, Amsterdam NL

These were obviously meant to be seen from the back 

with images carefully placed.

Fries Museum, Leeuwarden NL

Súdwest Fryslân

The front with the closures was usually not as well planned.

Post from Natania Barron

Caracos were popular in Holland's Friesland (Fryslân), especially in a port town called Hindeloopen north of Amsterdam where the chintz wearers were considered a bit eccentric by their neighbors. The Fries Museum has a good sample of their Indian imported costumes.

https://www.friesmuseum.nl/en/see-and-do/exhibitions/hindeloopen

Fries Museum from Hindeloopen

Colonial Williamsburg

Also in Colonial Williamsburg's collection

A longer jacket over a quilted skirt

Royal Ontario Museum

Metropolitan Museum 

The front

Three different chintzes

Museu d'Història de Barcelona

Shop Selling Chintzes in Spain by

Gabriel Planella Conxello 1824

Daniel Defoe in 1708 complained about the fashion for chintz in England replacing good old English wools: "Chintz from India crept into our houses, our closets, and bed-chambers; curtains, cushions, chairs, and, at last, beds themselves were nothing but calicos or Indian stuffs." To keep English people wearing English fabrics Parliament twelve years later passed a law forbidding 

"the Use and Warings in Apparel of imported chintz, and also its use or Wear in or about any Bed, Chair, Cushion or other Household furniture".

Like most prohibitions the law, repealed in 1759, encouraged innovations in cheating, marketing and using the forbidden stuffs.

Dutch East India Company warehouse & shipyard in 

Amsterdam about 1750

The history of these trade goods is another chapter in the tale of Europe's exploitation of Asia that began with Portuguese traders and continued in a rivalry between Dutch and English traders who formed commercial stock companies to govern conquered areas in the east. We'll look at this trade and the caraco's origins in later posts. (I have to read more books.).

Knickerbocker Puzzle: Early American Style

 

Thinking about stitching a period-authentic quilt from 250 years ago for the 2026 anniversary of the Declaration of Independence? I've posted one pattern for a style typical in the years 1780 to 1810 or 1820. Click here:

https://barbarabrackman.blogspot.com/2025/11/250th-anniversary-quilt-pattern.html

Other patchwork styles were also made in the new U.S. in the years 1780-1820. See a post about Dutch-American style quilts here:

https://barbarabrackman.blogspot.com/2025/12/early-american-quilts-knickerbocker.html

Here's a pattern for a patchwork bedcover you might find in Knickerbocker New York and other former colonies nearby such as Connecticut and New Jersey.

Knickerbocker Puzzle

84" Square

Today we tend to call the triangular pattern Yankee Puzzle but it 

reflects Dutch taste from the descendants of colonists in

New Netherlands before there was a New York. 

Style: Central focus in a field of patchwork, here with a

simple pattern as far as compass types go.

The main problem in drafting a pattern for the center is trying to fit pattern 

pieces on an 8-1/2 x 11" sheet so you can print them yourself.

Many 24" finished traditional circular patterns would do.

(Or if you have a larger or smaller center add or subtract triangles.)

If a central compass seems a bit much you might find inspiration in this quilt made in the Netherlands from An Moonen's collection, pictured on the cover of her book.

Dutch quilt, about 1815

Detail of a star in a field of patchwork posted on 

Pinterest by Christine Anderson

Or if a simple star is not your style:

Collection of the Fries Museum in the Netherlands

Late 18th century

Early American Quilts: Knickerbocker Style for St. Nicholas's Day

Pennsylvania State Museum

American patchwork quilt thought to be about 1800, attributed to a 

woman in the Robinson/Wells/Drum family.

https://5074.sydneyplus.com/Public/PHMC_ArgusNET/Portal/Portal.aspx?component=AAAL&record=cb90d1f2-ea21-49f2-b12f-c9fb3396090b

Examples of surviving 18th-century American quilts give us answers about the earliest American patchwork but they also generate more questions. See a post on a style of patchwork framed medallion dating from about 1780 to 1810 like the quilt above:

https://barbarabrackman.blogspot.com/2025/11/early-american-patchwork-considering.html

Yet, other styles seem to have been stitched. One fashion shows great influence from the Netherlands---Dutch quilts. Today is St. Nicholas's day...Santa Claus to Americans. We can celebrate that Dutch custom by looking at some very old patchwork.. 

SinterKlaas in Holland

Santa Claus is a Knickerbocker gift

A little Dutch-American history: In 1609 Dutch capitalists from the Dutch East India Company sent English explorer Henry Hudson to find a shorter water route to India where they were buying goods to sell to the rest of the world. Instead, Hudson found the river that bears his name far from what he was looking for--- India's Coromandel Coast . Five years later Netherlandish entrepreneurs capitalized on his error and founded the Dutch West India Company to establish a colony with a port at the Hudson River's mouth on the Atlantic. Their "New Netherlands" extended from Pennsylvania and New York south to what is now Delaware.

National Park Service map of New Netherland altered to

highlight the Hudson River and add the fictional

 Diedrich Knickerbocker who came to personify Dutch New York.

New York (Knickerbocker himself) pulls the strings

in a 1901 illustration by Louis Dalrymple.

Dutch settlers did not arrive until 1624, establishing Fort Orange (later Albany) and two smaller settlements on an island in the Delaware River and another in what is now Governors Island near Manhattan.

                     The capital on "Manhatans" was called New Amsterdam

Thirty years later their trade rival England began fighting for control of the area with skirmishes that lasted a decade until the English took control of a renamed New York.

20th-century version of Dutch Governor Peter Stuyvesant's 1664 surrender

And that's about all we have learned about Knickerbocker history, a lack

Washington Irving regretted in 1809 when he invented Diedrich Knickerbocker.

Collection Los Angeles County Museum of Art

71" x 62"

Did colonists in New Netherlands and their descendants make quilts? If so, what did they look like?
Perhaps like this top dated with initials.

"1807 M.B."

Although it has the same high-contrast color scheme as the patchwork medallion at the head of this post --- an emphasis on dark brown and white typical in the cotton prints of the 1780-1820 period---this top contains a wider variety of prints compared to the medallion quilts shown in my November post. The major difference is in the overall design, which we could call a medallion format with a central focus floating in a field of patchwork triangles. No concentric borders of plain or patchwork.

Unfortunately LACMA knows nothing about it. Who was MB and where was it made?

Perhaps in the Netherlands...

...where this piece is in the collection of the Dutch Open Air Museum in Arnham

(Nederlands OpenLucht Museum)

Stylistically similar top from the Zeeuws Museum in Middelburg NL 

Another from the Groninger Museum in Groningen NL

Surprising similarities: Tops with a star center floating in a field of triangles in high contrast.

What do those visual similarities tell us?

Could the LACMA quilt top have been made in America?

There are American-attributed bedcovers in the Dutch style format.

Winterthur Museum Collection 

Pieced quilt with commemorative handkerchief in center, 

American, 1790-1810. Cotton. 94 x 74"

The triangles are rather large.

National Museum of American History Collection

No history with this quilt but fabrics indicate a date of "1790-1800" with the 

border's plate-printed toile "similar to English plate prints of 1770-1795."

Link to the files: https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object/nmah_556465

D.A.R. Museum Collection

Gift of New Yorker Susan Greene

Adaptation: Stars rather than being a central focus are in the corners.

High contrast brown and white prints with a later stripe border.

Copied this one from the files of the Ohio Historical Society

years ago, attributed to Sally Howard Bailey but I cannot find

the file today. Rather than patchwork, Sally incorporated recycled embroidery

into her center and her triangles. 

The circular or star center in a field of patchwork is seen in both English, Dutch and American quilts. 

Collection of the National Museum of American History

Unknown maker, late 18th -19th century

 Gift of Mrs. Robert Stephens 

https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object/nmah_556238

Stella Rubin's Inventory

Doll quilt signed 

"Ann Crisford

Aged 8 Years

1826"

The patchwork field is seen in the earliest of quilts. The most common names today for half-square triangle variations are Broken Dishes and Yankee Puzzle (don't tell Diedrich Knickerbocker) because these fanciful names were published in the first half of the 20th century by Ruby McKim and Ruth Finley---a New Yorker. Those books have had staying power in their rather dubious histories.

Quilts pictured above are cotton (plus linen) quilts. In North America we also have surviving quilts of wool and silk or all four natural fibers .

McCord Museum, McGill University, Montreal. 81 ½ x 77 ½"

Silk quilt inscribed IN 1726

This early silk bedcover is thought to have been made in England. As it is not quilted, just backed, paper templates can be seen, cut from a handwriting copybook, letters, texts and malt makers' legal regulations ---we presume in English and Latin. Curator Jacqueline Beaudoin-Ross noted that the border brocade is typical of English or Dutch silks at the time the quilt is dated, the rival countries that were the powerhouse international textile traders at the time.

Wadsworth Atheneum Collection

Circular center in a field of patchwork triangles inscribed 

"Anna Tuels her bed quilt given to her by her mother in the year Au 23. I785"

Wool, silk, and printed cottons, wool backing and batting.

With better access to genealogical records we now know more about the maker and the Tuels family. Lilian H. Zirpolo found records of the probable quiltmaker---Anna's mother Experience Taylor Tuels (her dates according to FamilySearch: 1722-1789) who lived in Marshfield, Massachusetts. Both she and her husband Barnard Tuels were born in Massachusetts. (Tuels in its variations is a Welsh name.) Anna (1759-1848) was one of seven children, in her twenties when the quilt was made. Experience died a few years later in her sixties.

Winterthur Museum 

Quilt attributed to Martha Agry Vaughn [Vaughan] (1786-1856),

ca. 1805. Silk with cotton and linen, backing wool

Caption from Robert Shaw's American Quilts

Laurie LaBarr in Maine Quilts dates it to 1795-1815 and notes it's pieced over newspaper templates, probably English-language papers. Martha's father was Thomas Agry II (1756-1821.) Mother Hannah Nye Agry died at 29 in 1794 when Martha was about 8. The family lived in Maine when it was Massachusetts---in Hallowell near Agry's Point in the Kennebec Valley where they built ships and smaller boats. No records found yet indicate that either of the two men named Thomas Agry was a ship's captain.

Family Search records of Martha Agry Vaughan

Silk quilt attributed to Catherine Penniman Bradford (1777 or 1778- 1827) of Massachusetts about 1825, pictured in the Wisconsin project's book Wisconsin Quilts: History In The Stitches by Ellen Kort. 1825 is a cut-off date for "Early" quilts but this silk spectacular attributed to a century after the McCord's 1726 piece in pieced and embroidered in similar style. 

https://barbarabrackman.blogspot.com/2025/02/early-silk-quilt.html

Catherine's genealogy from FamilySearch

More Questions!!!

Two Dutch-style quilts found in the U.S., both now at the International Quilt Museum

One possible idea: If we are looking at historic styles for a 250th anniversary quilt we should 

 have a pattern for a Dutch-inspired Knickerbocker Quilt. But that's a lot of triangles.

See a post here:

https://barbarabrackman.blogspot.com/2025/12/knickerbocker-puzzle-early-american.html

---Further Reading

Lilian H. Zirpolo, "The Anna Tuels Quilt in the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT: Stylistic, Technical, and Historical Considerations"

An Moonan, A History of Dutch Quilts