Conventional Applique in Calicoes

Center of the Ann Daggs or Ann Dagge quilt

 

Ann Dagge's 1818 quilt, attributed to Rochester, New York, in the collection of the Smithsonian, looks like a singular piece of folk art but it shares several characteristics with other quilts from the teens. All these quilts found in the U.S. rely on the latest multi-color calicoes rather than large-scale furnishing chintzes. For the next few weeks we shall consider this style.

http://americanart.si.edu/collections/search/artwork/?id=36860

 

Like Louisa Brigham's quilt below Dagge's quilt has a swag border with triple leaves.

Louisa Brigham 1818

Found by the Connecticut Quilt project.

The triple leaf motif is seen throughout the Brigham quilt

Louisa also included a pair of reptiles (alligators?) appliqued from calico. A family member brought this quilt to a quilt day. According to the wife of Louisa's descendant she was born April 9, 1793 in Barre, Vermont. 

Here's a detail of Ann Dagge's quilt (bad color) showing her calico birds. Also note her flat cookie-shaped roses and three-lobed tulips, something we see a lot more of in later applique quilts.

 

Ann Robinson's 1813-14 quilt in the Shelburne Museum collection is similar---using flat flowers and tulips with many flowers composed of hexagons

 

Robinson also included calico animals and birds and many triple-leaf designs.

With several cornucopia.

 

Quilt inscribed Maria Whelpton,

aged 19, Feb. 27 1828.

Here's a similar calico quilt, a little more orderly and ten years later.

Maria used small-scale calicoes and a lot of oval leaf shapes.

 

My photos are fuzzy because I copied a photo in the 1991 Quilt Engagement Calendar.

The page has been hanging in and hanging around in my studio or twenty years. Those calico leaves in a white square are so much like Ann Robinson's.

 

 

Sources for all of these designs are not too hard to find.

 

Embroidered Pocket

Triple leaf motifs are common in embroidery

Embroidered blanket

with a similar swag border

 

Triple leaves along the top border.

 

 

Embroidered sampler by Anna Braddock 1826

Braddock's sampler includes a cornucopia, tulips, birds and animals and, like Ann Robinson's quilt, a rather chaotic composition more familiar in samplers than in appliqued quilts.

 

These early conventional applique quilts, all found in the U.S., share so much---a certain early style, which then seems to disappear in the U.S. replaced by block-style design with more restrictions

 

1861 applique quilt by Esther Griffin

 

Griffin used similar design units but sashing confined her compositions forty-five years later.  

 The block below with the floating perspective common in samplers is unusual in a mid-century quilt.

 

Detail of a quilt signed M.S.from the  Byron and Sara Rhodes Dillow Collection at the International Quilt Study Center and Museum. Estimated date about 1850.

See the whole quilt here (#2008.040.0114)

http://cdn.firespring.com/images/512277e0-ff89-44fe-94dc-5364f177493c.jpg 

 

Did early-19th-century American applique artists develop a short-lived, rather unconfined style that was forgotten when block-style applique became the dominant style in the 1840s. Were these calico quilts from the teens derived from a particular school or teacher?