Eagles Appliqued and Embroidered

Quilt dated 1808 by Rebecah Foster (detail) 

Appliqued and stuffed-work eagle.

Collection Tennessee State Museum

Eagles are among the earliest conventional applique in which the images are cut from small prints rather than transferred from a printed chintz. Eagles were popular even before the War of 1812.

An overall view of the Foster quilt. She combined embroidery and conventional applique using indigo prints.  The image is the Great Seal of the United States, featuring a bald eagle holding laurel leaves and arrows with a shield on his breast and a banner in his beak. The seal, adopted in 1782, inspired many artists.

 

Quilt dated 1807 by Esther S. Bradford, Connecticut,

appliqued eagle. Collection: Henry Ford Museum

A similar quilt in red and white. It's hard to believe this is appliqued, as the lines are so fine, but that's what the catalog says.

See more here:

http://www.thehenryford.org/exhibits/quiltinggenius/quilts/59_41_2.asp

Here's a sharper picture in black and white. The maker is perhaps the Esther Bradford born on December 2, 1782 in Montville, New London County, Connecticut, who married Reynolds Johnson on August 25, 1821 and died on December 1, 1823 in Colchester, Connecticut.

 

Patchwork can be considered an efficient form of embroidery. These quilts seem to be appliqued adaptations of traditional embroidery designs. The embroidered bedcover below in red and white is almost identical to the Bradford quilt

Embroidered bedcover

Brooklyn Museum

This piece was on the cover of Rose Wilder Lane's

Woman's Day Book of American Needlework

And here it is again in colored yarns in an embroidered bedcover sold by Copake Auctions.

We assume a needlework pattern was passed around or perhaps a professional pattern drafter marked  fabric.

The quilts above make good use of two fabrics---a white background and indigo or madder prints. The fabrics might be domestically produced, since these simple prints were the kind of thing American printers could do.

Eagle applique by Susan Strong Bell (1809-1875)

Collection of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.

The catalog information dates it to 1825-1840

http://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object.cfm?key=35&gkey=169&objkey=9568

Susan's eagle quilt is unusual in it's use of white applique on indigo. It seems related to the earlier quilts in design and fabric use.

Eagles were such popular imagery in this early period that I have three  posts from last year on the subject

http://quilt1812warandpiecing.blogspot.com/2011/09/quilt-from-era.html

http://quilt1812warandpiecing.blogspot.com/2011/09/another-eagle-quilt-in-field-of.html

http://quilt1812warandpiecing.blogspot.com/2011/10/more-eagles-for-ideas.html

More Eagles for Ideas

 Eagle and Stars Center Medallion,

Martha Randall Chesebrough, ca. 1808, 99” x 93”

Collection of the Fennimore Art Museum

This eagle quilt,  similar to others from the first decades of the 19th century, will be on display through the end of the year at the Farmer's Museum in Cooperstown, New York.

Unfolding Stories: Culture and Tradition in American Quilts "organized by renowned quilt scholar Jacqueline M. Atkins, the Fenimore Art Museum for the first time in over 15 years will display selections from its large collection of quilts. The exhibition will address themes of diversity, ethnicity and culture. Also included are the three award-winning quilts from the 2010 New York State of Mind Quilt Show." Through December 31, 2011.
Click here for more:

http://www.farmersmuseum.org/node

Here's one from the collection of the Benton County Historical Museum in Oregon. Again it's an interpretation of the Great Seal of the U.S. with a combination of cut-out chintz applique (in the border blocks) and conventional applique in the eagle and stars. See their post on it here:

 http://www.bentoncountymuseum.org/horner/artifact.cfm?id=29

" Label on back, bottom right: 'Aunt Maggie gave this 1918 over 100 years old.' "

If Aunt Maggie is right the quilt would be from the teens. The fabric is very worn and the photos don't give us enough detail to determine the age but the quilt could be a souvenir from the patriotic wave of the War of 1812. Or it could be a "Union quilt" from the Civil War era, fifty years later.

Scroll through their collection which features several nice quilts, including another early example, a cut-out chintz medallion with a Greek key border.

http://www.bentoncountymuseum.org/horner/artifact.cfm?id=40

This last one is from an online auction a while back.

Could be early---I see no fabric or patchwork ideas in this snapshot that conflict with a "first quarter of 19th century date" although a detailed examination might reveal those pink and brown prints are late-19th century.

Another Eagle Quilt in a Field of Patchwork

Quilt donated to the Smithsonian Institution in 1947

attributed to members of the Brown-Frances family

 of Canterbury, Connecticut

This undated quilt is attributed to the first decades of the 19th century and may well reflect the patriotism of the War of 1812. Although the fabrics and the style are simpler than the eagle quilt in the last post the quilts have several  design ideas in common.

Both feature a central eagle drawn from the Great Seal of the United States, but this artist has few of the drawing skills shown in the chintz eagle.  The fabrics in this more primitive example have none of the flair of the imported prints in that quilt.

The central eagle floats in a field of patchwork, in this case a nine-patch block that creates a neat chained design.

The Smithsonian has another early Connecticut quilt with a similar field of patchwork. The prints are simple, dyed with blue indigos and brown vegetable dyes, perhaps printed in the United States rather than shipped from Europe or India.

The quilt was donated in the 1890s by John Brenton Copp of Stonington, Connecticut, part of a comprehensive gift of textiles and other furnishings.

Notice the shell quilting in the plain blocks, a common period pattern that lost favor as the 19th century progressed. The quilter alternated parallel diagonal lines in the blocks. 

We can buy templates but they probably used a circle of some kind, perhaps a coin.

See more about the two Connecticut quilts by clicking on these links:

http://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object.cfm?key=35&objkey=7230

http://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object.cfm?key=35&objkey=9545

A comment reminded me that Jan Patek has done an interpretation of that Smithsonian eagle at the top. See her book if you'd like a pattern.