Museum accessions

Magazine Antiques, Jan, 2003 by Eleanor H. Gustafson

In our fractious world, it is nice when cooperation makes for a happy ending. Such is the case with John Frederick Kensett's Niagara Falls (above), which has been formally acquired by the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut, where it hangs amid one of the greatest collections of Hudson River school paintings in the world. The painting once belonged to Antoinette Eno Wood, a lifelong resident of Simsbury, Connecticut, and an original benefactor of the Abigail Phelps Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution. In 1991 it was spotted by a staff member of the Wadsworth Atheneum hanging unnoticed in Eno Memorial Hall, where the Town of Simsbury and the Abigail Phelps Chapter have offices. Its fate became a matter of some debate when the town proposed selling the painting at auction or to a private collector. Fortunately an agreement has been reached by which the town relinquished its claim in return for the purchase of the painting by the museum, and the Phelps Chapter simultaneously donated its claim to the museum.

A cross town from the Wadsworth Atheneum, the Connecticut Historical Society has made several important additions to its textile holdings. Most significant is the extraordinary silk-embroidered picture worked by Faith Trumbull of Lebanon, Connecticut, in 1754, while she was a student at Elizabeth Murray's school for young ladies in Boston. Entitled Milking Scene and based on an engraving after a painting of the same tide by Nicolaes Pietersz. Berchem, this is one of three needlework pictures Trumbull is known to have executed. They descended in different branches of the family but are now all at the historical society which possesses a trove of Trumbull family material.

Illustrated at the far right is a detail of a crewelwork bedcovering that is also new to the historical society It remained for at least two centuries in the Noyes family of Connecticut, and has been attributed to Lois Noyes of Stonington, who married John Slack of Mansfield in 1794. Lynne Z. Bassett, the historical society's costume specialist and an authority on early New England textiles, believes, however, that it may well have been made in the 1740s or 1750s by an earlier member of the family In design and stitching, it is closely related to a number of crewel-embroidered bed hangings by Noyes women in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, the Webb-DeaneStevens Museum in Wethersfield, Connecticut, and elsewhere. In any case, the bedcovering is a particularly welcome addition because, while bed hangings have survived in some numbers, crewelwork bedspreads are much rarer, probably because they were subjected to greater wear.

Most often the handiwork of women in prosperous New England households from about 1720 to 1800, crewel embroidery consists of slackly twisted yams that are stitched onto plain-woven fabrics, usually linen, using a variety of stitches. The results were often beautiful, as is the case with the Noyes spread, but they were not particularly warm. By contrast, bed rugs were both warm and decorative. Although they have a shaggy pile surface similar to that of hooked rugs, bed rugs were created by sewing rows and rows of running stitches onto a base fabric, often a wool blanket, and then cutting (or leaving uncut) the loops created by the stitches to achieve different pile effects. Illustrated at bottom center is a detail of a bed rug recently acquired by the historical society Although its provenance is not known, the bed rug is initialed and dated "HH/1770."