American-Alsatian quilt

Magazine Antiques, Feb, 1999 by Denis Roland, Jean Francois Keller

The art of the patchwork quilt has been approached in terms of designs, the regional variations in patterns, and the techniques used to make the quilts. Rarely have the scraps of fabric that make up the quilts been the object of attention. However, as printed cottons they themselves have designs that are rich in significance. This approach has been particularly fruitful when applied to a patchwork quilt from the superb collection assembled by Gaby Burkert, a Swiss-born resident of the United States since 1961 (PI. II).(1)

The patchwork quilt is a distinctively American art form, yet a study of the one hundred scraps of printed fabric that comprise this quilt yielded a surprising result. Nearly all of the fabrics were identified in the large and well-documented collection of the Musee de l'Impression sur Etoffes in Mulhouse, France. All of them were printed between 1863 and 1867 in Mulhouse in southern Alsace, where the industry dates from 1746. The companies involved were Freres Koechlin; Steinbach, Koechlin et Compagnie; and DollfusMieg et Compagnie (see Pl. I), three of the oldest and most important textile printers in the city.(2)

There is no Alsatian tradition of making patchwork, and, if there are any French patchwork objects, they are from southern France.(3) In any case, the shapes stitched into the quilt in Plate II are typical of nineteenth-century American quilts. The question remains why Alsatian fabrics were used to make a quilt in the United States.

The cottons used in the quilt were printed with wood blocks and copper rollers predominantly in stripes, checks, and geometric figures. The autumnal colors - cachou, brown, rust, mauve, and gray - are typical of inexpensive Alsatian calicoes, which competed with those printed in Rouen(4) and England. These durable cottons in simple, timeless patterns and a wide variety of color ways were used for everyday dresses, cloaks, and aprons both in the city and the countryside. The competition among manufacturers for this market was fierce, and the fabrics tended to become standardized. For this reason a purely stylistic analysis of the quilt would not have turned up the origin of the fabrics used.

In the 1860s cotton fabric was in sixth place among manufactured goods exported from France to the United States, lagging behind silk and wool fabrics, "articles de Paris" (presumably Parisian luxury goods), lingerie, and leather goods.(5) In this context of expensive merchandise, the Alsatian textile printers could compete with the fashionable, finely printed calicoes at which they were past masters (see Pl. V). However, the fabrics in our quilt are far from the top of the line, and it is these everyday calicoes that the Alsatian manufacturers failed to export in competition with Rouen and England. In 1860 the industrialist Jean Dollfus (1800-1887) wrote: "In Alsace we print calico, percale, pique, muslin, and organdy, but we hardly export any calico any longer."(6)

In the 1860s the Mulhouse manufacturers were very concerned about exports, particularly deploring the absence of people experienced in overseas trade. To deal with these shortcomings the Societe industrielle de Mulhouse(7) founded a business school in the city in 1866. Despite this effort to instill in the young men of Mulhouse "the knowledge necessary to go abroad, that is to say languages, the geography of trade, and the commercial practices of foreign countries," Jacques Siegfried, reporting to the Societe industrielle de Mulhouse in 1869, lamented "the lack of young Frenchmen capable of founding branches overseas."(8)

Between 1863 and 1867, when the fabrics in our quilt were printed in Mulhouse, the exports of cotton fabrics from France to the United States never exceeded two percent of all cotton fabrics exported.(9) Given this situation it is unlikely that American retailers would have had a steady supply of cheap printed cottons from Alsace. Exports of people far exceeded exports of goods to the promised land.

Alsace had sent emigrants to America beginning in the seventeenth century, throughout the eighteenth, and into the nineteenth. The numbers increased about 1820, and it has been established that between 1832 and 1867 more than twenty thousand Alsatians emigrated to the United States,(10) with scarcely a dip during the Civil War.

The emigration from Alsace was driven by rural overpopulation and the consequent competition for jobs at lower wages than prevailed in the rest of France. Poverty, resulting in malnutrition and disease, both in the cities and the countryside,(11) was an added factor. Some emigrants were evading conscription, particularly during the Crimean War (1854-1856), and others were enlisted by recruiting companies such as the one operated by Henry Castro (1786-1865), who settled Alsatians in Texas in 1843 and 1844.(12)

Once in the United States immigrants settled in groups according to the region from which they had come. In the arduous existence of these pioneers, the patchwork quilt, the artistic expression of a hardscrabble economy, found its place quite naturally. One can easily imagine evenings devoted to this community project using fragments of doth brought from home by everyone. The scraps were old, but they were a precious witness to the immigrants' attachment to their roots. In this sense, this art of the new world celebrated the memory of the old world.