A textile trove from historic deerfield

Magazine Antiques, Feb, 2003 by Allison Eckardt Ledes

Among textile aficionados Historic Deerfield in Massachusetts, is well known for its large and important collection of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century costumes, quilts and other bedcovers, and upholstery and curtain fabrics. These textiles are found in the fourteen historic houses along Deerfield's main thoroughfare, in the Flynt Center of Early New England Life, and in the Helen Geier Flynt Textile Museum.

Recently Historic Deerfield and the textile firm Brunschwig et Fils have formed a collaboration that has resulted in a group of fabrics reproduced or adapted from objects in the museum's collection. As with other such alliances, the museum will receive a royalty on each sale. This both makes Deerfield's textile collection better known and provides funds with which to purchase new objects.

A recent accession is a splendid man's banyan, or dressing gown, probably made in India for export to Europe, and thence to America, in the last quarter of the eighteenth century (illustrated at top). Edward F. Maeder, the chairman of the curatorial department and curator of textiles at Historic Deerfield, wrote an illuminating article about this piece in the winter 2001 issue of the magazine Historic Deerfield. The banyan came into fashion in England as early as the mid-sixteenth century. In 1768 a banyan was listed in the inventory of Ebenezer Pierpont of Roxbury, Massachusetts, where it was described as being made of "Chenee." Cheney was a worsted wool usually used for furnishings but sometimes for informal, at-home attire, which is exactly where banyans were worn. Deerfield's banyan is hand-painted, making it singular indeed. This banyan served as the model for a reproduction fabric manufactured by Brunschwig et Fils in three colorways--one that is identical to the document and two that are inspired by ba nyans made in England during this same period (illustrated at lower left).

What Brunschwig et Fils is calling Deerfield Woven Plaid is based on a blue linen handkerchief dated 1773. It is being reproduced in five colorways (illustrated below, second from left). A set of linen bed hangings with woolc embroidery made by Esther Meacham Strong (1725-1793) in the middle of the eighteenth century is the original on which Brunschwig's Esther's Stitchery is based. The original hangings are in the Allen House, where they adorn a maple pencil-post bed. Henry and Helen Flynt, who founded Historic Deerfield, discovered the bedspread from this set in the collection of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation in Williamsburg, Virginia. When they subsequently located and purchased the other pieces from the set, they convinced the trustees at Williamsburg to sell them the bedspread. Brunschwig produces this fabric in three colorways (illustrated below, third from left).

Bringing the textile collection at Deerfield into the twentieth century is a quilt made in 1924 by Fannie Bouviere Stebbins of Wethersfield, Connecticut. Each of the fifty-six vignettes on the quilt was inspired by nineteenth-century photographs and magazine advertisements. Brunschwig offers an adaptation of this fabric in two colorways, and they have reduced the number of vignettes to twelve (illustrated at bottom, far right).

Brunschwig et Fils is headquartered in North White Plains, New York, and has showrooms throughout the United States, open to the trade only. Information maybe obtained by telephoning 800-538-1880 or through their Web site (www.brunschwig.com).