Inspired fantasy: design sources for New England's whole-cloth wool quilts

Magazine Antiques, Sept, 2005 by Lynne Zacek Bassett

The earliest quilts on colonial American beds were made of whole cloth, with the visual interest created by the quilting patterns high-lighted by the gloss of the elegant fabrics, such as silk and glazed worsteds. These quilts were costly imports from India, England, or France, professionally made in the upholstery trade and available only to the wealthy until the 1700s. Over the course of the eighteenth century, more and more New England women began to make their own whole-cloth quilts--often with faces of English calamanco or of tammy and backs of locally produced wool. (1)

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By the mid-eighteenth century, New Englanders had broken away from the rigid framed-center-medallion designs of English whole-cloth quilts; instead, they created their own fantastic variations on baroque and rococo motifs. The artistic quality of these stitched patterns is easily overlooked, for after two hundred years the originally smooth and glossy fabrics have often been dulled by repeated washings, faded from exposure to light, and marred by the voracious attacks of moth larvae and mice.

Fortunately, one of the earliest survivors of this type of quilt is still in beautiful condition (Pls. VII, VIII). This bright pink calamanco quilt was designed by the Reverend Jonathan Livermore and stitched by his sister Abigail Livermore Keyes of Shrewsbury, Massachusetts, in 1769, the year of Livermore's marriage to Elizabeth Kidder (1743-1822). (2) Jonathan Livermore was a Harvard College graduate (1760); in 1763 he became the minister of the First Congregational Church in Wilton, New Hampshire, where he died in 1809. His father, Deacon Jonathan Livermore, was remembered as "an excellent penman," (3) and it appears that the Reverend Jonathan Livermore inherited his father's artistic ability. His design of stylized floral motifs and meandering vines resembles eighteenth-century crewel-embroidered bed hangings.

Such designs were rooted in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, from seed propagated in even earlier periods. The fashion of New England decorative arts in the seventeenth century was the baroque, or mannerist, style, which was characterized by tightly packed motifs, exaggerated proportions, and an artificial imitation of nature. (4) It was based on early sixteenth-century Italian design, which grew out of the discovery in the 1480s of the ruins of the so-called Golden House (Domus Aurea) built for Emperor Nero in the first century AD. This palace had underground rooms or grottoes with wall paintings depicting elaborately swirled and bizarre floral and figural motifs. The adaptation of this decorative style came to be known as grotesque, based on the word grotto. Stylized and bizarre floral patterns became ubiquitous in European decorative art design, evolving from the heavy and large-scale baroque motifs to lighter and generally asymmetrical rococo florals, shells, and ribbons by the second and third decades of the eighteenth century. It continued in textile design, particularly in whitework embroidery and some printed calicoes, into the mid-nineteenth century.

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Compare the reverse-curved scrolls terminating in stylized flowers seen in Figure 2, a design by Raphael from a mid-seventeenth-century pattern book Miscellaneae picturae vulgo grotesques ..., with the pattern stitched into a quilt made by Ruth Benton Thompson of Goshen, Connecticut, probably in the 1780s (see Pl. I). (5) Such large, reverse-curved floral borders were favored in southern New England in both quilt and bed rug design. (6) Similar reverse-curved floral vines were also common in Elizabethan embroidery, which possibly served as the main influence on the quilt designs.

Another useful comparison can be made between the 1650s design by Jean Le Pautre (see Fig. 1) with the pattern stitched on a quilt that family tradition states was designed and made about 1784 by Asenath Rising of Suffield, Connecticut (see Pl. II). While Rising's design might be called "debased" by strict art historical standards, it is actually a masterful adaptation of a high-style design. The symmetrical plan and abstracted leaf and shell forms are all in evidence, along with the foliate scroll topping the central ornament, but they are very individualized. So distinctive is this design that it is clear that the pattern for the quilt represented by the drawing in Plate IV was also drawn by Rising; this quilt was originally owned by Lucy King Norton (c. 1753-1831) of Suffield. (7)

It is unlikely that Rising or Thompson were looking at seventeenth-century design books for inspiration for their quilt patterns. Rather, their inspiration came from other items in their houses, or even from the gravestones in the local burying ground. Such stylized and curving natural forms could be seen in all of the decorative arts of the eighteenth century. Perhaps Rising drew some inspiration from the work of the famed furniture maker Eliphalet Chapin of nearby East Windsor. Compare, for example, the finial on the top of the Chapin high chest of drawers in Plate XI with Rising's quilt design.