Description:
Block-printed cotton medallion coverlet or quilt panel decorated with an amphora vase holding a bouquet of garden flowers encircled with birds on leafy branches and butterflies in red, green, gold, brown, and black, and the iintials "MP"(stamped) and "M.T" (painted) encircled with dots on the bottom edge. British-born John Hewson was one of the earliest and finest chintz printers in the United States. Having worked as a dyer and bleacher for Ollive and Talwin at Bromley Hall in Middlesex, he immigrated to Philadelphia at the invitation of Benjamin Franklin in 1773 to start a business printing and dyeing fabrics to compete with those being imported from England. He opened a calico printing factory in 1774, near the Delaware River at the foot of Gunner's Run, now Aramingo Avenue. Hewson is best known for block-printed squares featuring an elaborate vase overflowing with flowers and sheaves of wheat and surrounded by motifs of butterflies and birds, such as this example. These squares were used as the center medallions of quilts printed the vase with flowers and on smaller square panels that needleworkers incorporated into quilts Hewson placed the vase on a small plot of ground reminiscent of features he would have known from Chinese bird and flower wallpapers and on Indian textiles with the tree of life motif. Although few examples survive, Chinese wallpaper came into the American colonies decades earlier than French arabesque papers; it was also more expensive and prized, and demand for it only increased as the eighteenth century wore on. The largest number of extant Hewson textiles comprises the separate panels needleworkers incorporated into the center of quilts. In his day commemorative handkerchiefs and embroidered panels were occasionally used in this manner, but Hewson’s panels predate the practice of quilts with colorful printed chintz medallions, some shaped in octogans or ovals, that came into fashion from 1815. There are a few breaks in the textile (esp. center design) corresponding to where the black dye has eaten through.
Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=HD+2005.16 |
