Description:
Woven wool coverlet or blanket featuring a repetition of three colorful, abstracted embroidered floral sprigs set within a dark colored, woven-in grid against an off-white wool ground. Additional embroidered embellishment in the form of a meandering stylized grapevine decorates the outside border, which is also trimmed on the same three sides with applied blue worsted fringe. "1831/Lucretia Bush/ Busti" is embroidered at the top center, enclosed within an embroidered oval worked in yellow, red, and blue. Lucretia Ensign Bush was born in January 1759 (some sources give the year as 1755), the daughter of Datis (1729-1787) and Lucretia (Seymour; 1730-1814) Ensign of West Hartford, Connecticut, and later Westfield, Massachusetts. In 1777, Lucretia married Moses Bush (b.1756) of Westfield, Massachusetts. At some point in the early 19th century, the couple moved to Busti, New York, in Chatauqua County. While wool was long known to be a fiber whose properties helped keep people warm, this coverlet reflects the early nineteenth century trend for more decorative bed coverings, following improvements in home heating and construction, increased specialization of domestic spaces like bed chambers, and the more ornamental lens through which women's work was now viewed. Stitches used include satin, stem, buttonhole, and chain. the blanket itself is constructed with two selvage-wide lengths of the wool twill seamed together and hemmed top and botton 1/2". Except for the bottom three inches of this center seam (which are butt-stitched together), the seam is constructed by turning one of the selvage edges over to the back, and joining with the straight selvage edge of the other width. The turned down selvage is secured on the back using a herringbone stitch. Bush's work resembles other, extant blankets with a connection to western Massachusetts and New York state.
Label Text:
As travel for many Americans became more of a reality in the early 19th century, so, too, did aesthetics move or adapt to new surroundings. The maker of this spectacular embroidered coverlet or blanket, Lucretia Ensign Bush, originally hailed from Westfield, Massachusetts. Sometime in the early 19th century, she and her husband Moses (b. 1756) moved to the western New York State town of Busti, in Chatauqua County. Rather than employing her needlework to create a more familiar pattern from her native Connecticut River Valley, Bush’s dated bed covering, vividly embroidered with three different, but repeating, floral sprig motifs each contained within a grid pattern, reflected domestic needlework from her adopted state. Another, similar example dated 1778 is found in the collection of The Henry Ford Museum (THF133978).
Subjects:
Textile fabrics; Embroidery; polychrome; Wool Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=HD+2019.53 |
