Monday 7 November 2016

American Folk Art - part 7

Continuing a major series on American Folk Art featuring 21 postings. Folk Art encompasses art produced by artists and ordinary folk with little or no training in the arts, and is traditionally utilitarian and decorative rather than purely aesthetic. The period I’m covering is the C18th and C19th.
See parts 1-6 also for earlier works.

Note: Follow me on Twitter for notice of updates @poulwebb

This is part 7 of a 21-part post on American Folk Art:

Quilts and textiles:

During the C18th and C19th women of all social levels made quilts and coverlets. Primarily meant to be utilitarian, they were often designed to please the eye as well, and were sometimes imbued with significance far beyond being simple bed covers.

They were often wedding gifts, or made by brides-to-be to take to their future marital home. They were also made to celebrate the birth of a child, and even sometimes in remembrance of the dead.


1790-1810 Hewson-Centre Quilt with Multiple Borders
cotton and possibly linen 217.2 x 193 cm
American Folk Art Museum, New York City

1803c Coverlet made for Phebe Warner (probably) by sarah Furman Warner Williams (b 1764)
262.3  x 229.9 cm
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City

1825-45 Appliquéd and Embroidered Pictorial Bedcover
wool, silk, cotton, beads with silk and cotton embroidery 231.1 x 204.5 cm
American Folk Art Museum, New York City

1825-49 Block-Work Stencilled Spread
paint on cotton 223.5 x 193.6 cm
American Folk Art Museum, New York City

1842 Quilt Top by "MTD"
cotton 251.5 x 238.7 cm
American Folk Art Museum, New York City

1843 Album Quilt
cotton and ink with cotton embroidery 236.8 x 241.9 cm
American Folk Art Museum, New York City

1845-50 Baltimore-Style Album Quilt Top
cotton with wool embroidery 213.4 x 208.3 cm
American Folk Art Museum, New York City

Detail of the 1845-50 Baltimore-Style Album Quilt Top (above)

Detail of the 1845-50 Baltimore-Style Album Quilt Top (above)

1848 Quilt by Elsey A. Halstead (1830-1850), Middletown, New York
Folk Art Museum, New York City

1850-60  Feathered Stars Quilt by "ECB"
cotton 242.6 x 194.3 cm
American Folk Art Museum, New York City

1850-1880 Soldier's Quilt: Square within a Square
wool 217.2 x 167.6 cm
Folk Art Museum, New York City

1852 Dunn Album Quilt
cotton and ink with cotton embroidery 254 x 252.1 cm
American Folk Art Museum, New York City

1854-1890 Soldier’s Quilt
wool-melton 170.2 x 168.9 cm
American Folk Art Museum, New York City

1858-63 Bird of Paradise Quilt
cotton, wool, and silk with ink and silk embroidery 214.6 x 176.8 cm
Folk Art Museum, New York City

1861 Cross River Album Quilt
cotton and silk with wool embroidery 231.1 x 190.5 cm
American Folk Art Museum, New York City

1866 Abraham Lincoln Flag Quilt by Lucy Frost
cotton with cotton appliqué and embroidery 154.9 x 190.5 cm
American Folk Art Museum, New York City

1870-80 Floral Medallion Quilt
cotton 218.4 x 177.8 cm
American Folk Art Museum, New York City

1875-95 "Sacret Bibel" Quilt Top
cotton, silk, wool, and ink, with cotton embroidery 224.8 x 182.9 cm
American Folk Art Museum, New York City

1876 Centennial Quilt
cotton with cotton embroidery 209.6 x 189.3 cm
American Folk Art Museum, New York City

1880-1910 Circle in Star Quilt
pierced cotton 198.1 x 193 cm
American Folk Art Museum, New York City

1884-90 Grover Cleveland Quilt
cotton 217.2 x 217.2 cm
American Folk Art Museum, New York City

1885 Masonic Appliqué Quilt
cotton
Folk Art Museum, New York City

1885-90 Cleveland-Hendricks Crazy Quilt
lithographed silk ribbons, silk and wool with cotton fringe and silk and metallic embroidery 190.5 x 195.6 cm
American Folk Art Museum, New York City

1885-95 Crazy Quilt by "S.H.'"
silk, ink, paint and cotton with silk embroidery 190.5 x 188 cm
American Folk Art Museum, New York City

1890-1910 Pine Tree Quilt
pierced cotton 172.7 x 223.5 cm
Private Collection

1890-1910 Vortex Quilt
pierced and appliquéd cotton 203.2 x 208.3 cm
Folk Art Museum, New York City

 c1900s "Close Finish"
hooked rug wool and burlap with cotton binding 82.5 x 116.8 cm
American Folk Art Museum, New York City

1907c Quilt by Carl Klewicke (1835-1913)
silk, faille, taffeta and satin 183.1 x 152.4 cm
Folk Art Museum, New York City


Eunice Griswold Holcombe Pinney (1770-1849)

Eunice Pinney is the earliest known American primitive watercolourist. She was born into a large, wealthy family in Simsbury, Connecticut. Painting fruit and flower still lifes, landscapes, and scenes from history was a popular pastime among refined ladies in nineteenth-century America.

Self-educated before art instruction books became popular, Pinney was free to invent her own style. The variety of her subjects is unusual; she painted memorials and literary scenes, portraits and landscapes. English prints inspired some of her works, such as "The Cotters Saturday Night", which illustrates a poem by eighteenth-century Scottish poet Robert Burns. 

1810 The Cotters Saturday Night
pen and watercolour 30.7 x 37.8 cm
National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

"Lolotte et Werther" illustrates an episode in the life of the hero of Goethe's enormously popular romantic novel "The Sorrows of Young Werther" (1774).

1810 Lolotte and Werther
watercolour 37.7 x 29.2 cm
National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

Pinney seems to have started painting around 1809, when she was thirty-nine. Some scholars have noted that her maturity might have allowed her to be bold and confident in her work. Most of her paintings were done in Simsbury or Windsor, Connecticut, where she settled in 1797, marrying Butler Pinney after her first husband drowned. Of her fifty-four recorded works, the majority were painted between 1809 and 1826.


1800-10 Three Women Standing by a Funerary Monument
watercolour and graphite on paper 25.4 x 20.6 cm
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA

1810 (attributed to) Untitled
watercolour 22.2 x 20.9 cm

1810 Two Women
watercolour on paper 25.4 x 30.5 cm

1813 "In Memory of Eunice Pinney"
watercolour and pricking on paper 41.9 x 48.9 cm
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA

1815c (attributed to) Lady Standing in a Landscape
watercolour on paper 28.5 x 22.9 cm

1815c Mother and Child
pen and black ink and watercolour on wove paper 25.2 x 30.1 cm
National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

1820c Family Group at Piano
watercolour on paper 35.5 x 41 cm
Art Institute of Chicago, IL

1845c Portrait of Two Girls
watercolour and pen and ink on paper

n.d. Children Playing
watercolour 25.4 x 30.5 cm

n.d. Collingwood and Northesk: The Ever to be Lamented Lord Nelson
watercolour on paper 30.5 x 36.8 cm

n.d. Family Register of Butler Pinney
pen and watercolour on paper 38.9 x 26.7 cm
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA

n.d. Hope, Faith, Peace and Charity: Family Register of the Butler Family
watercolour 28.7 x 22.4 cm

n.d. Mother and Daughter
pen and brown ink and watercolour over graphite on laid paper 21.7 x 18.1 cm
National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

n.d. Shot by Cupid's Arrow
watercolour

n.d. Young Couple in a Landscape
watercolour on paper 19.4 x 15.7 cm
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA

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