Embroidered coverlet

The 1876 Centennial Exhibition served to revive interest in all things related to the American colonial period. It is in this era, in the late nineteenth century, that saw the beginning of the struggle to save early buildings facing demolition due to the growth of industrial cities, and the post-Centennial years were also when the first great private collections of eighteenth-century objects were formed, many of which eventually found their way into museums, such as the Metropolitan. The Colonial Revival movement fell somewhere in between being political and artistic, mixing ideas about what was good, simple and unpretentious design with ancestor worship and trying to define what it meant to be a "true" American in the face of massive waves of foreign immigration.

The best and most influential practitioner of Colonial Revival needlework was, without a doubt, The Deerfield Society of Blue and White Needlework, founded in 1896 by Margaret Whiting (1860-1946) and Ellen Miller (1854-1929). They were both trained artists, and together had written and illustrated a botany book, "Wild Flowers of the Northeastern States." After moving to the small town of Deerfield, Massachusetts in the early 1890s, the two women became intrigued with the early American crewel-wool embroideries housed in Memorial Hall, the local Deerfield museum. In a talk given in Flushing, New York in 1898, Margaret Whiting recounted: "At first it was our intention simply to make one replica of each of the pieces in the collection. The wools had been badly moth-eaten and many of the pieces were threadbare, but the designs showed true New England directness, often with a vigor and perception of decorative need that was remarkable." Not satisfied with only the models close at hand, the two women began to travel New England, and even New York, in search of outstanding examples of crewel work to use as models for their own embroideries. Instead of simply copying the eighteenth-century pieces, they adapted them, producing original designs inspired by the colonial needleworks. They soon established a local cottage industry, and by the turn of the century, they were said to have between twenty and thirty women producing needlework from their own homes. The needlework was all stitched on linen grounds, sometimes re-used antique bedsheets or table linens, but mostly new fabric that was especially handwoven for the Society. In order to bypass the problem seen in the old works where the crewel wool motifs had all but disappeared due to moth damage, the Deerfield group often used moth-impervious linen embroidery thread, hand-dyed the old-fashioned way using natural dyes such as madder (for reds), fustic (for yellows), and of course, indigo, to produce the blue color that gave the Society its’ name.

The coverlet seen here has many characteristics of Deerfield embroidery, but can’t be absolutely attributed to the Society. The designs on the coverlet, each one of which is slightly different from the others, have much in common with those used by the Deerfield Society. They were inspired by the blue-floral motifs found on eighteenth-century pieces such as our collection’s 61.48.2. The materials of the coverlet seem right, and both the linen thread hand-dyed in shades of blue, and the embroidery techniques, are just like those found on Deerfield pieces. Yet there is a certain stiffness to the individual motifs and overall layout that makes us question if they were really designed by Margaret Whiting and Ellen Miller, whose work generally was somewhat more artistic and flowing. In addition, most Deerfield pieces bear an embroidered mark, a "D" within a flax spinning wheel; the Museum’s coverlet does not.

Were there other embroidery societies who made works similar to those produced by Deerfield? We haven’t been able to find any evidence that there were, and at this time, we believe that they are the work of either a lesser Deerfield designer than Whiting and Miller, or may have been sewn by a talented seamstress and embroiderer from elsewhere who was inspired by the products of Deerfield Society. The Society’s work was highly publicized in its the early days, when both the artistic and "historical" nature of the embroideries as well as the means of providing paid work for women within their own homes, were considered worthy of high praise. The Society showed their wares at Arts and Crafts exhibitions around the country, so an enterprising woman set on making fashionable "Colonial" decorations for her home could easily find a chance to study their hand-wrought designs in the early years of the frighteningly industrial Twentieth Century.