Star of Lemoyne Quilt

It is not difficult to appreciate why this quilt was a Finalist in the Chicago Evening American Quilt Contest of 1930, about one hundred years’ after it was made- proclaimed on a label still attached to its reverse. The quilt’s splendid palette is characterized by the predominant use of a single printed cotton. Its lush red, green and brown colors and otherworldly coral and seaweed-like motifs embody the technical adventurousness of textile printing in the 1820s, combining multiple stages of both block- and superimposed machine-printing. Though this cotton can be attributed to printers working in the United States, the quilt’s reverse is a wholecloth of cotton printed in Britain in the 1820s, with a high quality block printed design featuring peacocks, based on the work of the seventeenth-century artist, Francis Barlow.