Mary Miller Taylor Quilt #4 1832

Inscribed in cross-stitch in the center

Eight appliqued vignettes with small florals and leaves scattered between them

on single piece of fabric.

This quilt combines the almost-block applique of Quilt #3 with the triangle borders from Quilt #2

1824 border of five strips

1832 border of six strips

Alexander Clark Taylor, like his older brother William, attended the University of Pennsylvania for a medical degree, graduating in 1850.

One fragment of Alexander's life is kept in the archives of Pennsylvania's Lehigh University. He left a journal of 24 pages, dating from November 1843 until July 1846 when he was "a primary school teacher in Vineland, New Jersey awaiting acceptance into the medical school of University of Pennsylvania." 

Here's a link to Journal & Extracts by Alex. C. Taylor.

Like quilt number 1 for his father, Alexander's quilt includes birds

cut from chintzes found in other quilts of the time.

The most recognizable is Bird B, pheasant and palm tree

first printed in England in 1814 at Bannister Hall

See a post on the ten colorways of this print here:

Bird A looks like a pheasant in a bowl of fruit on a pedestal.

Cut from a pillar print.

The quiltmaker did not cut just the bowl but included the

capital for a little extra elegance and height.

This piece of the pillar print from the Winterthur Museum's collection

shows how the bird and fruit basket are rather precariously perched

on an architectural column.

Bird C: Similar bird perched in similar fruit basket but with a large palm frond.

Here's a monochrome version of the bird, fruit and the palm fronds.

No pillar.

And a very strangely colored version that may be

a later reproduction.

Three of Bird D frame the central cherub.

Hard to see what he looks like. I haven't found any yardage

yet with this cheerful bird but have seen him appliqued to other quilts.

Perhaps that bird of paradise (?) was once as bright as this one in a quilt associated with Elizabeth Welch in the Brooklyn Museum's collection and an almost identical quilt associated with Catherine Markey Garnhart (1773-1860) in the D.A.R. Museum.

The Elizabeth Welch quilt uses many of the same birds as the 1832 Taylor quilt....

With bird C cut from the pillar print in the four corners.

What is intriguing is that the quiltmaker here also cut both

fruit bowl and pillar capital, a rather distinctive way to use the fabric.

My first thought in looking at these common bird images was that one could buy finished or basted blocks to incorporate into one's own quilt like this palm tree and pheasant block from a top auctioned at Skinner's a few weeks ago.

A rather unimaginative use of 12 identical chintz blocks.

Left over inventory?

But there are no block seams on the chintz quilts before 1840.

The birds and flowers float on the background cotton as in Mary Miller Taylor's 1824 quilt #3.

Perhaps one bought these appliques as slips---an ancient term for a decorative piece to be transferred to another textile. Slips are most often thought of as embroidery slips as in the 18th-century piece below that you can buy on Etsy.

A slip is a worked image that is to be attached to another piece of cloth.

See one from about 1600 in the collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum:

A needleworker might buy a trimmed applique image, perhaps pasted to a piece of paper

to use in her quilt.

Ann Hill's quilt looks to have 18 identical cut images.

And then the raw edges were secured with a blanket or buttonhole stitch.

There are flaws in my theory of cut-out chintz slips, the major one being I have never seen a piece of trimmed chintz that looks ready to stitch to another piece. We've seen basted chintz cut-outs ready to be stitched but they are already attached to the larger fabrics.