Celebrating Cretonne

I've been looking at the quilts at the Spencer Museum for 45 years or

so. This particular quilt, sort of a square in a square, was a puzzle for a long time.

At first we classified it as a chintz quilt and thought

it was early 19th century.

But as we amateur curators saw more quilts over the years

we realized the large-scale furnishing prints

were better classified as cretonnes

and better dated as 1880-1910.

See this post about differentiating between chintzes and later cretonnes.

I thought the comforter (it isn't quilted) was one-of-a kind. You just don't often see cretonnes celebrated like this. But then I saw one that dealer Julie Silber had in the Quilt Complex collection. 

More of a string quilt

or a crazy quilt, theirs

 has some of the same prints.

Quilt Complex's has a circus

performer in red. 

Spencer's has the circus performer in a brown

colorway.

Once I started collecting pictures from

online auctions I realized these weren't the only

two quilts in the style. Here are a few others.

What makes this a style is the emphasis on large-scale prints. Most quilters in the 1870-1910 period were interested in tiny prints. Cretonnes usually wound up on the back rather than the front.

Stella also has this crib quilt in her online store

And this postage-stamp-sized triangle with a cretonne center.

I found some in Museum collections.

We might think of these as the antithesis of modern.

They are nostalgic, busy---if not chaotic--- sentimental and full of

non-essential decorative details.

I'll show some of those decorative details in a later post.

Here are links to the Museums' quilts.