Sunburst Quilt

Unknown

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This quilt was made for a trundle bed or a child’s bed. The lower edge is shaped to fit around bed posts. It is composed of twenty full pieced Sunburst pattern blocks, sewn from a combination of imported 1830s English chintz and plain white cotton. The background fabric is a brown chintz, patterned with seashells and flowers in pinks, blues, greens and golds. Many of the pierced blocks use this same chintz to make up the sunburst pattern, but others of the blocks are patterned with four different contemporaneous chintzes. The sunbursts are hand-quilted with white thread in concentric circles, while the outer part of the blocks are quilted with straight lines following the edges of the block.

The American Wing

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The American Wing's ever-evolving collection comprises some 20,000 works of art by African American, Euro American, Latin American, and Native American men and women. Ranging from the colonial to early-modern periods, the holdings include painting, sculpture, works on paper, and decorative arts—including furniture, textiles, ceramics, glass, silver, metalwork, jewelry, basketry, quill and bead embroidery—as well as historical interiors and architectural fragments.

Metropolitan Museum of Art