Pictorial Quilt

Euphemia Kichlein

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This quilt is one of four known quilts and several quilted pillowcovers made by the Schleifer/Kichlein women in the 1830s. It demonstrates their unique family style of alternating red and white pieced blocks with embroidered blocks. In this case, red and white blocks in the "Reel" or "Orange Peel" pattern alternate with blocks of white embroidered cotton. The central block of the quilt is embroidered with a fashionably dressed couple and a small boy, and an inscription that reads "Euphemia Kichlein 1832." The quilt was completed in 1832 Euphemia Kichlein, likely with the help of her mother Christina Schleifer Kichlein as Euphemia was only 14 years old. The embroidered motifs seem to have been copied from print sources; the family group on the large central block may have been copied from a similarly composed family group that appears in an English print entitled "View Of Dandelion Garden, Margate, Kent" by Benjamin Thomas Poundy (fl. 1772-1799), or another print or fashion plate of the day. The smaller blocks with the birds perched on a flowering tulip bush are generic images found on Pennsylvania German fraktur (hand-painted paper certificates, given on the occasion of births/baptisms, weddings, and school accomplishments). The image of the young woman holding a bird is very specific and was copied from a printed birth and baptism form that was popular in the area in the first decades of the 1800s.

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.