A textile trove from historic deerfield. (Design Notes).

Among textile aficionados Historic Deerfield in Massachusetts, is well known for its large and important collection of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century costumes, quilts and other bedcovers, and upholstery and curtain fabrics. These textiles are found in the fourteen historic houses along Deerfield's main thoroughfare, in the Flynt Center of Early New England Life, and in the Helen Geier Flynt Textile Museum.

Recently Historic Deerfield and the textile firm Brunschwig et Fils have formed a collaboration that has resulted in a group of fabrics reproduced or adapted from objects in the museum's collection. As with other such alliances, the museum will receive a royalty on each sale. This both makes Deerfield's textile collection better known and provides funds with which to purchase new objects.

A recent accession is a splendid man's banyan, or dressing gown, probably made in India for export to Europe, and thence to America, in the last quarter of the eighteenth century (illustrated at top). Edward F. Maeder, the chairman of the curatorial department and curator of textiles at Historic Deerfield, wrote an illuminating article about this piece in the winter 2001 issue of the magazine Historic Deerfield. The banyan came into fashion in England as early as the mid-sixteenth century. In 1768 a banyan was listed in the inventory of Ebenezer Pierpont of Roxbury, Massachusetts, where it was described as being made of "Chenee." Cheney was a worsted wool usually used for furnishings but sometimes for informal, at-home attire, which is exactly where banyans were worn. Deerfield's banyan is hand-painted, making it singular indeed. This banyan served as the model for a reproduction fabric manufactured by Brunschwig et Fils in three ...