Comfort and Glory: Two Centuries of American Quilts from the Briscoe Center by Katherine Jean Adams (review)

Comfort and Glory: Two Centuries of American Quilts from the Briscoe Center presents selections from the Winedale Quilt Collection, part of the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin. In his preface, Don Carleton, the center's executive director, indicates that this publication was originally envisioned as "a gallery of images with basic descriptions of the quilts" (p. xiii). Truly, the generous proportions and abundance of large, full-color images would earn this book a place on a coffee table, but through a particular set of circumstances the Winedale Collection "preserves extensive documentary resources on American quilt history, including ephemera, patterns, letters, photographs, research files, and countless other types of materials" (p. xiii). Carleton credits the efforts of Katherine Jean Adams not only for the current publication, but also for envisioning and implementing the development of the quilt collection.

Adams has selected 115 of the Winedale's nearly 500 quilts to showcase in Comfort and Glory. Her goal is to show the breadth of the collection, and she gives "preference to quilts whose known date, maker, and/or provenance offered … opportunities for profitable research and, hence, for robust description" (p. 4). The quilts and their stories form a rich tapestry documenting the daily lives of families—their joys, sorrows, hopes, concerns, and relationships.

A particular strength of the collection is its quilts related to Texas history. For example, Sterling and Mary Jones Orgain arrived in Texas with their ten children in the 1850s, bringing the quilt made for their 1818 wedding in Tennessee. In 1975, author and illustrator Betsy Warren made her first and only quilt, "Patches of Texas History," consisting of twenty-five blocks depicting historic scenes and famous Texans (p. 256). For the sesquicentennial of the founding of the Republic of Texas, Shirley Fowlkes Stevenson created a pictorial quilt to honor her great-grandfather, Captain John Files Tom, a veteran of the Texas Revolution.

Comfort and Glory not only presents the individual quilts within their social, cultural, and historical contexts, but also details the development of the Winedale Quilt Collection as a whole. In 1967, a legendary Texan, Miss Ima Hogg, donated a property called Winedale to the University of Texas. The historic farmstead included land, buildings, and an extensive collection of American furniture and decorative arts. Among the textiles were seventeen quilts, which became the foundation for the Winedale Quilt Collection in 1995. Once established, the collection attracted individual donations of family quilts, typically accompanied by information about the makers. The collection also drew the support of influential figures, notably Karoline Patterson Bresenhan and Nancy O'Bryant Puentes, cofounders of the International Quilt Festival and numerous other events and organizations.

Curator Katherine Adams envisioned the collection would include not only the textiles themselves but also related documentary resources. This effort began in earnest with the acquisition of the Kathleen H. McCrady Quilt History Collection, which includes contemporary and historical quilts, related textile objects, and publications. In 2008, the Briscoe Center acquired the voluminous Joyce Gross Quilt History Collection, a library and personal archive accumulated over a period of nearly forty years that includes iconic quilts made by important twentieth-century fabric artists such as Bertha Stenge, Pine Hawkes Eisfeller, and Jean Ray Laury.

Comfort and Glory offers a sampling of two hundred years of American quilts and shares stories of families migrating to the Texas frontier, while simultaneously establishing the Winedale Quilt Collection as an important research resource. The reader comes away with a clear recognition of a succession of passionate and dedicated individuals' efforts to collect, preserve, and document quilts as significant cultural expressions, individually and collectively, of the lives of American women.