Vintage Trapunto 3-d

[Kevin McCormack]

If you enjoy this style, you'll like this - I bought this at the Easton MD Waterfowl Festival about 25 years ago from a vendor who said it came out of a large house out on the Main Line outside Philadelphia. I had a couple of art appraisers look at it but no one was sure of the material used to make the raised surfaces of the bodies of the birds.

I finally sent it to the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC where a curator in the Social History Domestic Life Collections rendered her opinion. She said it was most likely hard plaster with a wax-like coating which was then hand painted by a
process patented by an English ceramist at the turn of the century (1900). Another possibility could be the bodies of the birds were cast in raised relief from papier mache or even hammered tin, then coated and painted.

The image has an almost strange, mellow peaceful aura about, and I often think about my dogs and the woodcock woods we hunted over the years when I look at it.