ne of the fascinations of working with museum collections is that the study of one object can enhance our understanding of others. This portrait, which the Village recently acquired, is a good example. Village curators have named her "Cordelia," a name inscribed on the bottom stretcher. Her portrait is important to the Village because it provides much-needed contextual information about women's outdoor clothing, which is rarely depicted in paintings. Most nineteenth-century sitters preferred to be portrayed in dressy indoor apparel, but Cordelia chose to be painted in a stylish black pelisse--a long fitted coat-like garment with a high waist. She added a sheer white ruff (a ruffled collar) and pulled a red shawl around her shoulders. Most unusually, Cordelia complemented these garments with a hat made of milkweed silk, adorned at its high crown with green silk ribbon and tied at her chin, below its broad rim, with ribbon of yellow silk.

At first glance the hat appeared to be made of long-napped beaver, but a comparison of the image in the painting with the soft golden color and silky, curled texture of two milkweed collars in the Village's collections made it clear that Cordelia's hat was indeed milkweed.

In the 1820s and 1830s young ladies in New England added milkweed decoration to their repertoire of needlework skills. They created
garments and accessories from dried milkweed pods, which they sewed onto a backing fabric in linear rows and lined with dress fabric. An observer at the exhibit of domestic manufactures at the Hartford County Agricultural Society Fair of 1826 reported in the New England Farmer that "two beautiful bonnets made of the down milkweed attracted much notice." On display at an 1838 fair held near Boston were milkweed "tippets, capes, and bonnet," which an attendee thought, "very beautiful." In a report on the fair published in the Horticultural Register and Gardener's Magazine

, the writer noted that the garments "had the appearance of the most delicate and rich fur, and so simple was the work that a child could execute it."

Surviving examples of milkweed creations are scarce. The Village's textile collection has only the two milkweed collars previously mentioned, intended to be worn as stylish decorations with dressy gowns. The New Hampshire Historical Society owns one other known New England example--a hat, complete with three milkweed-covered feathers.

How common were milk-weed garments and decorative accessories in the Village period? The observation of a Salem, Massachusetts, woman in 1837 suggests that this "fabric" was more a novelty than commonplace. Upon viewing a milkweed cape, she wrote that it was a "flossy, fluffy, feathery bit of silky sunlight, shimmering and shining ... before our astonished eyes."

The painting provides an image of just such a piece of milkweed handiwork, and also a context. The artist captured the details of Cordelia's face, her outdoor apparel, and beautiful hat. In so doing, he has presented the viewer with a well-dressed, self-assured very "present" woman who was proud enough of her milkweed creation to wear it boldly in her portrait.

Old Sturbridge Village Visitor Fall, 1994