Name/Title
Quilted StomacherEntry/Object ID
2003.1.3Context
Fashionable American and English ladies of the 18th century wore stomachers, decorative fabric panels that formed the center portion of the bodice of a gown, emphasizing the cone shape desirable in the female bodice of that period. These could be plain, printed, or, occasionally, embroidered. This is stomacher with its richly worked composition of a decorated two-handled urn holding a graceful display of flowers, set against a quilted background. A publication from Colonial Williamsburg, What Clothes Reveal: The Language of Clothing in Colonial and Federal America by Linda Baumgarten discusses this form and illustrates several stomachers, both printed and embroidered, as figures 19 and 162.