Featured Textile
| Overlooking Kingston |
| 1934, United States |
| HLATC P.R.US.0059 |
Overlooking Kingston is a linen furnishing fabric designed by Ruth Reeves for her Hudson River Series in 1934. The piece was acquired by the Helen Louise Allen Textile Collection in 1969 from the estate of Helen Louise Allen. Overlooking Kingston and the rest of Reeves' Hudson River Series, which included The Hudson River at Tarrytown, Newburg from a Downing Garden, and Poughkeepsie Bridge from Hyde Park, were the result of a fellowship grant in 1933 from the Gardner School Alumni Foundation that subsidized the work of distinguished women. As Mrs. Freeman R. Swift, a chairperson of the fellowship committee association explained, Reeves received the grant “because it was felt that her idea of perpetrating the present Hudson River scene in fabrics might initiate as significant a trend in textile design as that which produced the fascinating old French Toiles which recorded in that medium the story of French life of that day.”
The Hudson River School, considered America’s first landscape painters, had interpreted the Hudson River extensively in the mid-19th century. Reeves followed suit and painted a variety of Hudson River scenes in oil. Later, she translated her work into designs for furnishing fabrics. Overlooking Kingston and the other designs of the Hudson River Series are reminiscent of 18th century French Toiles de Juoy, printed fabrics whose motifs depict various life scenes. Using shades of blue and green and the geometric lines of the Art Deco movement, Overlooking Kingston shows an idyllic scene as a steamboat floats down a river near Kingston’s quaint buildings and leafy trees. The romanticized motif, however, was quite different from the reality of Kingston’s relationship with the Hudson River in the early part of the 20th century. During that time, Kingston’s shipping industry declined as the railroad and highways prevailed as the choice modes of transportation for coal.
Ruth Reeves (1892-1966) was a prominent American textile designer, painter, writer, teacher, scholar, and administrator. Her main body of textile design work was produced from 1929 until 1945. She began her textile design career when she was chosen as a prize winner at the first Women’s Wear Textile Design Contest in 1916. After studying under Fernard Léger at the Académie Moderne in Paris, Reeves returned to the United States in 1927 and began creating hand-printed textiles often based on her Cubism-influenced paintings. Throughout her career, Reeves’ continued to seek inspiration from ancient and non-Western art to develop her own unique and modern aesthetic.
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