Winter 2016

Winter 160 www.afamag.com | w ww.incollect.com Embroidered Needlework, Attributed to Sarah Phillips (1656– 1707), probably Boston, Massachusetts, ca. 1670. Wool embroidery on blue-green linen ground, with silver and gold metallic threads and mica, 17½ X 24½ in., period Hogarth frame, 24 ⁄ x 30½ in. Private Collection. This is one of the few extant seventeenth-century American needlework pictures. Sarah Phillips (1656–1707) was the daughter of an English-born, Harvard-educated minister, the Reverend Samuel Phillips, whose parents brought him to Massachusetts in 1630, when he was five. Sarah is believed to have studied at a private school in Boston, where she probably acquired her skills in fancy needlework and stitched her picture around 1670. While Philips’ picture is made up of elements commonly found in seventeenth-century English pattern books and needlework—elegantly dressed upright figures, a central tree of life, a depiction of the prodigal son, and an array of animals, birds, insects, and flowers—it is worked in wool on a wool ground rather than the silk on satin typical of English embroideries. In addition, the colorful, imaginative, and playful freedom of Phillips’ well-balanced composition sets it apart from comparatively stiff English work. THE INSTRUCTION Arts from Private Girls’ Schools and Academies in Early America OF YOUNG LADIES by Robert Shaw F rom colonial days into the nineteenth century, most girls were taught the essential practical skills needed to manage and maintain a household from their mothers and other older female relatives. While girls from well-to-do families had access to more sophisticated schooling and could develop refined tastes and accomplishments, their expected roles differed little from those of the less fortunate. The curriculum for young ladies of means who attended private boarding schools and female academies in early America included a wide range of artistic endeavors in addition to the reading, writing, and arithmetic emphasized in public schools of the time. Students were taught pictorial needlework, weaving, rug hooking, drawing, and painting in multiple media. This decorative “fancy” work tested young women’s skill and also offered a socially acceptable artistic outlet. While some of these efforts were inevitably pedestrian or rote, a surprising number form a body of work that is significant in the history of American art. Equally important are the key roles that women educators played in the development of America’s education system and in the opening of higher learning to women in the decades before and after the Civil War. Art was a distinguishing element of young women’s education in America from the late seventeenth century on, and both the artwork produced in private schools and the teaching later carried on by women who attended them had major and lasting impacts on American society and culture.