Winter 2016

2016 Antiques & Fine Art 161 Adam and Eve in Paradise, Lydia Hart (Boston, Massachusetts), 1744. Silk embroidery on linen, 11½ x 9 in., period Hogarth frame, 15 x 12½ in. Private Collection. This sampler, which is signed by Lydia Hart and dated 1744, belongs to the earliest known group of related American samplers. Like the other very similar pieces in the group, which were made in Boston between 1724 and 1754, Lydia’s sampler depicts Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, surrounded by “every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air” while standing on either side of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, whose fruit God had admonished them not to eat lest they “surely die.” Each of them holds an apple, but the snake that is wrapped around the central tree faces Adam rather than Eve, whom both Adam and God later blamed for the Fall. Hart’s sampler is also unusual because she framed the central image with a subtle floral border, an innovation that would become standard in later needle works. Embroidery of the Grant Arms, Ann Grant (1748–1838), 1769. Polychrome silk embroidery, metallic thread, black satin weave, silk ground, 25⅝ x 29⅝ in. Courtesy of Historic Deerfield. Ann Grant was a daughter of a prominent East Windsor, Connecticut, family. In the summer of 1767, when she was nearly twenty years old, she traveled to Boston to study embroidery with Jannette Day, a Scottish woman who had emigrated to the city and opened a school there in 1756. Mrs. Day, who went by both Jannette and Jane, advertised her business in a number of regional newspapers, which is likely how Ann Grant and her parents learned of it. After three months of study, Day presented Grant with a bill for forty-one pounds, more than thirty-one of which were for embroidery supplies, including 100 skeins of silk, sixty-one yards of “silver gold,”and nineteen yards of “Gold Flatt.” Day returned to the British Isles in 1768, but the following year, Grant continued her study with the Misses Ann and Elizabeth Cummings, who had taken over Day’s school. She spent seventeen weeks at the Cummings’ school with the Cummings sisters, during which time she completed this family coat of arms worked in silk with gold and silver threads and metallic raised work.