Winter 2016

Winter 162 www.afamag.com | w ww.incollect.com Palemon and Lavinia, Sophia Burpee (1788–1814), Sterling, Massachusetts, ca. 1806. Silk embroidery and watercolor on satin, 15⅝ x 13⅜ in. Fenimore Art Museum, Cooperstown, New York, Jean and Howard Lipman Collection, Gift of Stephen C. Clark (N0121.1961). Pictures that combined needlework and watercolor became increasingly popular in the early decades of the nineteenth century as skills in painting gained social ascendency over handwork. Among the influences on this transition were increased literacy and the wider availability of prints in books. This silk embroidery and watercolor on satin of the lovers Palemon and Lavinia created by Sophia Burpee (1788–1814) in about 1806 demonstrates all these influences. Sophia Burpee’s source was a print illustrating the Scottish poet James Thomson’s poem Autumn , from The Seasons , a long, descriptive poem first published between 1726 and 1730 that remained immensely popular well into the nineteenth century. Thompson’s tale of Palemon and Lavinia, which he freely adapted from the Biblical story of Ruth and Boaz, was printed separately in the late 1700s and became the subject of numerous paintings, prints, and needlework. Pictorial Sampler, 1807. Mary Antrim (1795–1884), Burlington County, New Jersey. Silk embroidery on linen with cut paper and watercolor, ink on paper, 17 x 16¾ in. in original arched frame 24½ x 19⅜ Private Collection. Mary Antrim was one of eight children born to John Antrim (1766 – 1849), who was a weaver, and his wife Sarah Rogers (1772 – 1815). Her sampler belongs to a recently recognized group of six closely related pieces worked by girls in Burlington County, New Jersey. Mary’s is dated 1807, while all the others are dated 1804. However, Mary’s date appears only in calligraphy on paper at the top of her fancy frame, so it is likely that she too stitched her piece in 1804 and framed it later. All the samplers are organized in three bands of pictorial work and share a central figure of a young woman with a paper face and bonnet who is sitting sidesaddle on a horse in the bottom band. All six are believed to have been made under the instruction of a single teacher, most likely at the Society of Friends’ School in Upper Springfield, New Jersey.