With Needle and Brush

Charlotte Porter (1799–?) Sampler, Middletown, Conn., 1810 Silk on linsey-woolsey; 17¼ x 16¾ inches Private collection Charlotte Porter chose a green linsey-woolsey, more typically found in samplers from the northeast corner of Massachusetts and nearby areas of Maine and New Hampshire, on which to work her charming pictorial Middletown sampler. Many samplers from Middletown include impres- sive houses or groups of buildings set in a townscape, suggesting the influence of one teacher’s designs. Alice Mather (1762–1842), Lyme, Conn. Sampler, Norwich, Conn., 1774 Silk on linen with a printed chintz border; 13¾ x 11½ inches Private collection Alice Mather included a bucolic scenic panel in her sampler and further enhanced it with the unusual addi- tion of a floral chintz applied border. A resident of Lyme, Alice attended school in Norwich, Connecticut, where the solidly stitched black background appeared on other samplers in the 1760s, as did small sections of a Greek key pattern as seen here in the alphabet. The blue house and biblical verse are found on other Norwich samplers. Melancia Bowker (1803–1875) Sampler, Fitzwilliam, N.H., 1817 Silk, chenille, and paper on linen; 17 x 21½ inches Private collection A girl holding a bouquet and standing in a disproportionate landscape dotted with sheep is surrounded by a lavishly embroidered floral border in this large sampler stitched by Melancia Bowker at age thirteen. The girl’s face and the sheep are applied paper, a technique not commonly found on New England samplers. The four Bowker daughters from Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire, are all known to have created or taught needlework and Laura Bowker made a sampler very similar to Melancia’s, also in 1817, and now in the collection of the Cooper- Hewitt, National Museum of Design, Smithsonian Institution. SAMPLERS continued