With Needle and Brush

by Carol & Stephen Huber T he Connecticut River Valley region stretches from northern New Hampshire to Long Island Sound. The area including Deerfield, Massachusetts, south to Old Saybrook, Connecticut, was an important center for needlework. Taught by skilled instructresses, young women in fashionable academies and smaller day schools mastered the art of needlework and painting, beginning with elementary samplers and advancing to canvaswork in the eighteenth century and to exquisite pictorial silk embroideries and detailed watercolors on paper and silk at the turn of the nineteenth century. The finished pieces demonstrated the young women’s accomplishments in the “polite arts” and displayed the gentility and social status of their families. The exhibition With Needle and Brush: Schoolgirl Embroidery from the Connecticut River Valley is the first to examine the extraordinary needlework and watercolors created by young ladies attending school in the Valley in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Over seventy works, mostly from private collections and never before on exhibit, are included. The embroideries and watercolors reveal the stylistic distinctions of the various schools and teachers responsible for educating young women in the region over two hundred years ago. The following is a selection of works included in the exhibition. Mary Ann Post (1813–1883), Hebron, Conn. Family register, Glastonbury, Conn., 1827 Silk on linen; 18 x 22 inches Private collection Family register samplers became enormously popular in the early nineteenth century, recording marriages, births, and deaths. They sometimes included depictions of several generations of a family alongside memorial monuments.Mary Ann Post of Hebron, Connecticut, the daughter of a farmer, worked this striking sampler at Miss Cornwall’s school in Glastonbury, Connecticut, in 1827. Several other samplers from this school share the same characteristic pillars with arched enclosure and the elaborate floral border with bow-tied garlands. She left space for the death dates of her parents and brother to be added later. SAMPLERS A girl’s first sewing endeavor at school was a sampler on which she stitched letters and numbers as a means of learning both basic academic and sewing skills (these were referred to as “marking” samplers; not illustrated). A larger, more pictorial sampler or family register followed, which sometimes included lettering and numbers along with a verse or scenic panel. Samplers are usually stitched on linen and often relay specific information about the maker, such as her name, date of birth, parents, teacher, town, and age.