Coat of Arms

Mary Ann Thomas

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

These diamond-shaped coats of arms represent the various kinds of intricate crafts practiced by young women in eighteenth-century New England. In demonstration of their accomplished domestic talents, female family members executed these decorative emblems at schools for young ladies where they copied an appealing coat of arms from a pattern book. Coats of arms were made either in embroidery or quillwork, a technique of tightly curled paper shaped into a design, frequently embellished with crushed glass, mica, and pearls. However, embroidered coats of arms with silk and precious metallic threads on a black silk background were more common. Although lacking the royal social hierarchy of Great Britain, many of Boston’s merchant class families adopted coats of arms to imply heraldic ancestry and reflect their wealth and social position.

The American Wing

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The American Wing's ever-evolving collection comprises some 20,000 works of art by African American, Euro American, Latin American, and Native American men and women. Ranging from the colonial to early-modern periods, the holdings include painting, sculpture, works on paper, and decorative arts—including furniture, textiles, ceramics, glass, silver, metalwork, jewelry, basketry, quill and bead embroidery—as well as historical interiors and architectural fragments.

Metropolitan Museum of Art