Embroidered Sampler

Priscilla T. Glover

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This piece belongs to a group of the least formal samplers thought to have been made under the tutelage of one Salem teacher. Worked in silk on a green linsey-woolsey ground, they often have flowering vine borders and a crisscross woven basket of flowers. More elegant versions of this type of basket can be found as carved ornaments on Federal furniture made in the Salem area. Other motifs on this sampler--the sawtooth border and the row of stylized strawberries beneath Priscilla's name--relate to earlier local examples. The motto on this sampler seems to have been particularly popular; it is also stitched on Rebekah Munro's Providence sampler (ca. 1791; 1984.331.13) and Emily Kittredge's sampler from Nelson, New Hampshire (1826; 1984.331.5).

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