Sampler with apocalyptic verse

Ann McFarlan

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This delightfully original sampler, with borders illustrating buildings and trees, reveals the visual influences and religious concerns of the part of New York State where McFarlan grew up in the 1820s. The sampler's composition and simple blue-and-white palette resemble the popular woven coverlets made by New York State weavers between 1820 and 1850. Typically, the coverlets were made of indigo-dyed dark blue wool and natural cotton and often had borders decoarted with repeating patterns of village houses. But the buildings pictured on this sampler have a meaning beyond a young girl's imitation of the designs found on a common bed covering. The Bible verse stitched in the lower left-hand corner speaks of the time after Judgment Day when redeemed souls will rise from the dead and "soar to the blest mansions." Perhaps the houses and church embroidered here are those heavenly abodes. Upstate New York was a center for religious revivalism in the first half of the nineteenth century; the imminent approach of the millennium was one of the beliefs central to many of the evangelical Christian groups that settled there. McFarlan both practiced her stitching and voiced her religious convictions in this unusual sampler.

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