Sampler

Eliza Hodges Oliver

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This sampler was made by Eliza Hodges Oliver of Suffolk, Virginia in 1829, when she was twelve years old. She included the requisite alphabets in a variety of lettering styles, and a religious verse that is relatively common on samplers from the early nineteenth century. After her name and information, she embroidered a long series of initials of friends and family; the first two "TO" and "MO" are the initials of her parents, Thomas and Mary Oliver. In 1838, when Eliza was twenty, she married a farmer named Richard Parker (1816-1857). They had nine children together; sadly three of their sons, Richard, Jesse, and Calvin, died as young men while serving as Confederate soldiers in the Civil War. Eliza herself died in 1863, while the war was still raging.

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