Embroidered sampler

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This sampler features motifs common to Dutch samplers of the period, including flower pots, birds flanking trees, and pierced hearts. The sampler maker also stitched an ape spinning yarn, possibly symbolic of the thread of life. Apes appear in seventeenth-century Dutch and English needlework, functioning as a mirror or critique of human behavior, or representing the sense of taste in compositions of the five senses. The letters AI (or AJ, as "I" and "J" were written interchangeably in the Latin alphabet at this time) and the year 1659 are stitched onto the linen, most likely the initials of the maker and the year in which she completed her work.

European Sculpture and Decorative Arts

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The fifty thousand objects in the Museum's comprehensive and historically important collection of European sculpture and decorative arts reflect the development of a number of art forms in Western European countries from the early fifteenth through the early twentieth century. The holdings include sculpture in many sizes and media, woodwork and furniture, ceramics and glass, metalwork and jewelry, horological and mathematical instruments, and tapestries and textiles. Ceramics made in Asia for export to European markets and sculpture and decorative arts produced in Latin America during this period are also included among these works.

Metropolitan Museum of Art