ART REVIEW : ‘Samplers’: Stitches in Life of a Young Girl

Teaching young girls to embroider small, oblong pieces of cloth as evidence of beginning proficiency with needle and thread is an idea that has been out of fashion since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. By the mid-19th Century, the need for hand-stitching to mark initials on clothing and linens was eradicated by the cheap availability of indelible ink and by the unstoppable emergence of mass production. The making of embroidered samplers was suddenly obsolete.

From the Colonial settlement of the Northeast to about 1840, however, sampler making wasn’t just a hobby or even a domestic chore. As plainly demonstrated in the small but unusually insightful exhibition, “Samplers and Samplermakers: An American Schoolgirl Art, 1700-1850,” which is at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art through Feb. 2, it was the central activity in the education of a well-bred young lady.

Samplers of course don’t comprise a major art, occupying instead a very specific place within decorative traditions in the United States. Yet, encoded in this once-common brand of folk art is a way of thinking and working that was fundamental to the foundation of Colonial life.

The show was organized by Mary Jaene Edmonds, a Long Beach collector whose own extensive holdings form the display (about 80 samplers are on view). Together with its informative catalogue, “Samplers and Samplermakers” manages to examine this highly precise field in considerable depth; it ends up overturning long-held assumptions about the art.

A wide variety is included. A trained eye can no doubt examine patterns, materials and intricate methods of stitching and knotting and identify the sampler by period, region and perhaps even school.

Still, a clear similarity amid undeniable diversity is the most surprising feature of this art. As an activity, samplermaking seems to have had rather strictly defined parameters, beyond which a young seamstress rarely went, and within which the needleworker’s individuality had to be expressed.

Numerals and the alphabet are of course most prevalent. Pictorial subjects typically tend toward pious depictions of hearth and home--rarely does a stitched image go beyond a picture of the house or garden--further embellished with mottoes of Christian virtue or with homilitic warnings.

To wit: “Our life is ever on the wing / And death is ever nigh / The moment when our lives begin / We all begin to die.”

Flowers, fruits and foliate patterns are everywhere, establishing a basic decorative motif. Sometimes they form the principal imagery, as in Mehitable Foster’s design of birds, urns and vases, which feels vaguely Chinese, or in the sharp geometry of Martha Avery’s floral motifs, both from 1786. Almost always, flora will at least be found creating a lively patterned border to decorate the defining edges of the composition.

Plainly, abundance and fecundity were the principal province of women, and these embroideries show how the sentiment was literally stitched into the fabric of Colonial life. The transformation of the tree of life into a personal family tree became a common motif for a subset of samplers used to record the path of genealogy.

Mary Jaene Edmonds has, almost single-handedly, upended conventional wisdom about the origins and uses of Colonial and early 19th-Century samplers. Long assumed to have been produced in the home, as a means by which mothers passed on a skill to daughters, samplers turn out to have been a far more formal enterprise.

As the collector explains in the show’s catalogue, samplers were stitched by young girls, not adults, under the vigilance of a schoolmistress. Significantly, they were made in boarding or private day schools--attended by the children of wealthy landowners, at first, and later by the daughters of the emerging merchant class--and weren’t the product of public school education.

The false assumption of domestic origin for embroidered samplers has arisen from the mistaken idea that young Colonial women did not receive formal education. The 80 works in the show--two-thirds of which Edmonds has managed to identify by maker and school--stand as primary evidence of the existence of early education for young women in the United States.

Perhaps the most notable formal characteristic of sampler design is an unwavering symmetry. There are prominent exceptions, such as Rebeccah Thomas’s 1817 ode to Christian salvation, which renders a young lady in a landscape as a kind of “peaceable kingdom,” or Barbara Hunsicker’s seemingly random scattering of stitched images across the pictorial field, in a surprisingly airy sampler from 1831. And the rare application of paint on silk, as in an 1827 sampler attributed to Jane Hanson, creates a thoroughly atmospheric landscape space unlike any other in the show.

Typically, however, the guiding principle in the often rigorously bilateral symmetry of these designs seems to be “a place for everything and everything in its place.” This should not be unexpected in needlework, a flat and two-dimensional medium in which the warp and weft of the loom marks out a regular grid on which embellishment will appear.

Yet, neither should the medium be thought of as one which formally prevented a wide-open range of options for the artisan. Instead, the values meant to be expressed in the work of Colonial American girls and young women found the medium of sampler embroidery to be an appropriate vehicle for their issuance. That’s why they proliferated.

Symmetry is rooted in the mathematical perfection of geometry. Applied to needlework and embroidery patterns celebrating the fecund values of hearth, home, Christian virtue, gentility and obedience, schoolgirl samplers are thus emphatically idealized pictures.

The clear and calculable visual rhythm of symmetry speaks of rote repetition, of the steady commitment of certain ideas to memory. Meditative, intensely focused and inward-looking, the technical intricacies of embroidery create for this activity an aura of diligent industry and even duty.

The patterned borders so prevalent to the genre literally mark off the space of a sampler as a world apart--as highly organized and separate from the seeming chaos of the world around it. With industry and skill, samplermakers erected elaborate little fences inside of which their lives would soon be lived.

* At the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., (213) 857-6000, through Feb. 2. Closed Mondays.