American needlework

Magazine Antiques, April, 2001 by Allison Eckardt Ledes

The Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, has its origins in the East India Marine Society, founded in 1799. At that time, Salem enjoyed economic prosperity as one of the leading ports of New England and maintained commercial ties with ports around the world. The society was founded to house "a museum of natural and artificial curiosities from beyond the Capes [Cape of Good Hope and Cape Horn]." Overtime, the institution not only underwent several changes of name, but it also became the repository for the possessions of some of the most prominent local families in addition to the ethnographic material and natural specimens collected on voyages to the far corners of the globe.

Today the collections include a fair number of pieces made in New England during the colonial and Federal periods, and more than twenty-five thousand American textiles, costumes, and related accessories, making the museum a particularly rich repository in this area. A selection of more than one hundred textiles from the permanent collection, supplemented by loans, comprises an exhibition entitled Painted with Thread: The Art of American Embroidery, which is on view at the museum from April 13 through September20. The exhibition

focuses on pieces made or used on the North Shore of Massachusetts--from a white-work sampler stitched between about 1610 and 1620 by Anne Gower Endicott in England, which she brought to America in 1628, to a wool and cotton blanket woven by Linda Behar last year, which features portraits of her parents and herself based on photographs. Among the pieces with a local history of ownership are examples of needlework created in Asia and Europe.

Schoolteachers instructed young girls how to sew as part of an academy's curriculum. Among those whose students are represented by works in the exhibition are Misses Saunders and Beach who ran a school in Dorchester, Massachusetts, and Miss Sarah Stivours of Salem. Needlework was not only the purview of women. Sailors, for example, had to learn the rudiments of sewing in order to mend sails and maintain their clothing during long periods at sea In the nineteenth century seamen also filled leisure time creating what were then called "woolies," embroidered portraits of ships and other aspects of maritime life. During the Victorian period women embroidered household articles to embellish their surroundings. Included in the show are table covers, needlework patterns, needle worked fire screens, valances for mantels and beds, needlework upholstery, and sewing tools. There are also needlework pictures worked in memory of a deceased friend, relative, or well-known public figure.