Artwork story
About Sampler
The artist and artwork
An unknown British needleworker made this Sampler during the eighteenth century in cotton on linen. It is both an embroidered textile and a display of learned skill. Lettering and patterned stitches lead into a devotional verse, then a small imagined landscape filled with crowns, trees, animals, flowering urns, and a many-windowed house. The Met does not identify the maker, although Mary Dawson is stitched across the bottom.
The world around it
Samplers belonged to the education of eighteenth-century girls and young women. The Met explains that they were made in formal schools or under instruction at home, combining sewing with basic reading, writing, and arithmetic for lives expected to center on household management. Earlier samplers, pattern books, instructional manuals, penmanship books, and engravings carried alphabets and motifs between generations and places. That practical system still allowed choices in arrangement and color. Because many needleworkers left few other records, a sampler can be both a lesson sheet and the surviving evidence of a life otherwise difficult to recover.
A detail to notice
The sampler changes character halfway down. Dark blue letters state a prayer beginning “Jesus permit thy gracious name to stand,” asking that divine love be written upon the child’s heart. Below, five red-and-blue crowns float over lions, deer, and dogs between alternating trees. Birds balance on striped trees beside a crenellated house, squirrels face inward, and flowering urns glow in red thread. Variations in the animals, trees, and spacing reveal decisions made stitch by stitch. At the lower corners, MARY and DAWSON turn the landscape into a signature-like field. Yet the museum still lists an unknown maker. The name may identify the needleworker, but without documentation it cannot safely be treated as proven authorship. The textile speaks a name clearly while history leaves the person behind it uncertain.
Look closer: materials, scale, and subjects
The recorded object is sampler made in Cotton on linen and held in the European Sculpture and Decorative Arts department.
Recorded dimensions include 15 1/2 × 12 3/8 in. (39.4 × 31.4 cm).
Subject terms include Birds, Deer, Dogs, Lions, Trees, and Crowns. Treat them as guideposts, not a complete interpretation.
Collection history and public-domain source
The collection credit line is From the Collection of Mrs. Lathrop Colgate Harper, Bequest of Mabel Herbert Harper, 1957.
The individual artwork page and official image were verified as Public Domain on 2026-08-23.
No Context Gallery independently uses the public-domain image. The source museum has not endorsed, sponsored, or affiliated itself with these products.
Research sources
See the products currently available with this artwork. Product choices appear only when the exact item is published, in stock, and available to purchase.
