Artwork story
About Sampler
The artist and artwork
An unidentified maker stitched this Sampler in 1809 with silk thread on wool canvas. A sampler was both an exercise and a durable record of needlework skill: text, borders, figures, animals, and plants displayed control of repeated stitches. This one organizes biblical text and the story of Adam and Eve around a broad Tree of Knowledge, with winged figures above and birds, butterflies, and beasts below. Because no name, school, country, or city survives in the catalog record, the embroidery itself, not an invented biography, is our closest evidence for its maker.
The world around it
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, samplers belonged to a changing educational world. The Met’s survey of American and European examples explains that young women made them at formal schools or under informal instruction at home. Girls were commonly expected to learn reading, writing, arithmetic, and sewing; around 1800, some schools and families broadened girls’ intellectual education. A pictorial sampler could bring those lessons together, demonstrating literacy, biblical knowledge, design judgment, and command of materials before mechanized sewing.
A detail to notice
The stitched words capture Adam shifting blame after eating the forbidden fruit: he tells God that the woman gave him fruit from the tree. Below, the maker turns that sentence into a symmetrical stage. Adam and Eve reach toward one another on opposite sides of the trunk while the serpent coils around it in a bold S-curve. Two winged figures fly inward; paired butterflies, clipped trees, flower baskets, birds, goats, dogs, and lions expand Eden toward the edges. A chain of flower-filled compartments forms the side and upper border, but the bottom opens into layered bands of green, yellow, and brown. Scale shifts: enormous butterflies hover beside tiny lions, and the tree is both narrative center and organizing spine.
Look closer: materials, scale, and subjects
The recorded object is sampler made in Silk on wool canvas and held in the European Sculpture and Decorative Arts department.
Recorded dimensions include H. 16 5/8 x W. 13 1/4 inches (42.2 x 33.7 cm).
Subject terms include Dogs, Goats, Butterflies, Lions, Snakes, and Trees. 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
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