Winterthur buys rare needlework stitched in 1793 by black girl, 8Delaware’s Winterthur Museum
Winterthur buys rare needlework stitched in 1793 by black girl, 8Delaware’s Winterthur Museum has purchased a rare 18th-century needlework sampler stitched by an 8-year-old Philadelphia girl who was the daughter of free blacks - ensuring that the important relic remains in local hands.Samplers were an important part of a girl’s formal education in early America, and are seen as a window into the history of women, said Linda Eaton, Winterthur’s director of collections. Since most schoolgirls who produced them were white and affluent, a sampler by an educated black girl is considered a major find.“We’re thrilled to get it,” said Eaton, who declined to give the purchase price. The sampler was sold to the museum by Amy Finkel of M. Finkel & Daughter, a Philadelphia antiques dealer that received it on consignment from a family in England.Only a handful of such samplers are known to exist. Winterthur owns two others made by black students, but those date from the mid-19th century.The sampler was stitched in 1793 by Mary D'Silver, who attended the Bray Associates Negro School, founded by an English abolitionist. It was one three Philadelphia schools open to blacks in the 18th century.Mary’s modest sampler is believed to be one of the oldest in existence by a nonwhite student.For her sampler, Mary took a stanza from a well-known abolitionist poem by Anna Laetitia Akin Barbauld, “The Mouse’s Petition.” The poem was an allegory of slavery in which the mouse begs its captor for freedom.THE well-taught philosophic mind,To all compassion gives;Casts round the world an equal eye,And feels for each that lives. Wrought by Mary D'Silver in the 8th Year of her Age Negro School Philadelphia 1793 -- source link
#history#18th century#philadelphia#black history