Sewn in Place: Gender, Materiality, and Mapmaking in the Early United States

Abstract

Focused on four early nineteenth-century embroidered maps of the US capital in Washington, DC, the following analysis situates the maps’ appropriation of printed material in the context of early modern women’s work and its associated knowledge networks, exploring how embroidery’s unique set of material practices restructured conventional cartography’s claims to power and political oversight. Investigating how such practices shaped the mapmakers’ relationship to the powerful symbolism of the national capital, this account reveals embroidery to be more than just an imitative, schoolgirl art. Embroidery emerges as a way of thinking about and working with space all its own.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Needlework scholar Gloria Seaman Allen has provided the most comprehensive account to date of these maps in Allen, Columbia’s Daughters: Girlhood Embroidery from the District of Columbia, ed. Lynne Anderson (Baltimore: Chesapeake Book Company, 2012), 58–67. These maps are also included in Judith A. Tyner’s more recent discussion of the Anglo-American tradition of embroidered mapmaking. This latter text includes a comprehensive census of all examples of US and British embroidered maps known at the time of its publication. Tyner, Stitching the World: Embroidered Maps and Women’s Geographical Education (London: Routledge, 2016), 86, 123–26.

2 While a handful of women present themselves as possible instructors for these young women, geographic and familial ties with Eve Resler point to a Mrs. Cooke as a likely originator of the sampler’s design. While Mrs. Cooke’s 1801 advertisements in the Alexandria Gazette promised needlework instruction “for those young ladies who . . . may wish to acquire that useful and truly elegant accomplishment,” the absence of any specific reference to embroidered maps makes it impossible to determine whether her school was, in fact, the origin for these three compositions. Discussion of possible instructors and Cooke’s advertisement can be found in Allen, Columbia’s Daughters, 67.

3 Biographical details for these three women are provided in Allen, Columbia’s Daughters.

4 No firm provenance links the Susanna W. Atkinson identified in Brunswick County court records to this map, but the date of her marriage suggests a possible birth date proximate to the 1793 date supplied by the signature on the embroidery. The provision of money to fund her half- sister’s education would have also echoed provisions made for her to continue the kind of education represented in this elaborate embroidered picture. Reference to her material wealth can be found in an 1837 court case filed against her husband after her death. Benjamin Watkins Leigh, Cases Decided in the Supreme Court of Appeals of Virginia, vol. 8 (Richmond, VA: Shepherd & Colin, 1839), 1–9.

5 Virginia Whelan, “Marvelous Maps: Five Schoolgirl Embroideries of the Plan of the City of Washington ca. 1800,” Dames Discovery 33, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2023): 10–11.

6 References to these compositions as both map samplers and embroidered maps is common, but as I describe below, the luxurious materials and sophistication of the compositions suggest that they should more properly be called embroidered maps to link them to the more common practice of embroidered picture-making among elite young women of this period.

7 Tyner, Stitching the World, 28–30, 74–76. Jennie Batchelor notes the appearance of maps in British periodicals directed at women as early as the 1760s, but cites a 1776 issue of London’s Lady’s Magazine as one of the first publications “to encourage readers to instill geographical knowledge by inviting readers to stitch the contours of nations onto fabric.” Batchelor, The Lady’s Magazine (1770–1832) and the Making of Literary History (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022), 120n70.

8 In the early modern period, it was not uncommon to find women who could sew their letters but were unable to use pen and ink to sign their name. Rebecca Scott, Samplers (Oxford: Shire, 2009), 56–60. Broader discussion of needlework and the contours of female education in colonial American literacy is available in Betty Ring, Girlhood Embroidery: American Samplers and Pictorial Needlework, 1650–1850 (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1993); Pamela A. Parmal, Women’s Work: Embroidery in Colonial Boston (Boston: MFA Publications, 2012); and Susan Prendergast Schoelwer, Connecticut Needlework: Women, Art, and Family, 1740–1840 (Hartford: Connecticut Historical Society, 2010), 12–14.

9 Parmal, Women’s Work, 77–97; and Rachel Harmeyer, “The Education of Daughters: Embroidered Pictures after Angelica Kauffmann,” in The Enlightened Mind: Education in the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. Amanda Strasik (Wilmington, DE: Vernon Art and Science, 2022), 43–66.

10 On the expansion of the private academy throughout New England and New York in the years following the American Revolution, see Mary Kelley, Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America’s Republic (Williamsburg, VA: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture; Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 28, 66–111; and Kim Tolley, “The Rise of the Academies: Continuity or Change?,” History of Education Quarterly 41, no. 2 (2001): 225–39. A similar, though smaller, movement toward the establishment of academies occurred in the southern states, documented in Catherine Clinton, “Equally Their Due: The Education of the Planter Daughter in the Early Republic,” Journal of the Early Republic 2, no. 1 (1982): 39–60, https://doi.org/10.2307/3122534.

11 Tyner, Stitching the World, 6, 12–19. See also Robert Shaw, The Instruction of Young Ladies: Arts from Private Girls’ Schools and Academies in Early America, exh. cat. (Cooperstown, NY: Fenimore Art Museum, 2016); and Susan Schulten, “Map Drawing, Graphic Literacy, and Pedagogy in the Early Republic,” History of Education Quarterly 57, no. 2 (2017): 185–220.

12 Harmeyer, “Education of Daughters,” 44.

13 Chloe Wigston Smith, “The Empire of Home: Global Domestic Objects and The Female American (1767),” Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 40, no. 1 (2017): 67–87.

14 Ring, Girlhood Embroidery, 312–17, 502–5.

15 Martin Brückner, The Geographic Revolution in Early America: Maps, Literacy, and National Identity (Williamsburg, VA: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture; Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 1–8; and Brückner, The Social Life of Maps in America, 1750–1860 (Williamsburg, VA: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture; Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 309.

16 Schulten, “Map Drawing, Graphic Literacy, and Pedagogy in the Early Republic,” 216–20.

17 Tyner, Stitching the World, 1–7.

18 John Taylor, “In Praise of the Needle,” in The Needles Excellency a New Booke Wherin Are Divers Admirable Workes Wrought with the Needle; Newly Invented and Cut in Copper for the Pleasure and Profit of the Industrious ([London]: printed for James Boler and are to be sold at the Signe of the Marigold in Paules Church yard, 1631), [6–9].

19 Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 137.

20 See, for example J. B. Harley, “Maps, Knowledge, and Power,” in The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography, ed. Paul Laxton (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002); Denis Wood and John Fels, The Power of Maps (New York: Guilford Press, 1992); Christian Jacob, The Sovereign Map: Theoretical Approaches in Cartography throughout History, trans. Edward H. Dahl (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); and Raymond B. Craib, “Cartography and Decolonization,” in Decolonizing the Map: Cartography from Colony to Nation, ed. James R. Akerman and Kenneth Nebenzahl Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 11–71.

21 Elissa Auther, “Miriam Schapiro and the Politics of the Decorative,” in With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art, 1972–1985, ed. Anna Katz, exh. cat. (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art; New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019), 80.

22 Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: With Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects (Boston: printed by Peter Edes for Thomas and Andrews, 1792), 164–65.

23 Rozsika Parker, The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine (New York: Routledge, 1989), vi.

24 Ibid., 5–6.

25 Griselda Pollock, Generations and Geographies in the Visual Arts: Feminist Readings (London: Routledge, 1996), 13.

26 The categorization of needlework as art or craft has served as a proxy debate for the role of feminism in art history, with battle lines drawn early on. Miriam Schapiro, Patricia Mainardi, and Norma Broude all sought to insert needlework into mainstream narratives of modern art, while Rozsika Parker and Tamar Garb sought to use a history of needlework to overturn those same mainstream narratives. Elissa Auther offers a helpful synthesis of these strands of scholarship in her recent essay on Miriam Schapiro. Auther, “Miriam Schapiro and the Politics of the Decorative,” 76–80. See also Mainardi, “Quilts: The Great American Art,” in Feminism and Art History: Questioning the Litany, ed. Broude and Garrard (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), 331–46; Broude, “Miriam Schapiro and ‘Femmage’: Reflections on the Conflict between Decoration and Abstraction in Twentieth-Century Art,” in Broude and Garrard, Feminism and Art History, 314–30; and Garb, “Engaging Embroidery,” review of The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and Making of the Feminine, by Rozsika Parker, Art History 9, no. 1 (1986): 131–34.

27 An alternative approach has been embraced by literary historians, who have sought to certify needlework’s intellectual labor by comparison with writing. See Maureen Daly Goggin, “Visual Rhetoric in Pens of Steel and Inks of Silk: Challenging the Great Visual/Verbal Divide,” in Defining Visual Rhetorics, ed. Charles A. Hill and Marguerite H. Helmers (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2004), 87–110; Heather Pritash, “The Needle as the Pen: Intentionality, Needlework, and the Production of Alternate Discourses of Power,” in Women and the Material Culture of Needlework and Textiles, 1750–1950, ed. Goggin and Beth Fowkes Tobin (Farnham, UK; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), 13–30; Susan Frye, Pens and Needles: Women’s Textualities in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010); and Serena Dyer and Chloe Wigston Smith, introduction to Material Literacy in Eighteenth-Century Britain: A Nation of Makers, ed. Dyer and Smith (London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2020), 1–15.

28 Both Pamela Smith and Glenn Adamson have pioneered work in this field, with Smith’s work focusing on the early modern period and Adamson directing attention to the way in which craft knowledge intersects with the dynamics of industrialization. See Smith, “Why Write a Book? From Lived Experience to the Written Word in Early Modern Europe,” Bulletin of the German Historical Institute 47 (Fall 2010): 25–50, as well as her larger discussion of artisanal epistemology in Smith, The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); and Adamson, The Invention of Craft (London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2018). The work of women, however, is noticeably absent in both treatments, an issue addressed more recently in the work of Elaine Yuen Tien Leong, Recipes and Everyday Knowledge: Medicine, Science, and the Household in Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018); and Leonie Hannan, A Culture of Curiosity: Science in the Eighteenth-Century Home (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2023).

29 Crystal B. Lake, “Needlework Verse,” in Dyer and Smith, Material Literacy in Eighteenth-Century Britain, 36.

30 Wit is a critical, and understudied, aspect of needlework practice, addressed in Sumpter T. Priddy, American Fancy: Exuberance in the Arts, 1790–1840, exh. cat. (Milwaukee, WI: Chipstone Foundation and the Milwaukee Art Museum, 2004), 10, 12, 14–15, 16.

31 John R. Short, Representing the Republic: Mapping the United States, 1600–1900 (London: Reaktion, 2001), 91–106.

32 Jedidiah Morse, Geography Made Easy, Being an Abridgement of the American Universal Geography: Containing Astronomical Geography, Discovery and General Description of America, General View of the United States . . . : To Which Is Added, a Geographical Account of the European Settlements in America; and of Europe, Asia and Africa: Illustrated with Eight Neat Maps and Cuts: Calculated Particularly for the Use and Improvement of Schools in the United States, 2nd ed. (Boston: printed by Isaiah Thomas & Ebenezer T. Andrews, 1790), [v]. Morse’s nativist approach to geography has been amply explored by both John Rennie Short and Martin Brückner. Jill Lepore has traced similar arguments in the field of grammar and literacy, from the work of Noah Webster to that of Samuel Morse. Lepore, A Is for American: Letters and Other Characters in the Newly United States (New York: Vintage, 2003).

33 Morse, Geography Made Easy, vi.

34 Benjamin Rush, Thoughts upon Female Education Accomodated to the Present State of Society, Manners, and Government in the United States of America: Addressed to the Visitors of the Young Ladies’ Academy in Philadelphia, 28 July, 1787, at the Close of the Quarterly Examination (Philadelphia: Prichard & Hall, 1787), 5.

35 Brückner, Geographic Revolution, 141.

36 Schulten, “Map Drawing, Graphic Literacy, and Pedagogy in the Early Republic,” 198.

37 Both Short’s Representing the Republic and Brückner’s Geographic Revolution build on the model established in Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 2016). In contrast, Trish Loughran has pushed back on this idea, suggesting that a material history of print actually indicates a far more fractured view of the nation, representative of multiple different publics rather than a singular and broadly unified populace. My argument proceeds more along these lines, identifying the embroidered map as a unique way of accessing one (or perhaps some) of these fractured publics. Loughran, The Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age of U.S. Nation Building, 1770–1870 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).

38 Adam Costanzo, George Washington’s Washington: Visions for the National Capital in the Early American Republic (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2018), 2–4.

39 Dell Upton, Another City: Urban Life and Urban Spaces in the New American Republic (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 118.

40 L’Enfant received from Jefferson maps of several European cities, including Amsterdam, Paris, Marseilles, Turin, and Milan. These immediate precedents, as well as L’Enfant’s own training in civil engineering and topographical drawing as part of his military career, formed the basis for his design of the new capital. Costanzo, George Washington’s Washington, 22–23.

41 The second half of the eighteenth century saw a transformation in the utility of maps in early America, especially as objects of private ownership. Maps acquired a decorative function, classed alongside pictorial prints in booksellers’ advertisements and hung on walls in late eighteenth-century homes. While they remained scientific instruments, they also become signs, symbols, and tools of social engagement. Brückner, Social Life of Maps, 165–71.

42 Thackara and Vallance produced a periodical version that was issued in the March 1792 issue of The Universal Asylum and Columbian Magazine. A second edition of this same print accompanied Tobias Lear’s Observations on the River Potomack in 1793 and again in 1794. In June 1792, Thackara and Vallance also produced a more elaborate version of this plan as a stand-alone print, which survives in two states. Samuel Hill likewise produced a periodical version for The Massachusetts Magazine in April 1792 and a more elaborate stand-alone version later in July.

43 Iris Miller, Washington in Maps: 1606–2000 (New York: Rizzoli International, 2002), 50–53.

44 Herbert Ridgeway Collins, Threads of History: Americana Recorded on Cloth 1775 to the Present (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1979), 59.

45 Tanner’s stipple engraving (which I have only been able to locate in reproduction) appears to have synthesized two of the most popular traditions of Washington portraiture, incorporating the military regalia found in portraits based on Edward Savage’s 1792 stipple engraving with the style of wig and direct gaze adopted in prints after Gilbert Stuart’s Athenaeum portrait. As described in Charles Henry Hart’s Catalogue of the Engraved Portraits of Washington (# 391), the print includes the text embroidered by all five young women under the image of the president. Hart, Catalogue of the Engraved Portraits of Washington (New York: Grolier Club of the City of New York, 1904), 290.

46 Print sources for much of the maps’ emblematic and ornamental material have thus far eluded identification, but the emblem of Justice is based on a 1797 print by Thomas Clark, as identified in Davida Tenenbaum Deutsch, “Needlework Patterns and Their Use in America,” The Magazine Antiques 139, no. 2 (February 1991): 368–81.

47 On the mobility and manipulability of print in this period, see Anne Puetz, “Design Instruction for Artisans in Eighteenth-Century Britain,” Journal of Design History 12, no. 3 (1999): 221–25; and Lucy Peltz, Facing the Text: Extra-Illustration, Print Culture, and Society in Britain, 1769–1840 (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library Press, 2017).

48 Jane Nylander suggests that schools would have held collections of unframed prints and books of illustrations, citing an invitation to parents to view such sources in an advertisement for an academy in Dorchester, MA. Nylander, “Some Print Sources of New England Schoolgirl Art,” The Magazine Antiques 110, no. 2 (1976): 296–97. See also Nancy Graves Cabot, “Engravings and Embroideries: The Sources of Some Designs in the Fishing Lady Pictures,” The Magazine Antiques 58, no. 6 (December 1950): 476–78; Deutsch, “Needlework Patterns and Their Use in America”; Ariane Fennetaux, “Female Crafts: Women and Bricolage in Late Georgian Britain, 1750–1820,” in Women and Things, 1750–1950: Gendered Material Strategies, ed. Maureen Daly Goggin and Beth Fowkes Tobin (Farnham, UK; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), 91–108; and Andrea Pappas, “Each Wise Nymph That Angles for a Heart: The Politics of Courtship in the Boston ‘Fishing Lady’ Pictures,” Winterthur Portfolio 49, no. 1 (2015): 10–19.

49 Anna Lena Lindberg, “Through the Needle’s Eye: Embroidered Pictures on the Threshold of Modernity,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 31, no. 4 (1998): 503–9. It should be noted that scholarship on printwork is woefully thin. Lindberg’s article, although it deals with the Swedish rather than the American context, is useful for the ways in which it both summarizes the broader category of work and deals with some of the thornier issues involved in printerly reproduction. See also Santina M. Levey, Discovering Embroidery of the Nineteenth Century, 2nd ed., (Aylesbury, UK: Shire, 1989), 25; and Rosika Desnoyers, Pictorial Embroidery in England: A Critical History of Needlepainting and Berlin Work (London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2019), 99–103.

50 William Huntting Howell, Against Self-Reliance: The Arts of Dependence in the Early United States (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 124–35. See also Howell, “Spirits of Emulation: Readers, Samplers, and the Republican Girl, 1787–1810,” American Literature 81, no. 3 (2009): 497–526.

51 Much of the foundational work on early American embroidery focused on establishing the identities of needlework instructors and the institutions within which they worked. A sense of the sociality of the medium is thus essential to the scholarship and has paved the way for more recent work investigating the complexities of this social dynamic. In addition to Howell, Susan Schoelwer has devoted considerable energy to understanding the kinship networks that often went unidentified in earlier studies and thus undermined the significance of the domestic environment in understanding the social dynamics of embroidery, while Jennifer Van Horn has emphasized the role of embroidery in forging a broader community identity, particularly among an emergent middle class in the early national period. Schoelwer, Connecticut Needlework, 7–15; and Van Horn, “Samplers, Gentility, and the Middling Sort,” Winterthur Portfolio 40, no. 4 (2005): 219–48. Among foundational studies, see especially Glee F. Krueger, New England Samplers to 1840 (Sturbridge, MA: Old Sturbridge Village, 1978); Betty Ring, Let Virtue Be a Guide to Thee: Needlework in the Education of Rhode Island Women, 1730–1830 (Providence: Rhode Island Historical Society, 1983); and Mary Jaene Edmonds, Samplers and Samplermakers: An American Schoolgirl Art, 1700–1850, exh. cat. (New York: Rizzoli; Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1991).

52 Howell, Against Self-Reliance, 136–37.

53 Fennetaux, “Female Crafts,” 92.

54 Alexander Pope, “Pope’s Homer’s Iliad,” in Extracts, Elegant, Instructive and Entertaining, in Poetry; from the Most Approved Authors, etc., vol. 4, ed. Vicesimus Knox (London: printed for Messrs. Rivingtons et al., 1791), 176.

55 On needlework and mourning, see Susan Stabile, Memory’s Daughters: The Material Culture of Remembrance in Eighteenth-Century America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 178–227.

56 A comparison between mapmaking and trompe l’oeil has previously been made by both Wendy Bellion and Katie Pfohl, in reference to the work of Philadelphia mapmaker Samuel Lewis, whose side-by-side exhibition of trompe-l’oeil drawings and national maps called into question the veracity of the map’s ostensibly authoritative view. Bellion, Citizen Spectator: Art, Illusion, and Visual Perception in Early National America (Williamsburg, VA: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture; Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 171–80; and Pfohl, “Still Life’s Ground: American Interpretations,” in The Art of American Still Life: Audubon to Warhol, ed. Mark DeSaussure Mitchell (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art; New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015), 82–83.

57 Scott, Samplers, 58.

58 Tyner’s work includes a detailed account of the various ways in which the map might have made its way from print to textile ground. Tyner, Stitching the World, 30–35.

59 Mary Uhl Brooks, Threads of Useful Learning: Westtown School Samplers (West Chester, PA: Westtown School, 2015), 71.

60 Ibid., 146–57.

61 Ibid., 75.

62 Rob Kitchin and Martin Dodge, “Rethinking Maps,” Progress in Human Geography 31, no. 3 (2007): 335. Emphasis in original.

63 John B. Bender and Michael Marrinan, The Culture of Diagram (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 7.

64 Ibid., 33.

65 Ibid., 23.

66 Benjamin Henry Latrobe, A Private Letter to the Individual Members of Congress on the Subject of the Public Buildings of the United States at Washington from B. Henry Latrobe, Surveyor of the Public Buildings (Washington City: printed by Samuel H. Smith, 1806), 5–6, 16–19.

67 Costanzo, George Washington’s Washington, 74–76.

68 See, for example, “John Lemoine, Saddler and Harness-Maker,” Alexandria Advertiser, July 11, 1793, [1]; “For Sale, A Cargo of Excellent Virginia Coals,” Alexandria Advertiser, December 6, 1797, [3]; and “John Lemoine, Fairfax Street,” Alexandria Advertiser, March 7, 1798, [1].

69 Jacob Resler probate inventory, taken in 1804 and summarized in William Seale, “Inventories from Alexandria: What Personal Objects Reveal about Our Historic Buildings and Their Owners,” Historic Alexandria Quarterly (Spring 2000): 5–6.

70 The population of Alexandria itself more than doubled between 1790 and 1810, growing from 2,748 to 7,227. For discussion of Alexandria’s economic and social development in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, see Thomas M. Preisser, “Alexandria and the Evolution of the Northern Virginia Economy, 1749–1776,” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 89, no. 3 (July 1981): 292–93; T. Michael Miller, Artisans and Merchants of Alexandria, Virginia, 1780–1820 (Bowie, MD: Heritage Books, 1991–92); and Pamela J. Cressey, The Nineteenth Century Transformation and Spatial Development of Alexandria, Virginia (Alexandria, VA: Alexandria Archaeology Museum).

71 Frye, Pens and Needles, 126–27.

72 Discussion of the pastoral as an instrument of political ideology is rooted in the scholarship of John Barrell, Ann Bermingham, and W. J. T. Mitchell. See Barrell, The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting, 1730–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition, 1740–1860, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989); and Mitchell, “Imperial Landscape,” in Landscape and Power, 2nd ed., ed. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 5–34.

73 For discussion of the pastoral, georgic, and picturesque in the context of North America and the Caribbean, see Jill Casid, Sewing Empire: Landscape and Colonization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), esp. xxi for a definition of the georgic.

74 Zara Anishanslin, Portrait of a Woman in Silk: Hidden Histories of the British Atlantic World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), 47–48.

75 The intertwined and mutually informed history of gardening and embroidery from the sixteenth through the twentieth century has been traced in Thomasina Beck, Gardening with Silk and Gold: A History of Gardens in Embroidery (Newton Abbot, UK: David & Charles, 1997), but a more recent approach can be found in Andrea Pappas, Embroidering the Landscape: Women, Art and the Environment in British North America, 1740–1770 (London: Lund Humphries, 2023).

76 See the discussion of pastoral imagery in Carolingian poetry in James Turner, The Politics of Landscape: Rural Scenery and Society in English Poetry 1630–1660 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1979), 5–6, 9–15, 163–169; and Andrew Morall, “Regaining Eden: Representations of Nature in Seventeenth-Century English Embroidery,” in English Embroidery from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1580–1700: ‘Twixt Art and Nature, ed. Morall and Melinda Watt, exh. cat. (New York: Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture; New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 94–96. Bourne’s chimneypiece is also an exemplar of a category of embroidered pictures known as “Fishing Lady” pictures, popular in the Boston area at midcentury, many linked by familial and social ties and seemingly connected to the same print sources. These works were established as a corpus by Helen Bowen, “The Fishing Lady and the Boston Common,” Antiques, August 1923, 70–73; and Cabot, “Engravings and Embroideries: The Sources of Some Designs in the Fishing Lady Pictures.” For more recent discussions of these images, see Pappas, “Each Wise Nymph That Angles for a Heart”; and Parmal, Women’s Work, 77–89.

77 In fact, seed stitch is among the many tools that evoke the natural world in the needleworker’s arsenal, alongside “fern stitch, coral stitch, feather stitch, cloud filling stitch, star stitch.” Clare Hunter, Threads of Life: A History of the World through the Eye of a Needle (New York: Abrams, 2019), 207. In Britain’s American colonies, needleworkers would have also employed wool or silk as their principal ground, but the most common embroidery ground was domestically produced linen—a material tradition that can be traced back to the enforced cultivation of linen in the Massachusetts and Connecticut colonies in the seventeenth century. Krueger, New England Samplers to 1840, 5.

78 In a related vein, Pappas discusses the fact that embroidery and angling, the subject of many related “fishing lady” embroideries, employ a shared set of materials, among them silks, threads, cruels, and twisted gold and silver—in all sizes and in a variety of colors. As with the geographic implications of particular stitch selections, the particular resonances of the embroiderer’s choice of materials bears further consideration. Pappas, “Each Wise Nymph That Angles for a Heart,” 5–7.

79 Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth (New York: Vintage, 2002), 143–46.

80 Ibid., 154–55.

81 David Stinebeck, “Understanding the Forgotten Poetry of American Samplers,” Journal of Popular Culture 52, no. 5 (2019): 1186.

82 An extended version of this text, with one additional stanza, is recorded in Barrett Wendell’s compendium of early American sampler verse, dated to 1805. Cited in Ethel Stanwood Bolton, American Samplers (Boston: Massachusetts Society of the Colonial Dames of America, 1921), 269.

83 Harley, “Maps, Knowledge, and Power,” 56.

84 Wood and Fels, Power of Maps, 215.

85 This conflation of the urban and pastoral is certainly not unique to the embroidered map but is rather an intrinsic feature of American urbanism going back to the mid-eighteenth century. James L. Machor, “The Garden City in America: Crèvecoeur’s Letters and the Urban-Pastoral Context,” American Studies 23, no. 1 (Spring 1982): 72.

86 Kelley, Learning to Stand and Speak, 23–25.

87 [Mather Byles], “The Following Lines Were Wrote for the Samplars of Three Young Ladies, by Their Papa, a Gentleman Residing at Nova-Scotia,” Boston Magazine, May 1784, 296. For more on the Byles family and the literary interpretation of sampler verse, see Gwendolyn Davies, “Researching Eighteenth-Century Maritime Women Writers: Deborah How Cottnam—A Case Study,” in Working in Women’s Archives: Researching Women’s Private Literature and Archival Documents ed. Helen M. Buss and Marlene Kadar (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2001), 46–47.

88 Susan Stabile provides a discussion of the rhetorical significance of one’s “compass” and its relationship to gendered decorum, including an analysis of a related print, in her Memory’s Daughters, 25–30.

89 Literature on Addison’s essay, even the more specific subject of Addison’s understanding of the imagination in relationship to the landscape, is expansive. For discussion of the British context, I have principally relied on John Brewer, Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge, 2013); and for Addison’s reception in an American context, I have relied on Edward Cahill, Liberty of the Imagination: Aesthetic Theory, Literary Form and Politics in the Early United States (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012).

90 This alternate version of the print, by an anonymous artist, is found at the Winterthur Museum, Garden, & Library: Keep within Compass, 1785–1805, 1954.0093.001 A, Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library, Winterthur, Delaware.

91 Linda Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press; Williamsburg, VA: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1980), [14].

92 Brückner, Geographic Revolution, 141.

93 Pappas, “Each Wise Nymph That Angles for a Heart,” 5.

94 Priddy, American Fancy, xxvii, 12, 25.

95 Parker, Subversive Stitch, 16.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Elizabeth Eager

Elizabeth Eager is assistant professor of art history at Southern Methodist University, specializing in the history of art, science, and technology prior to 1850. Her current book project examines the role of drawing materials, tools, and technique in the process of industrialization [Department of Art History, Meadows School of the Arts, Southern Methodist University, P.O. Box 750356, Dallas, TX 75275-0356, [email protected]].