Sampler

According to the inscription, Mary Graham stitched this sampler in 1804, when she was 13. This expansive pastoral landscape, opulated by sheep, dogs, rabbits, an eagle, and birds flying overhead, seems the perfect embodiment of the lines from Joseph Addison’s 1712 hymn: “The Lord my pasture shall prepare, and feed me with a shepherd’s care.” The asymmetrical placement of a house in a verdant landscape, delicately worked willow trees, rail-and-picket fence, and slender, high-waisted Empire-style clothing are characteristic of samplers produced in Philadelphia in the first decades of the 19th century. In her publication Girlhood Embroidery: American Samplers and Pictorial Needlework, 1650–1850, scholar Betty Ring refers to this landscape type as the “house and garden form” and notes that it first appeared in Philadelphia about 1798 and continued until 1834.