Lot 41
41
A SILK ON SILK NEEDLEWORK SAMPLER
PROPERTY OF A DESCENDANT OF THE ORIGINAL OWNER AND MAKER
A SILK ON SILK NEEDLEWORK SAMPLER

ELIZABETH WILLIAMS, MARYLAND, DATED 1798

Details
A SILK ON SILK NEEDLEWORK SAMPLER
Elizabeth Williams, Maryland, dated 1798
The rectangular needlework wrought in various greens, cream, blue, mustard, red, brown and yellow silk threads in two horizontal alphabetical registers and inscribed bands separated by meandering flower-set vines above a wrought reserve depicting Adam, Eve and the Serpent at the Tree of Knowledge flanked by animals and flowering trees with perched birds, over the wrought inscription Elizabeth Williams Her Work Aged Eight Years 1798, all enclosed in a border of meandering vines issuing flowers
16x12in. (sight)
Provenance
Elizabeth Williams
Duval Fontaine Polk and Lillie Bancroft Caldwell
Helen Maury Polk and Henry Hague Vaughan
Robert Polk Vaughan
Present Owner

Lot Essay

Elizabeth Williams was born in Maryland in 1790, where she worked this sampler in 1798. Subsequently married to Joshua Polk, a cousin of the artist Charles Peale Polk, Elizabeth and Joshua produced six children, all born in Maryland, and they later moved to Clinton County, Ohio in 1827. It was to a son of Charles Peale Polk that the needlework was given and in whose family it ultimately descended.

The sampler offered here represents an important survival of 18th century needlework produced south of the Mason-Dixon Line.

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