A SILK PICTORIAL SAMPLER ON LINEN

Featuring an exquisitely worked fruit tree flanked by animals including deer, birds and insects, this early sampler from Newbury, Massachusetts is a rare and important survival of Colonial American needlework. As discussed by Betty Ring, this sampler, wrought by Sarah Toppan (1748-1823) in 1756, is closely related to one made two years earlier by Anna Fowler. Both feature borders of stylized flowers derived from early eighteenth-century English work, but Sarah's is the first from the region to incoporate a pictoral scene. Her renditions of the central tree and attendant animals were motifs that would be repeated in later needleworks from the area. Sarah Toppan was the daughter of cabinetmaker Edward Toppan (1715-1795) and Sarah Bayley (1721-1811) of Newbury and married Colonel Josiah Little (1747-1830) on 23 March 1770. A successful landowner, Little was a prominent and influential figure in Newbury (Betty Ring, Girlhood Embroidery: American Samplers & Pictorial Needlework, 1650-1850, vol. I (New York, 1993), pp. 114, 115; Ethel Stanwood Bolton and Eva Johnston Coe, American Samplers (New York, 1973), p. 80, pl. XXIV; additional information provided by Carol and Stephen Huber).