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Sampler
Sophia Stevens Smith1818
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum
New York, United States
A floral garland tied with bows swags over three alphabets, a set of numerals, an inscription and a verse:Alas the brittle clayThat built our body firstAnd every month and Every dayTis mouldering back to dustAt the bottom, is a village scene with a church and a large house on opposite banks of a stream, with a bridge connecting them, and a carriage on the bridge. The scene represents the North Branford, Connecticut church, since destroyed by fire.
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Details
- Title: Sampler
- Creator: Sophia Stevens Smith
- Creator Lifespan: 1804/1881
- Date Created: 1818
- Physical Dimensions: w595 x h440 cm
- Type: Sampler
- Rights: Bequest of Rosalie Coe, from the collection inherited from her mother, Eva Johnston Coe
- Medium: Medium: silk embroidery and paint on cotton foundation Technique: embroidered in cross, satin, stem, surface satin, chain and knot stitches on plain weave foundation
- Viewing Notes: Sophia Smith's sampler is part of a distinctive group of Wethersfield, Connecticut, samplers made at two different schools during the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Earlier examples were probably worked at the Abigail Goodrich School, which operated from around 1804 to 1815. Sophia's is one of a later group of samplers, most likely made under the instruction of the sisters Charlotte and Mary Porter Butler, who opened a school around 1815 and may have been joined by Abigail Goodrich. The sisters were former pupils of Goodrich, and had also attended the Misses Pattens' school in Hartford. Samplers attributed to the Butlers' school include elements of those made at both of their former schools. Sophia's work features motifs found on several other Wethersfield samplers, including a depiction of the town of Wethersfield that features the Connecticut River, houses, and the First Church of Christ, as well as two trees with intertwined trunks, and a garland of naturalistic flowers secured by bows. In some examples, the floral garland is held in the beak of an applied paper eagle. Two closely related samplers, both in private collections, were made by Elizabeth Cooke Crittenton (1806-1885) and Lucy Ann Hanmer (1806-1884). All three examples were worked in 1818 and have strikingly similar verses, garlands, and townscapes.Sophia Stevens Smith, born in Wethersfield in 1804, was the second child of Allyn Smith (1771-1839) and Rebecca Baldwin (1779-1876). Their other children were Caroline Crosby (1803-1814), Morgan Hills (1806-1828), and Porter (1815-1838). Sophia never married. After the deaths of her siblings and father, she resided alone with her mother, who lived to the age of ninety-seven. According to 1850 census data, Sophia earned her living as a "tailoress." She died in 1881 at the age of seventy-seven.
- Provenance: By 1941, Mrs. Henry E. Coe (Eva Johnston Coe)1941 - 1974, Rosalie Coe 1974, Cooper-Hewitt Museum
- Inscribed: August 5 1818 Sophia Stevens Smith, Aged 14 years
- Dimensions: H x W: 43.8 x 59.7 cm (17 1/4 x 23 1/2 in.)
- Bibliography: Ethel Stanwood Bolton and Eva Johnston Coe, American Samplers (Boston: The Massachusetts Society of the Colonial Dames of America, 1921) 224, plate LXVIII
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