AH 1810

This tiny needlework sampler with just a few spots of colour has been worked by AH thousands of miles away from the Ackworth School in England!

The needleworker probably attended the Quaker School in Westtown, a boarding-school near Philadelphia. The similarity between the typical Ackworth samplers and this work can only be understood when you know that only 22 years after the founding of the Ackworth School in Yorkshire the Religious Society of Friends, also known as Quakers, founded a school for their children in the new home of Pennsylvania. It is the oldest boarding-school in the United States of America! Working samplers was part of the curriculum for the girls there as well, samplers with geometric motifs, alphabet samplers and samplers with verses.

AH’s sampler (size: 29.9 x 29.9 cm) is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (Rogers Fund, 1913).