Object: needlework picture, Boston, 1747 to 1750. Subject: a lady fishing.
That is roughly all a museum label would tell you, and it skips the best part. Somewhere behind those lines is a schoolgirl who decided how a stretch of countryside should look, stitch by stitch, long before the Hudson River School painters carried their easels outdoors.
Her picture belongs to the celebrated “Fishing Lady” group, and a monumental example has travelled to New York for Locating Girlhood: Place and Identity in Early American “Schoolgirl” Art. The exhibition opened this month at the American Folk Art Museum and runs until 28 February 2027. Around 100 samplers, needlework pictures, watercolours and maps have been gathered from more than 35 museums and private collections, and together they make a bold case. American landscape art is usually told through male academic painters, yet girls were stitching and painting country views and city streets generations earlier. Their work was filed under decorative and left out of the account. The curators are putting it back in.
Left: Gilbert Stuart (1755-1828), Anna Dorothea Foster and Charlotte Anna Dick, Dublin, Ireland, 1790-1791, Oil on canvas, Reynolda House Museum of American Art, Winston-Salem. Right: Ruthy Rogers (1778-1812), Needlework Picture, Marblehead, Massachusetts, 1789, Silk on linen.
The loans reward close looking. A needlework picture attributed to Sarah Phillips from around 1670 is among the earliest of its kind to survive, and Mary King’s Tree of Life from 1754 shows how ambitious a colonial schoolgirl could be with a needle. Silk and paper suffer in strong light, so many of these pieces rarely leave storage, which makes seeing them side by side a rare chance.
Attributed to Faith Trumbull (1743-1775), Needlework Picture, Boston and Lebanon, Connecticut, 1754, Silk, mica, and gouache on silk. Connecticut Museum of Culture and History, Hartford.
For anyone who loves cloth, the most relatable thing about them is how communal they were. Teachers ran the schools that set the patterns, and classmates worked at neighbouring frames, borrowing ideas and correcting each other’s tension. Hannah Pearson Cogswell’s rare depiction of female education at Atkinson Academy, painted in 1811 to 1812, shows that world from the inside, with a school as a place where girls learned side by side. Curators Emelie Gevalt and Caroline Culp have built the show in the same spirit, drawing on collections across the United States and Canada and widening the frame to include work by Black and Native American students alongside their white peers.
Left: Rachel Barrett(1833-?), Sampler, African School, Halifax, Nova Scotia, 1845
Silk and wool on linen. Right: Rebecca Carter (1778-1837) with Ann Carter (1770-1798), Sampler, Providence, 1779-1788, Silk, metallic thread, and human hair on linen.
The museum extends that sense of shared effort to its own neighbourhood. Admission is always free, and a series of Night School of Embroidery evenings with artists including Jagdeep Raina and Spandita Malik puts needles into visitors’ hands in person, with dates running from October into January. Readers who cannot make it to New York can still join in through The Subversive Stitch Revisited, an online programme on 2 December.
If you have ever stitched beside friends at a guild evening, or learned a technique from a relative over a kitchen table, you already know what these girls knew. A picture of a place is also a picture of the people who sat close enough to help you finish it.
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Further Information:
Read an edited extract from the exhibition catalogue in Selvedge Issue 133, Kin.
Purchase the exhibition catalogue in the Selvedge Book Shop
Exhibition: Locating Girlhood: Place and Identity in Early American “Schoolgirl” Art is on show until 28 February 2027 at the American Folk Art Museum, New York.
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Image Credits:
Lead: Mary King, Needlework Picture(Tree of Life) (detail), Philadelphia, 1754, Silk, metallic thread, and glass beads on silk. Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library, Delaware, Bequest of Henry Francis du Pont.
All further images courtesy of Folk Art Museum and as credited in captions.