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...
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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.