TRADITIONAL EMBROIDERED SAMPLERS III: HORSE HILL HOUSE SAMPLER

Image copyright Victoria and Albert Museum

By the mid nineteenth century samplers were wider and shorter than the earlier examples I've been showing; rather than being rolled up and kept as references for the embroiderer, they were taking on the proportions of a picture, and were often framed for hanging on the wall.

Stylized borders (in this example there are two different borders) often surrounded a religious text, alphabets and numbers, and carefully placed decorative motifs. This sampler has a small text at the very top, which seems to have been given an insignificant place in the whole; the main part of the ground displays perfectly balanced motifs of flowers, flowering trees, birds, two baskets of fruit, two dogs and two squirrels. But the centre is taken up by what may have been the home of the embroiderer: Horse Hill House near London, a two-storey Georgian style house of red brick with lawns and trees. Below this is a very large flowering tree, and on each side stands a boxer figure wearing brief shorts and facing front.

The sampler is signed Sophia Stephens, and dated June 30 183.... Interestingly, she has omitted her age, perhaps a sign that she didn't want it known!

The ground fabric is wool, the threads are silk, and the stitches are cross and Gobelin stitch. As the sampler has been hemmed and finished with a line of hemstitching on each side, it was probably not meant for framing. This is a particularly beautiful sampler; it seems likely that it was carefully stored, only to be brought out for display on special occasions.

TRADITIONAL EMBROIDERED SAMPLERS IV: A 17th CENTURY SPOT SAMPLER

This beautiful and imaginative English random or spot sampler with its perfectly chosen motifs and colours, is dated to the middle of the seventeenth century. Although it is long and narrow like the band sampler which I showed in an earlier post, it is quite different in style: while the repeated motifs of band samplers are stitched in neat parallel rows, spot samplers are characterised by the random arrangment of single motifs, which are 'spotted' over the surface rather than arranged in single bands.

By the seventeenth century needlework was seen as a highly desirable skill and many embroiderers, from young girls to their mothers and grandmothers, reached a high standard in their stitching. Like band samplers, spot samplers were an essential reference for the embroiderer; the motifs would have been copied to decorate not only household linen, bed coverings and curtains, table coverings and cushions, bags and pincushions, but also the elaborate and beautifully decorated clothing worn by both men and women.

The workmanship of this sampler is especially fine, displaying beautiful stitching and placement of the 'random' motifs. The sampler is worked on a linen ground with silk threads, and the stitches the embroiderer has used are eyelets, back stitch, Hungarian stitch and rococo stitch, along with pulled thread work.

You can find this and many other traditional samplers in the book Samplers by Clare Browne and Jennifer Wearden, a Victoria and Albert Museum publication, and a wonderful resource containing stunning images of works from the museum's collection.

Photo © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

TRADITIONAL EMBROIDERED SAMPLERS II: JANE BOSTOCKE'S SAMPLER

Jane Bostocke's sampler of 1598, below, is the earliest surviving dated sampler, and one of the best known samplers in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

The inscription commemorates the birth of a child, Alice Lee, in 1596, two years before the date of the sampler. Jane Bostocke was a cousin of Alice Lee, and may have lived in the same household. The inscription reads:

JANE:BOSTOCKE:1598 ALICE:LEE:WAS:BORNE:THE:23:OF:NOVEMBER:BEING:TUESDAY:IN:THE:AFTERNOONE: 1596

The sampler contains both orderly arrangements of rows of border motifs and randomly placed and more diverse motifs, thus marking a transitional stage between band samplers and the later spot samplers.

The motifs and words are stitched in silk and metal threads on linen, and the stitches include cross, satin, chain, back, buttonhole and French knots. Seed pearls and beads are used to enhance the embroidery.

The images below show three details from the sampler. The top image, part of the inscription, shows the use of pearls on some letters of the surname 'Bostocke'; it is likely that pearls were also stitched over the rest of the name, but if this was so they must have worn off over time. The second detail shows black beads as well as pearls on knotwork, while in the third image strawberries and their leaves are contained within an interlaced trellis.

Photo © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

The above images were taken with permission from the publication Samplers from the Victoria and Albert Museum, V & A Publications, London, 1999, which is available here.