"Winter" Needlework Picture

In February of 1819, when Hannah Jane Robinson (1807-1890) completed this needlework picture at her aunt Elizabeth Robinson’s school, she must have been longing for the arrival of spring in the way most people do in February. Above her charming composition of a dog standing in a bare field looking towards a snug house surrounded with leafless trees, Hannah has embroidered a verse that reads: “SEE, how rude winter’s icy hand/Has stripp’d the trees and sealed the ground;/ But spring shall soon his rage withstand,/And spread new beauties all around.” The verse is excerpted from a hymn entitled “Winter” that was published in England in 1779 as one of the Olney Hymns by well-known evangelical Christian minister John Henry Newton (1725-1807). In its entirety, the hymn speaks of the soul’s longing to accept Jesus. But Hannah has simply focused on a much more universal wish for spring to arrive after the long winter months.

There are eight known samplers, dating from 1818-1836, related to this piece, all probably made at the school run by Hannah’s paternal aunt, Elizabeth Robinson (1778-1865) in Upper Providence, Montgomery County, Pennsylvania. It is thought that Elizabeth ran the school with the help of her five unmarried sisters, Rachel, Priscilla, Mary, Hannah, and Leticia, perhaps from the family homestead on the Schuylkill River that was left to them by their father, Nicholas (1741-1826). The needlework pictures attributed to the school are quite different from most embroideries made by young women at the time. Rather than being formulaic, featuring alphabets and common imagery, each of the pieces in the group is quite individual, and are more like original folk art paintings than typical needlework pictures of the day. They seem to show the vision of the young female artist who stitched it, rather than being solely a formal design laid out by her teacher. “Winter” presents a house typical of those found in Montgomery County in the period that the picture was made, and the dog is not stylized. While the current frame is a replacement, another extraordinary aspect of the piece is that it remains laced onto its original stretcher, a rare survival from over two hundred years ago.

The earliest of the group of Robinson School embroideries is dated 1818, and is signed by Hannah J. Robinson, whom we believe is the same girl who made The Met’s “Winter”. The two pieces bear some similarities in that both have compositions featuring a verse at top and a landscape. The verse on the 1818 sampler, entitled “The Spread of the Gospel,” is also taken from a hymn. Today in the collection of the Loeb Art Center at Vassar College, it depicts a hillside with a weeping willow at the top, birds flying above, and vines growing up poles to either side. The verse is in a tablet held aloft by an eagle.

The next in the group is our “Winter” picture by Hannah Jane, dated 1819, followed by an embroidery of a barnyard scene also completed in 1819 by Hannah’s aunt Leticia (1800-1871), who was the much younger sister of Elizabeth. This piece is in a private collection. Another barnyard scene was completed by Mary Rees in 1827; it features cows and sheep in a landscape guarded by the same dog that appears in Hannah Jane’s “Winter”. Mary kindly inscribed at the bottom, after signing her name, “E. Robinson, Teacher,” which has made possible the attribution of the entire group of similar needlework pictures to Elizabeth Robinson’s school. This piece is in the collection of Colonial Williamsburg (1957.602.1), as is another embroidery from 1828 also made by Mary Rees of four birds on a tree limb entitled “An Aerial Scene” (2006.601.1). The school seems to still have been in business in the mid-1830s, as three other similar needlework pictures, made by Hannah Kelter (1835), Elizabeth Kelter (1836) and Mary Lewin (1836) are also known, but are all in private collections.

Hannah Jane was born in 1807 to Quakers William Robinson (1777-1869) and Hannah Jacobs Robinson (1780-1807). As was far too common at the time, due to complications after childbirth, her mother died two days after Hannah was born. Hannah’s father remarried twice after her mother’s death and had several other children. In 1819, when twelve-year-old Hannah Jane made her needlework picture, he and his third wife were living in Jefferson County, Ohio, but at that time, Hannah Jane seems to have been sent back to Pennsylvania to stay with her aunts. It has been documented that in later years, William was an Underground Railroad operator in Emerson (now Mount Pleasant,) Jefferson County, Ohio. In 1841, when she was thirty-three, Hannah Jane married Joseph Brady McCune in Ohio, but he died the following year at age forty, and the only child from that union, Margaret R., died in 1843 at barely more that a year old. Returning to Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, Hannah Jane remarried at least once, and had other children, but the records of her later life are not completely clear. She died in 1890, at the age of eighty-three.