Embroidered picture “Hersilia”

Fifteen-year-old Sarah Skelding chose as the subject of her silk embroidery a legendary episode of the founding of Rome, illustrating Hersilia and the Sabine women—some holding their children—standing between the battling Roman and Sabine armies as Hersilia seeks to persuade her husband Romulus, the founder and first king of Rome and the Sabine king to establish peace and rule Rome jointly. Sarah’s composition closely follows a British acquaint after Henry Singleton’s painting The Battle of the Romans & Sabines, engraved and published in London by James Daniell in 1802. The scene’s depiction of female agency and mediation amid conflict would have resonated with American girls attending female academies during the tensions and economic stresses of the War of 1812.

Sarah Lockwood Skelding was born in Troy, New York, on July 30, 1798, the second of six children of Thomas Skelding (1773-1831) and Rheua Jones Skelding (1775-1857). Although family tradition associated Sarah with the Moravian Seminary for Young Ladies in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, the grand scale and expensive nature of the materials and ornate frame of this piece is not typical for Moravian works, and since Sarah’s name does not appear in surviving student lists, her precise school affiliation is unconfirmed. About five years after completing the embroidery, she married English-born Baptist minister Rev. Charles George Sommers (1793-1868) on Feb. 12, 1817. At the time of their marriage, he was the pastor of the First Baptist Church of Troy, but in 1832 they moved to New York City. Between 1818 and 1842 the couple had eight children, five daughters and three sons. Sarah died on Oct. 3, 1843, at age forty-five and was buried at Green-Wood Cemetery, in Brooklyn, New York. Sarah’s embroidery descended through her maternal line to her great, great granddaughter who donated it to The Met in 1962.