Sampler

Mary Austin’s sampler is one of the few late eighteenth-century samplers of its type to name Salem as the place where it was made. However, it is not known which of the city’s many schools she attended. It is unmistakably a Salem sampler due to the long, unraveled silk stitches that create the naïve rendering of the colorful scene below the large block with rows of alphabets. Here a single male figure stands in profile watching his black and white dog chase after a leaping stag, with four frightened birds escaping in the opposite direction. The long stitches in Mary’s blue sky and green grass go straight up, rather than being organized diagonally, which is more commonly seen in Salem samplers. The folk-like whimsy of the scene is in contrast to the formulaic stitching of the six rows of alphabets and inscription above, suggesting that Mary may have drawn her own figures, animals and birds in a composition to suit her own fancy. By comparison, The Met has another Salem sampler worked in 1766 by Rebekah White (1753-1823) with figures more directly inspired or copied from illustrations taken from books of poetry and songbooks. (See: 1984.331.8)

Mary Austin is believed to be the daughter of Jonathan Austin. She was born two years before the North Bridge in Salem witnessed the first armed resistance to British authority on February 26, 1775. This bloodless incident is considered the unofficial beginning of the American Revolutionary War. While little is known of her life, Mary may have been the Salem-born “Polly Austin” who married Dudley Porter (1771- 1839) of Gloucester in April or June of 1793. Polly was a common nickname for Mary at the time. The couple had three children, Dudley (1794-1818), Eleazer (1795-1831) and Mary (b. 1797). “Polly” died two years after the birth of her daughter at age 28 in 1799. Whether or not Mary was known as “Polly,” the creative maker of this sampler was a member of the first generation of women to live in the new American Republic and likely adhered to the emerging ideology aimed at expanding education and participation in civic culture for women in order that they might teach their children the ways of the new United Stated democracy – a movement that came to be identified as “Republic Motherhood.”