Embroidered Chair Back

This needlework panel was made in Boston about 1760 by Mehitable Starkey (b. 1739) and passed down in her family until 1993 when it was purchased at auction by the donor. Unlike most Boston needlework pictures, which tend to be horizontal in composition, this piece is a tall vertical panel, with two discrete scenes placed one above the other: the top scene shows three people harvesting grain; a woman at the center holds a sickle aloft, while a man at her right cuts the wheat and a man at her left bundles it. The lower scene depicts a landscape with two reclining deer flanking a leaping deer. In the background are a group of brick dwellings and a windmill. Both scenes were copied from print sources that must have been common in Boston in the mid-eighteenth century, since both scenes appear in other known Boston embroideries from the period.



Because of the unusual vertical composition, it can be surmised that rather than a decorative picture to be framed and displayed on a wall, the panel was intended to cover the outer back of an easy chair. Another example of this in The Met’s collection is the spectacular Newport easy chair of 1758 (50.228.3), covered with its original wool flame-stitch embroidery except for the outer back, which is decorated with a charming pastoral scene of leaping deer and a shepherd and his flock. Although the chair frame was made in Newport, the needlework is characteristic of embroideries identified with Boston teachers and was likely made by a young woman who studied needlework at a Boston school. The needlework back panel on the easy chair and this panel are about the same size, and both designs are most likely drawn from similar sources. Boston needlework pictures from the period were usually completed in either tent or satin stitch. That the panel on the easy chair is in satin stitch and this is in tent stitch cannot obscure the amazing similarities of these two extremely rare upholstery masterpieces.