Sampler

Mary Waine may have drawn her own pattern on this imaginative and freely designed sampler. Using motifs common to Boston samplers she organized her decorative images in three panels or fields. Like Millsent Connor’s sampler (1974.42) likely made at the same school, the upper field includes a double line of stylized blue and white clouds. Below, two houses, one large and the other small and perhaps meant to be at a distance, stand on a lawn beneath trees. A buck and a doe are posed between the houses, and the air is filled with butterflies and a single bird plummeting downward headfirst, its wings spread wide. The middle panel depicts a field with a prancing horse, a grazing cow, and two sheep. In the lowest panel a courting couple accompanied by a spotted dog stand in a luxuriant garden, overseen by an enormous bird perched on the limb of a tree. Like other Boston samplers of the late eighteenth century, the central scene is surrounded by a wide border of meandering vines with large multi-petaled flowers.

For more information, see catalogue entry below.