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Mary Ann Harrison, Pennsylvania, 1827
This fine sampler boasts excellent quality needlework, a well-developed pictorial register, outstanding horizontal bands and a highly appealing aphorism: "Industry is itself a treasure." The samplermaker was Mary Ann Harrison and the composition makes it clear that she attended one of the many fine schools that existed in the Philadelphia area in the first decades of the 19th century. Amongst the classic elements that appear on this sampler are the pair of stylized pine trees, centered basket with an outstanding strawberry plant, little branches with oversized parrots and double-handled urns of flowering plants, hearts, butterflies and Quaker patterned floral sprays. A narrow lawn worked of varying shades of the queen's-stitch appears along the bottom .The same sophisticated and very beautiful stitch was used to form the full blossom flowers of the center band, with pale blue birds standing at either end. The richly colored zig-zag band just above that was also worked in the queen's-stitch. Worked in silk on linen, this sampler is in excellent condition and has been conservation mounted into a fine cherry and maple cornerblock frame.
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