American Samplers

The earliest known American sampler was made by Loara Standish of the Plymouth Colony about 1645. By the 1700s, samplers depicting alphabets and numerals were worked by young women to learn the basic needlework skills needed to operate the family household. By the late 1700s and early 1800s, schools or academies for well-to-do young women flourished, and more elaborate pieces with decorative motifs such as verses, flowers, houses, religious, pastoral, and/or mourning scenes were being stitched. The parents of these young women proudly displayed their embroideries as showpieces of their work, talent, and status.

In recent years, samplers have become important in museum collections as representations of early American female education. Many are signed, and some are inscribed with locations and the names of teachers and schools. The emergence of large numbers of these samplers has resulted in much research in diaries, account books, letters, newspaper ads, local histories, and published commentary that is helping to illuminate the lives of women in early America.

Many early samplers do not have the letters “J” and “U” in their alphabets because they were not part of the early Latin alphabet and so the letter “I” was used for “J” and the “V” for “U.” The letter “s” is often replaced with the printers “s” which looks like the modern f.

There are 137 American samplers in the Textile Collection. The first was donated in 1886, the Margaret Dinsmoor sampler. In the 1890s the Copp Collection was received and it contained two samplers—one by Esther Copp and the other by her great niece Phebe Esther Copp. (The Copp Collection is an extensive collection of 18th-and 19th- century household textiles, costume items, furniture, and other pieces belonging to the Copps, a prosperous but frugal Connecticut family.) The earliest dated sampler in the collection was made in 1735 by Lydia Dickman of Boston, Massachusetts.

There is a wide floral crossband at the center of the sampler, worked with crinkled silk thread in long, couched stitches.
Description
There is a wide floral crossband at the center of the sampler, worked with crinkled silk thread in long, couched stitches. At the bottom of the sampler are three large and two small floral motifs, and among them these initials: “WB SB CB JB.” All four edges are finished with wide green silk ribbon. Mary Bishop included an inscription and the names Joseph Bishop, Mary Bishop, and Sarah Bishop.
Inscription: "In the sightless are I dwell / On the sloping sunbeams pley / Delve the cavern’s inmost cell / Where never yet did daylight stray / Joseph Bishop / Mary Bishop / Sarah Bishop."
Mary’s inscription is from a poem entitled “Song of a Spirit” by Ann Ward Radcliffe (1764-1823). Mrs. Radcliffe was a popular English writer in her day and this poem is from her 1791 historical Gothic romance novel The Romance of the Forest. The sampler is stitched with silk embroidery thread on a linen ground with a thread count of warp 28, weft 30/in. The stitches used are cross, satin, eyelet, rice, stem, outline, and crosslet.
Despite including the names of possibly her mother and father, nothing could be found about the life of Mary Bishop.
Location
Currently not on view
date made
1800-1825
maker
Bishop, Mary
ID Number
TE.T15008
catalog number
T15008
accession number
286272

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