Rare needlework sampler, Mary Coffin (1790-1864) Newburyport, Essex County, Massachusetts, dated 1801

Worked in silk on linen

Inscribed recto, silk thread: [alphabets] / I Here in this green and shady bower / Delicious fruits and fragrant flowers / Virtue fhall dwell within this seat / Virtue alone can make it sweet / Mary Coffin AE. 10.1801.

Eldred's, East Dennis, Massachusetts, November 1988
Steven Score, Essex, Massachusetts, 1989

"Every Picture Tells a Story: Word and Image in American Folk Art," American Folk Art Museum, 1994-1995
"Folk Art Revealed," New York, American Folk Art Museum, November 16, 2004-August 23, 2009
"Women Only: Folk Art by Female Hands," New York, American Folk Art Museum, April 6-September 12, 2010
American Radiance: The Ralph Esmerian Gift to the American Folk Art Museum, p. 295, fig. 256

Ring, Betty. Girlhood Embroidery: American Samplers & Pictorial Needlework, 1650-1850, vol. 1, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1993, p. 119
American Radiance: The Ralph Esmerian Gift to the American Folk Art Museum, p. 295, fig. 256

In very good condition.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

The schools of Newbury and Newburyport, Massachusetts, produced several groups of extraordinarily handsome samplers and silk embroideries during the federal period. Ten-year-old Mary Coffin's sampler is one of the most colorful and appealing examples within a group of eleven pieces worked in Newburyport between 1799 and 1803. Nine of Mary's classmates ranged in age from eleven to seventeen, and, like Mary, all but one worked the same verse. The earliest within this group portrays an exotic tropical scene with thirteen people, and none like it has yet appeared.¹ Nine others share Mary's basic pattern, with minor variations. ²-B.R.

¹  It was worked by twelve-year-old Sally Johnson in 1799 and is illustrated in color in Bolton and Cae, American Samplers, pl. 104.  Sally centered her "shady bower" poem but worked the ends of each of its four lines above rather than below the line where it begins.
² See Sarah Bartlett's (1800), in Ring, Girlhood Embroidery, vol. 1, p. 118; Mary Little's (1800), described in Bolton and Cae, American Samplers, p.189; Sally Frost Blunt's (c. 1800), in catalog for Sotheby's sale 6942 (1/97, lot 2029); Abigail Prince's (1801), in Betry Ring, American Needlework Treasures (New York: E.P. Dutton in association with MAFA, 1987), p.12, fig. 18; Mary Caswell Cook's (1801), in John Hardy Wright, Vernacular Visions: Folk Art of Old Newbury (Newbury, Mass.: Historical Society of Old Newbury, 1994), p. 34, fig. 20; Elizabeth Thurston's (1802), in the catalog for Skinner sale 1222 (10/88, lot 207); that of Mary Todd (1803), who worked a frequently found four-line verse that begins "How blest the maid whom circling years improve," in Elisabeth Donaghy Garrett, "The Theodore H. Kapnek Collection of American Samplers," The Magazine Antiques  114, no. 3 (September 1978): 545; and that of Dolly Pearson Johnson (1806), who surely attended the same school and worked a simpler form with the "shady bower" verse and one peacock but lacking people or animals, in Peter Benes, Old-Town and the Waterside (Newburyport, Mass.: Historical Society of Old Newbury, 1986), p. 174. Mary Ann Perkins's (1802), collection Stevens-Coolidge Place, North Andover, Mass., is unpublished, as is a well-preserved but unsigned and undated piece in the collection of the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, Boston.