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In the 1780s States Morris Dyckman acquired from the Miers firm in London a silhouette portrait of himself that today hangs at Boscobel, his house in Garrison, New York. A loyalist during the American Revolution, Dyckman also owned portraits of "the King & queen of England in Ivory," according to his estate inventory, and thus Boscobel Restoration long sought appropriate images of George III and his consort Queen Charlotte to hang in the house, not just to reflect Dyckman's possessions but also to emphasize his loyalist allegiance. Recently, the museum had the good fortune to acquire the portraits of the monarch and his queen illustrated here. In a neat turn of events, they remain in their original frame, which bears the printed label of "Miers/Profile Painter/-and-/JEWELLER/NO. 111,/STRAND," the very shop Dyckman himself had patronized. Made by James Tassie, a Scottish member of the Royal Academy in London, the miniatures are of a glass-paste composition imitating ivory that Tassie invented and used for more than five hundred portrait medallions. A friendly rival of Josiah Wedgwood, Tassie supplied Wedgwood with many portrait medallions, and the two occasionally exchanged models with each other.

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Of the many forms of needlework practiced in the United States in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, one firmly rooted here is rug hooking. Believed to have originated in northern New England in the early nineteenth century, it consists of pulling loops of yarn or strips of woven fabric through a ground fabric, usually a heavy hemp burlap, using a tool that may originally have been designed by sailors but was improved over the years by a host of innovators. As the craft was long practiced primarily in rural areas, women often devised their own designs, and, drawing from the country life they knew, depicted such subjects as farm animals or farm buildings. In the case of the charming rug illustrated below, the maker used a print after a drawing by the French-American artist Charles Balthazar Julien Fevret de Saint-Memin for her ...