Biblical samplers from New York City.

The pictorial samplers worked in New York City in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are unlike any other American samplers. While most examples of the period commonly show pastoral scenes of courting couples, fishing ladies, and gracious colonial houses, New York City samplers display multiple images illustrating a specific series of stories or figures from the Bible. Those in the earliest coherent group, dating between 1746 and 1768, are decorated exclusively with biblical scenes. Later in the century, some biblical imagery is retained, but other, more secular motifs appear as well. As late as the 1830s some samplers still show certain biblical images.

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These biblical samplers have long been identified as a distinct New York group, but at exactly what school (or schools) they were made, and under the instruction of whom, has remained hard to prove. It is possible that the style was first taught to individual young women by a needlework teacher who instructed private students. Some of the earliest advertisements for sewing instruction in New York newspapers seem to have been placed by women who were willing to teach a variety of fancy work, but do not mention affiliation with an actual school. (1)

The case has been made for crediting these samplers to a French-run boarding school in New Rochelle, a town outside of New York City in what is now Westchester County. (2) New Rochelle was settled in the late 1680s by Huguenots who had fled France after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, and was named in honor of the Huguenot stronghold of La Rochelle, France. It was a relatively poor farming community throughout most of the eighteenth century, and so seems an unlikely spot for a fashionable girls' boarding school. However, in the middle decades of the eighteenth century, there was a small but well-respected boarding school for boys in New Rochelle run by the Reverend Pierre Stouppe (1690-1760), who was also the pastor of the French Protestant church there.

The New Rochelle attribution was based on two late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century sources, but neither can be considered totally reliable. (3) Moreover, there is no evidence in town or church records that girls' boarding schools run by French teachers existed in New Rochelle in the eighteenth century. (4) There is one known eighteenth-century sampler that can be firmly linked to Magdalen Guion, a New Rochelle girl of French Huguenot heritage (Pl. III), (5) but it is much simpler in conception than our group and does not include any biblical imagery.

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Because of the dearth of hard evidence linking the samplers to New Rochelle, and the fact that almost all the girls who made them were New York City residents, it seems more likely that they were made in New York City, and that the biblical style was taught by several different teachers over the course of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The premise that this biblical style was started by a French Huguenot teacher even seems debatable. There is very little in the samplers that can be associated with French needlework--in fact there is no tradition of sampler making in eighteenth-century France. The European samplers that are most similar to those in the New York group were made in Germany (see Pl. II), so it could be that the style was originally taught by a German-born teacher.