Sampler Design: Animals
Animals in any true decorative sense hardly came into sampler ornament. Whilst the tapestry pictures teem with them, so that one wanting in a lion or stag is a rarity, in samplers, probably, the difficulty of obtaining rounded forms with the stitch used in the large grained canvas was a deterrent. The lion only being found on the Fletwood sampler of 1654 ([Fig. 44]) and the stag, which in tapestry pictures usurps the place of the unicorn, appears but rarely on samplers before the middle of the eighteenth century, when it came into fashion, and afterwards occurs with uninterrupted regularity so long as samplers were made.
This neglect of animals is hardly to be deplored, for when they do occur they are little else than caricatures (see, for instance, those in [Plate III.]). Birds, which lend themselves to needlework, appear in the later samplers ([Plate XI.] and [Fig. 18]), but hardly as part of any decorative scheme.