Plate XI.—Sampler by Ann Chapman. Dated 1779.
Mrs C. J. Longman.
Incongruity between the ornament and the lettering of a Sampler could hardly be carried to a more ludicrous extreme than in Ann Chapman’s, which is here reproduced in colour. The two points of Agur’s prayer, which fills the panel, are that before he dies vanity shall be removed far from him, and that he shall have neither poverty nor riches. Yet as surroundings and supporters to this appeal we have two figures posing as mock shepherd and shepherdess, and decked out in all the vanities of the time. Agur’s prayer was apparently often selected, for we see it again in the Sampler of Emily Jane Brontë ([Fig. 10]), but there it has the quietest of ornament to surround it, and it is worked in black silk; whereas in the present case there is no Sampler in the collection where the whole sheaf of colours has been more drawn upon.
The remaining illustrations of borders are selected as being those where the design is well carried out, and as showing how the types continue. The first ([Fig. 29]), worked by Elizabeth Turner in 1771, represents a conventional rose in two aspects; the second, by Sarah Carr ([Fig. 30]), in 1809, is founded on the honeysuckle; whilst the third ([Fig. 31]) is a delightfully simple one of wild strawberries that is frequently found in samplers from the earliest (in [Plate II.]) onwards. In that from which this example is taken, worked by Susanna Hayes in 1813, it is most effective with its pink fruit and green stalks and band. It will be noticed that it even crossed the Atlantic, for it reappears in Mr Pennell’s American sampler, [Plate XIII.]
Fig. 30.—Border to Sampler by Sarah Carr. a.d. 1809.
Fig. 31.—Border to Sampler by Susanna Hayes. a.d. 1813.
How even the border degenerated as the nineteenth century advanced may be seen in the monotonous Greek fret used in the three samplers of the Brontës ([Figs. 10], [11], [12]), and in that of Mary Anderson ([Fig. 19]).