Label Text:
Building a Collection, September 27, 2025-February 23, 2025: Neoclassical subjects worked with silk threads on silk fabric became the most fashionable and sophisticated of Boston’s school-girl embroideries in the Federal period. Rachel Willard created her picture, memorializing the deaths of her siblings Beriah and Catherine, around 1804 while she was attending the elite academy of Mrs. Saunders and Miss Beach School in Dorchester, Massachusetts. John Doggett, a notable looking glass and picture framer operating in Roxbury, Massachusetts, created the gilt frame. Willard’s composition, a cylindrical stepped plinth surmounted by a pedestal and figure with two twisting trees in the background, was likely derived from the mezzotint, Virtue Weeping over the Tomb of Washington, printed in 1800. The death of George Washington in 1799 inspired numerous commemorative images which were often used by schoolmistresses for embroidery patterns in the early 1800s.

Tags:
mourning

Subjects:
Grief; Embroidery; Silk

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https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=HD+2023.12

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