| Maker(s): | Willard, Rachel (embroiderer); Doggett, John (frame maker)
| | Culture: | American
| | Title: | Mourning Picture
| | Date Made: | circa 1803
| | Type: | Needlework
| | Materials: | silk embroidery on silk ground; carved, gilt frame with reverse-painted glass
| | Place Made: | Massachusetts: Boston, Dorchester
| | Measurements: | Frame: 21 1/2 x 18 x 2.5 in; 54.6 x 45.7 cm
| | Accession Number: | HD 2023.12
| | Credit Line: | Museum purchase with funds provided by a bequest from Joseph Peter Spang III in honor of the Flynt Family, the Museum Collections Fund, and the Mr. and Mrs. Hugh B. Vanderbilt Fund for Curatorial Acquisitions
| | Museum Collection: | Historic Deerfield
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Label Text:
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 Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=HD+2023.12 |
