Sampler (Fancy sampler)

Description

This needlework sampler is embroidered with silk threads on a plain-woven linen ground. It was worked by Sophie Bailly of Mackinac Island, Michigan in 1828 while at Marianne Schindler Fisher's Boston-based mission school. The sampler features symmetrically balanced motifs of flowers, animals, and trees below two rows of letters and one row of numerals. One particular motif, the parrot in the tree at the bottom center, appears to be influenced by samplers worked in Newburyport, Massachusetts. There are two figures, a man and a woman wearing 18th century clothing, in the bottom corners. Sophie Bailly was the daughter of Joseph Bailly, a French-Canadian fur trader, and Bead-way-way (baptized Angelique McGulpin), a French/Native American woman of the Odawa culture. Sophie signed her work in French, the typical language of a community dominated by French fur traders. The inscription on her sampler reads: "SOPHIE . BAILLY / Mackinac. Janvier 21 / 1828." She was twenty-one years old when she worked this sampler and may have been a teacher rather than a student.