Sampler (Verse sampler)

Description

This is a linen verse sampler worked with silk threads in 1806 by Sarah Lees Art of Pilotstown, near Lewes, Delaware. Sarah's sampler includes elements from Quaker design, especially the "Emblem of Love" within a wreath, and the flower sprigs at the bottom edge. Her sampler also depicts a Georgian-style house with green door shutters that appears in different variations on a group of samplers from Mrs. Bower's School Lewes in the 1820's. The first samplers to be linked directly with The Bower's School are dated in 1817, too late, perhaps, to place Sarah there as a student. Some of the words in Sarah's sampler are misspelled, missing, or difficult to read. The text was taken from a song called Morality, in Wyeth’s Repository of Sacred Music, Part Second, and are as follows: (left): "While beauty and / pLeasure are now in ther / Prime and FOLLY & FaShION / expect our WhOLE tIME / AH Let not those / phantoms our wishes / engage let us LIVE so in Youth / that we BLush not in age" (right): "ThOugh the vain and th\e / gaY MaY attend us a while / Yet Let not their fLattrY / our Prudence BeguILe / Let us Covet those [charms] that / WILL never decaY nor / LISten to all that dece / ivers can saY" Legend: "B-Art S-Art I-Art / H-Art I-Art M-A Lees"; and "Sarh Art her Work duN at LUIS in [stitches removed] the / fifth sep**r 1806"