Esther Stoddard's Embroidered Picture

Embroidered picture of a Reclining Shepherdess worked by Esther Stoddard of Northampton, circa 1750-1760 Photograph by Stephen Petegorsky

Esther Stoddard of Northampton (1738-1816), is believed to have embroidered this needlework picture of a reclining shepherdess. Her piece is typical of a group of needlework pictures with related designs embroidered in Boston in the mid-eighteenth century by the daughters of prosperous and prominent New England families.  These needlework pictures were embroidered under the direction of an experienced teacher at Boston boarding schools as a culminating project of a young lady’s study of the needle arts. 

The Boston Fishing Lady Series
Esther Stoddard’s needlework is one of a group of eighteenth century tent-stitch pictures collectively known as Boston fishing lady pictures based upon articles published in the magazine Antiques in 1923 and 1941. In the 1923 article, “The Fishing Lady and Boston Common,” Helen Bowen identified common motifs among eight mid-eighteenth century needlework pictures of New England origin.  A common central character was a fishing lady - “a finely appareled lady sitting beside a pond … with rod and line.”  In 1941, Nancy Graves Cabot revisited the subject after identifying fifty-eight such needlework pictures.  Twelve pieces featured a fishing lady as a central figure; eleven featured a reclining shepherdess.  One needlework picture of the Boston Common, made by Hannah Otis, was described by her nephew, Harrison Gray Otis, as “the boarding school lesson of Hannah Otis, daughter of the Hon. James Otis of Barnstable, educated in Boston.”  Nancy Graves Cabot suggested that these needlework pictures were embroidered under the direction of an experienced teacher at boarding schools in Boston as a culminating project of a young lady’s study of the needle arts.  The pictures are known as the Boston fishing lady series with or without the presence of the fishing lady in the design and share a number of characteristic motifs often rearranged within each picture in individual ways.  Esther Stoddard’s design features a reclining shepherdess and is categorized as a “Boston Fishing Lady” piece even though she didn’t include a fishing lady in her design.

In addition to a fishing lady and a reclining shepherdess, additional figures depicted in tent-stitch embroideries include a strolling couple, a piping shepherd, men riding horseback, a woman carrying a basket on her head, a woman with a drop spindle and a man and woman reaping wheat.  Additional design elements include animals - sheep, deer, ducks, lambs, birds and dogs, flowering plants and trees, houses and the rolling hills common to all the embroideries.  Esther Stoddard’s design features a reclining shepherdess at left with a spotted dog on its hind legs at her side and a crook and hat beside her.  Among the rolling hills are woolly sheep, nestling lambs, a leaping deer and a pheasant-like animal.  Depicted on the horizon is a two-story, two-chimney house with flanking single-story pavilions.  Several varieties of trees and two black birds fill the sky.  At lower right is a small pond with swimming ducks.  Red strawberries and red and cream flowering plants populate the grassy hills of the foreground.  In The Great River: Art and Society of the Connecticut Valley 1635-1820, Jane Nylander notes a similarity to Esther Stoddard’s piece with a piece attributed to Hannah Goddard of Boston.  In Women’s Work: Colonial Embroidery in Boston, Pamela Parmal finds Esther’s design closely related to pieces worked by Martha Frye of Boston (born about 1741) and Temperance Parker of Barnstable (born May 11, 1733).

Esther Stoddard’s Education
Esther Stoddard was born on May 23, 1738, the daughter of Prudence Chester and Colonel John Stoddard of Northampton, one of the most influential men in the Connecticut River Valley. Colonel John Stoddard was the son of Northampton’s second minister Solomon Stoddard and uncle of the third minister, the Reverend Jonathan Edwards.  In 1737, he built “the Manse” on Prospect Street in Northampton on land he inherited from his father.  In the book, Massachusetts Quilts: Our Common Wealth, Lynne Zacek Bassett describes Esther Stoddard’s family life and education: “The gentry families of the Connecticut River Valley in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were called the “River Gods.”  In their positions as leaders in the law, the military and in religion, members of the Stoddard, Williams, Ashley, Dwight, Partridge, Porter and Pynchon families controlled the region from the court and from the pulpit.  As successful merchants and wealthy farmers, they also controlled large tracts of land…. John Stoddard was a military man…. It was he who negotiated the return of captives who had been marched to Canada following the 1704 attack on Deerfield….  John Stoddard’s wife, Prudence Chester, was noted in the History of Ancient Wethersfield as being a 'noble and accomplished' woman….  Education was a priority in the Stoddard family, for the girls as well as the boys.  James Russell Trumbull wrote in the History of Northampton that Col. John Stoddard’s daughters were educated in Boston, ‘their teacher being a man by the name of Turner.  They would ride to Boston on horseback, sometimes on a pillion behind their father or some other person, and occasionally on a side-saddle.’  Their education in Boston would have included reading, writing, some math, and probably French.  It was unusual but not unheard of for some privileged girls also to learn the classics in Greek and Latin.  The knowledge that was valued above all others for wealthy and accomplished young ladies, though, was needlework.  The Stoddard girls would not have learned this skill from their teacher Mr. Turner, but from the female proprietress of a young ladies’ school.”

While “Mr. Turner” is identified as Ephraim Turner, the female proprietress with whom Esther studied needlework remains unknown. Few records of private young ladies’ schools exist.  As Jane Nylander writes, “it is generally believed that Esther Stoddard and other such girls lived for a time in Boston, boarding with school-mistresses or living with family friends or relatives.  During the 1750s, several Bostonians offered to board young ladies, teach tent stitch and other needlework, provide designs and/or sell embroidery supplies.” Nylander identifies Abigail Hiller and Bridget Suckling as two women who placed newspaper advertisements for their schools during the 1750s.

Tent-stitch embroidery
The embroidered pictures were worked in tent stitch – a diagonal stitch slanted at a 45-degree angle known today as a needlepoint stitch- using wool and silk thread on linen. In The Age of Homespun, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich notes that an examination of the linen canvas used by Eunice Bourne to embroider a 20 1/2" x 43 1/2" chimneypiece in 1753 shows that Bourne worked on linen made of 24 warp ends and 26 wefts per square inch. For her chimneypiece, Bourne created over 500,000 stitches.  Materials and patterns could be purchased from the teacher.  The design outline was usually drawn directly on the canvas with pen and ink by a pattern drawer or needlework teacher.  The student selected the colors and stitched the bands of color as she sought fit.  An unfinished piece pictured in Women’s Work: Colonial Embroidery in Boston shows that the embroiderer worked the figural elements in her piece first before stitching the background.  Occasionally, students used a textural stitch such as French knot or a bead.  Esther worked the sheep, deer's antlers and red strawberries in French knot and used a black bead for the eye of the deer.  Kathleen B. Smith, who created a reproduction kit of Esther’s piece in the 1990s, noted that in Esther’s piece even these areas were worked first in tent stitch and the embellishment added on top of the stitch.  Esther worked the hills of grass in shades of green wool from dark to light, changing shade along straight horizontal lines.

Design Sources
Nancy Graves Cabot researched the sources of the designs used in the embroidered pictures in a December 1941 article in Antiques magazine, Engravings and Embroideries: The Sources of Some Designs in the Fishing Lady Pictures.  Cabot identified several English and French engravings as original pattern sources for the motifs in the pictorial embroideries.  A set of seventeenth-century French Pastorales painted by Jacques Stella of Lyon and engraved by his niece, Claudine Bouzonnet (who used the name Stella) has been identified as the source of a strolling couple, a piping shepherd and a woman carrying a basket on her head.  Two engravings by English painter John Wootton, titled The Going Out in the Morning and The Chace, have been identified as the source for foreground figures of men riding horses, running dogs and a man with a pole. A source for the fishing lady has yet to be identified.  According to Cabot, “it seems probable that the patterns of the Fishing Lady embroideries, inspired by models imported from London, were distributed from one of the many schools of embroidery advertised in the newspapers of colonial Boston.”

Cabot provided an example of one of these schools - the school of Susanna Hiller Condy.  In the April 1934 Bulletin of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Gertrude Townsend brought to light an advertisement for the shop of Susanna Hiller Condy.  In April 1738, Condy advertised in the Boston News Letter: “All sort of beautiful Figures on Canvas, for Tent-Stick (sic); the Patterns from London, but drawn by her much cheaper than English drawing,” as well as embroidery supplies such as “All sorts of Canvas, without drawing; also silk shades, slacks, Floss, Cruells of all Sorts, the best White Chapple Needles, and everything for all Sorts of Work.”  In March 1742, Condy advertised in the Boston Evening Post, “Mrs. Condy opens her school next week, and Persons may be supplied with the Materials for the Works she teaches whether they learn of her or not.  She draws Patterns of all sorts, especially Pocket Books, House-wives, Screens, Pictures, Chimney Pieces, Escrutoires, etc. for Tent Stitch in a plainer Manner and cheaper than those which come from London.” 

When Susanna Condy died in 1747, her daughter Mrs. Elizabeth Russell, announced a sale at her house of “A Variety of very beautiful Patterns to draw by of the late Mrs. Susannah Condy, deceased.” In 1748, Condy’s sister-in-law, Abigail Hiller opened a boarding school, advertising in February 1748 in the Boston Evening Post: “This may inform young Gentlewomen in Town and Country, That early in the Spring, Mrs. Hiller desires to open a Boarding-School at the House where she lives, in Fish-Street at the North End of Boston … where they may be taught Wax Work … Quill-Work, Feather Work and Embroidering with Gold and Silver … and may be supplied with Patterns, and all sorts of Drawing and Materials for their Work.”

Stoddard Family Needlework
Esther Stoddard never married and lived her entire life in the family home, the Manse, on Prospect Street until her death in 1816.  Her embroidered picture was donated to Historic Northampton by a family descendant by 1941, when it was loaned for exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Two additional embroidered items were donated to Historic Northampton, which may have been worked by either Esther Stoddard or her sister Prudence: an embroidered silk apron and a metal thread embroidery of the Stoddard family coat of arms.

References:
Bassett, Lynne Zacek, editor, Massachusetts Quilts: Our Common Wealth, Hanover: University Press of New England, 2009.

Bowen, Helen, “The Fishing Lady and Boston Common,” Antiques, August 1923, pp. 70-73.

Cabot, Nancy Graves, “Engravings and Embroideries: The Sources of Some Designs in the Fishing Lady Pictures,” Antiques, December 1941, pp. 367-369.

Cabot, Nancy Graves, “The Fishing Lady and Boston Common,” Antiques, July 1941, pp. 28-31.

Nylander, Jane C., catalog number 266, Textiles, Clothing, and Needlework in The Great River: Art & Society of the Connecticut Valley, 1635-1820, Hartford, Connecticut: The Wadsworth Atheneum, 1985.

Parmal, Pamela A., Women’s Work: Embroidery in Colonial Boston, Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 2012.

Trumbull, James Russell, History of Northampton, Massachusetts, Northampton: Press of Gazette Printing Company, 1902.

Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher, The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001.

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