Esther Stoddard Embroidered Picture

Esther Stoddard (1738-1816) Embroidered Picture Boston, Massachusetts, possibly completed at Northampton, Massachusetts, ca. 1750-1760 Wool and silk on linen ground H 21; w 17 Northampton Historical Society, Northampton, Massachusetts Esther Stoddard's beautifully worked picture is typical of a large group of canvas-work pictures embroidered in Boston in the mid-eighteenth century by the daughters of prominent and prosperous New England families. The earliest dated example in the group was worked in 1746 by Priscilla Allen of Falmouth, Maine. The pictures are all meticulously worked in tent stitch on fine linen canvas and are linked together by a number of characteristic motifs which are repeated many times, often rearranged within each picture in fresh and individual ways. Some of the motifs were also used in more traditional samplers made at late as 1800. The reclining shepherdess with a little spotted dog at her side, woolly sheep, nestling lambs, and three very distinctive kinds of trees used by Esther Stoddard are seen also in a canvas-work picture thought to be by Hannah Goddard (1758-1786) of Brookline. Hannah's picture includes a shepherd with a tall crook, while Esther used a leaping deer, a small pond with ducks swimming on it, other small animals, and foliate designs to fill the right hand side of the picture. Both girls depicted on the horizon a large two-story, two-chimney house with flanking single-story pavilions. Esther Stoddard's version of the house has a projecting two-story central pavilion as well. Although Esther, Hannah, and the other girls who worked these pictures lived in widely scattered homes, from Maine to Cape Cod and as far west as Northampton, it seems clear that most of them lived for a time in Boston, boarding with school-mistresses or living with family friends and relatives while furthering their education, developing their social skills, and enjoying the lively and cosmopolitan atmosphere of the city. There is a strong tradition that Esther Stoddard and her sister(s) were sent "to Boston on horseback to seek and education," after her father's death in 1748.

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