Needlework picture (“The Shepherd’s Grove”)

Agnes Yeakle’s needlework picture, labeled “The Shepherd’s Grove,” illustrates a well-dressed couple standing in an idealized pastoral landscape. The lawn beneath their feet is composed of hillocks stitched with interlocking arches in five shades of green silk thread on a loosely woven sheer linen gauze ground fabric. A shepherd leans against the trunk of the weeping willow tree on the right. All is calm in the shepherd’s world; while he reads a book, his sheep graze and his sheepdog observes the flock benevolently. On the left, at the distance, there is farmhouse sheltered under another willow. The needlework is signed “Agnes Yeakle 1811” on a label pasted to its paper mat.

Agnes’ distinctive last name, Yeakle, associates her with a Pennsylvania-German religious group known as the Schwenkfelders. They were Reformed Protestant followers of Caspar Schwenkfeld von Ossig (1489-1561), who originated in Southern Germany and Silesia, today an area in southwest Poland. After being persecuted by both Catholics and Lutherans, in search of religious freedom, a few hundred arrived in Pennsylvania during the 1730s. Agnes was born in 1785 in Chestnut Hill, a neighborhood in northern Philadelphia. She was twenty-six in 1811 when she embroidered this piece, older than the age that many young women completed decorative embroideries. She did not marry until two years later in 1813, so she may have made it as an amusing project while she was still living in her parents’ home. It seems more like a creative work of pictorial art than a school exercise. While it has commonalities with other pastoral landscape embroideries completed in the Philadelphia area by younger girls in the early years of the nineteenth century, the composition and stitching on this piece is more sophisticated. An indication that the embroidery could have been made by a woman older than a schoolgirl can be found in the clever design of the interlocking hillocks in the green lawn, its overall disregard of strict compositional symmetry, and precision with which the couple’s fashionable clothing has been rendered.

For more information, see catalogue entry.