Sampler

The bold but sophisticated design of Eliza Pitner’s sampler is characteristic of a group of Delaware samplers made in the 1820s, which all contain a cohesive vocabulary of motifs. While related to earlier Delaware “fruit and flower” samplers like Jane Wilson’s from 1791 (2010.47), the motifs changed over the years, as more teachers and schools began to adopt the highly decorative pattern. Recent research points to Eliza attending the Seminary for Young Ladies, which was opened in 1820 in Newark, Delaware run by seasoned teacher Ann Barclay Cloud. Cloud advertised the opening of her boarding school in a Wilmington newspaper in April 1820, where in addition to academic subjects, she would teach “Plain and Fancy Work…Embroidery, Lace Work…” along with drawing and painting. Eliza’s design, which is closely related to a sampler by Eliza J. Benneson in the collection of the Cooper-Hewitt Museum (1941.69.254), displays a wide naturalistic floral border that rises from red and white roses blooming at the bottom. The center reserve features two alphabets, a stanza from a hymn, the maker’s name and the date the sampler was completed, and a small landscape with a central tree flanked by a pair of butterflies and grazing sheep. A large pineapple tops the sampler; this distinctive motif appears on many of the Delaware samplers from the early 1820s. Pineapples were imported to America from South American and the Caribbean in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Because they often spoiled in transport, they were rare and costly, and America’s gentry displayed them as centerpieces on their dining tables at important dinners. It is recorded that George Washington often asked ship captains to bring him "a few Pine Apples" from the West Indies to his Mount Vernon home to enjoy and display when entertaining honored guests. The appeal of this exotic luxury resulted in pineapple representations appearing not only in samplers but on garden urns, coffee pots, fabrics, and furniture, and over time, the pineapple became a symbol of hospitality.

Eliza Pitner was born in Newtown, Bucks County, Pennsylvania, near the Delaware border. She was the youngest of eight children born to John Pitner (b. 1755) and Jemina Davis Pitner (b.1758) who were married in 1786. At the time Eliza made this sampler, according to the 1820 United States census, the family was living in Pencader Hundred in New Castle County, Delaware. No record of Eliza’s marriage or the birth of any children has been found, and the 1860 Census lists her as single resident in Wilmington, Delaware. While Eliza stitched a stanza from a hymn related to the immediacy of death in her sampler, she lived a long life and died on March 29, 1888, at age 85. She is interred at the Wilmington & Brandywine Cemetery.