Samplers: Five Centuries of a Gentle Craft

by Anne Sebba

The history of sampler making is as colourful and varied as the craft itself. In this lavishly illustrated book, Anne Sebba charts the rise of the sampler in Great Britain and America from its sixteenth century origins through the golden age of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to its present day popularity among collectors of antiques. Throughout the centuries, sampler work has played a central domestic role. The earliest samplers were used as stitch and pattern guides by those wealthy enough to afford the luxury of embroidery but they soon became an art form in their own right.

Lace work samplers and those with elaborate bead or ribbon work were among the many varieties that gained widespread appreciation; school samplers, worked most often by girls, were an essential part of the curriculum in many schools. Throughout the years, samplers have displayed an impressive diversity of styles and stitches and their consistently high standards provide valuable documentation of changing fashions in needlework. Yet they are equally interesting to the social historian for with themes as varied as contemporary events moral behaviour and family life they provide a remarkable informal and intimate reflection of British and American life in the last five centuries An important contribution to the history of domestic crafts, Samplers will appeal to all those anxious to preserve a unique cultural heritage.

Hardcover

First published December 1, 1979

About the author

Anne Sebba began her writing career at the BBC world service, Arabic section, while still a student. After graduating from King’s College, London in Modern European History, she worked as a foreign correspondent for Reuters in London and Rome, the first woman Reuters accepted on their Graduate Trainee Scheme. In 1975 she moved to New York with her husband and first baby returning two years later with a second baby and first book. From then on she was launched into a freelance career as a journalist, biographer, cruise lecturer and occasional broadcaster and is now also an officially accredited Nadfas lecturer. She has worked for many writers’ organisations including PEN Writers in Prison Committee and the Society of Authors chairing its Management Committee from 2013- 2015 and followed her bestselling biography That Woman, a life of Wallis Simpson, based on the discovery of 15 secret letters which Wallis wrote to her second husband Ernest Simpson, with Les Parisiennes : How the Women of Paris lived, loved and died in the 1940s published in the UK and US in 2016.