ANTI-SLAVERY INTEREST. A RARE NEEDLEWORK SAMPLER

ANTI-SLAVERY INTEREST. A RARE NEEDLEWORK SAMPLER

EARLY 19TH CENTURY

worked with coloured wools, depicting a kneeling chained slave and with an inscription 'On africa's wide plains where the lions now roam..Freedom stalks forth the vast desert exploring, I was dragged from my hut and enchained as a Slave in a dark floating dungeon up on the salt waves, spare a halfpenny to blind negro', within a floral border, unframed

50.5 x 67cm

Catalogue Note

A related sampler can be found in the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.

Although women could not hold public office at the time, needlework provided a means of expressing political and moral convictions. This poignant picture depicts a kneeling enslaved African man, derived from Josiah Wedgwood’s celebrated abolitionist seal, modelled by William Hackwood in 1787. The image was widely reproduced in abolitionist broadsides and prints, one of which likely inspired this embroidered example. The inscription is taken from the opening verse of Desponding Negro, a poem and song by John Collins, published in London in 1792. The work offers a striking example of the role of women’s needlework in communicating the humanitarian ideals of the abolitionist movement.