The past week has been incredibly busy here at the Dyer Library and Saco Museum. The library has a very large annual book sale that runs for over a week and involves a lot of attention on my part. The good news is that it is doing very well and that I found a nice (although small) collection of textile related books to add to my office reference section. The sad news is that I have neglected this blog while taking care of that business.

Today I received a letter from Carol and Stephen Huber of www.antiquesamplers.com with little photographs of about twenty samplers and eleven silk embroideries from Maine that they have handled in recent years. Amy Finkel of www.samplings.com has also provided nice and ever-so-useful photos. Together, they've greatly expanded the volume of work with which I'm gaining familiarity, and each one I see broadens the story that we will be able to tell next winter in our exhibit. In the Hubers 'group were two more that fit into the largest group of related Portland samplers I've identified, bring it up to about a dozen, and still not a name that appears to be connected with the Misses Martins' academy, making it more and more certain that that very large and longlived school was not the source.

I also had a discussion today with a 19th century American art expert who participated in (and literally helped write the book on) Charles Codman, a now well-known landscape artist who came to Portland from Boston somewhere around 1822. His first advertisement in Portland appeared in a newspaper in October 1822, and December 1822, when he indicated that he was contemplating setting up an academy for young men and women to teach drawing, painting, etc. In 1822 and 1823 he appeared in the Boston, Massachusetts City Directory, but in 1823 he also was listed in the Portland directory. Was he dividing his time between the two places? You may wonder why this might be important.

Charles Codman also advertised that he would create "drawings for lady's needlework." Is it a coincidence that with Codman's arrival in Portland in 1822, silk embroideries from Portland began to feature elaborate and very attractive landscapes the same year? Betty Ring, in her examination of Portland schoolgirl embroidery in The Magazine Antiques, September 1988 discussed the possibility that Codman may have been the artist responsible for some of those designs.

This is one of the silk embroideries attributed to Mrs. Mayo's school, believed to have been worked by either Louisa or Sarah C. Davis and dedicated to the three deceased children of Moses and Mercy Caldwell Davis of Portland, ca. 1823. It's in the collection of Bayou Bend.

Please take a look at the tree on the left side of the embroidery: large, spare, brown and a little less than healthy looking. It turns out that Codman, in his later work, (he was born about 1800 so was still a very young man in 1822-23), is rather well known for his tall, unhealthy looking trees, which often look very much like this tree. That sounds exciting!  Not so fast. Betty Ring included four related embroideries in her article, all clearly from the same school. None of the other three have trees that look the least bit like the one in the Davis embroidery. I've seen at least four other mourning embroideries also from this school--presumably Mrs. Mayo's, but more about that on another posting--and none of those have Codman trees either.

Codman's biographers note that when he arrived in Portland he was the only artist there, so that at least means that IF a professional artist is associated with some Portland needlework, it MUST be Codman. Another tiny intriguing tidbit, for what it's worth, is that beginning in 1827 Codman struck up a very close professional relationship with John Neal who had just returned to Portland from more than a decade away and who was one of America's very first professional art critics, and (here's the fun part!),  he was the son of Rachel Hall Neal, who, of course, operated one of Portland's longest lasting female academies, first alone and later with the help of John's twin sister, Rachel. And that opens up another potential avenue of research. What about the works coming from Neal's school. Do those--whatever they are--show evidence of Codman's hand?