Merklap (not Stickmustertuch) arrives!
"Stickmustertuch?!" I can hear you ask (unless you're one of my German speaking readers...) What's that? It's a sampler! How do you pronounce it?Easy!"Stick" - "muster" (rhymes with buster!) "took" (like toot but with a 'k' at the end. "Stick" means to embroiderer, "muster" is a pattern or design and "tuch" is a cloth. So, like all of those long, complicated German words, it really means exactly what it says - "embroidered pattern cloth"!**Update - except this isn't a German sampler but a Dutch sampler and in The Netherlands they are called Merklap.
Why am I so excited? Two reasons: firstly I think it's absolutely beautiful and I feel very lucky to own it and secondly - it's from 1775!The American Revolution was about to begin. The famous German philosopher and poet, Goethe, was only 6 years old, Mozart was just 1 year old and Beethoven was born 5 years after the sampler was finished. The woman who embroidered it lived during the reigns of Frederik the Great and Catherine the Great of Russia. Samuel Johnson published the first dictionary of the English Language. Three years earlier Benjamin Franklin invented the lightning rod and four years later John Harrison invented the navigational clock for measuring longitude - meaning ships were less likely to get lost at sea. Did any of this matter to her? Did she read Goethe, listen to Beethoven, play Mozart, learn a few English words, hear about that crazy Mr. Franklin or have a father who owned a ship that could now safely navigate home?My knowledge of German Dutch samplers is tiny - almost non-existent, in fact. I know that the motifs have meaning but I don't know what they mean. I'm reading and researching which is certainly improving my German but progress is very slow.
The provenance was only back to the last owner who was a collector and no relation to the family so I have no idea of the name, other than the initials NP. She's put her initials on the piece twice - once at the bottom in large gold and green letters and once at the top in what is now a sandy beige.Between the large initials at the bottom is a vase with three roses. Below are two little birds and to the left and right of each bird there is a heart, each with a crown above. These remind me of the little crowns Luzine Happel had in her exhibition a few years ago of Schwalm Whitework. The crowns were used with the initials or names of the embroiderer to mark the old pieces of white work.
The symbol seems to be a tree with birds in it. There are five trees with birds perched in them, two large and three small. There is also what appears to be a bird house with four little birds surrounding it (see top photo, on the left side under the ship)
There is a ship, with two passengers, a large flag, waves below it and something unidentifiable on the left side. Is it someone walking the plank? Surely not! And is the ship tied to the tree on the right of it or is it crashing into the tree?
The decorations at the bottom of each tree are quite detailed. Are they meant to be a garden or does this motif have another meaning?
Then there's the robot looking thing in the middle of the photo above. What is it?! My husband thinks it's a windmill. That makes a lot more sense than a robot!
Isn't it romantic to wonder, to not be able to Google it and find out, to speculate or invent answers that are plausible? If you have any ideas, information or knowledge you can share to shed light on the meaning of these motifs I would so love your help! And, as soon as I have learned more about this sampler, I will let you know.