Sampler mid-17th century British The canvas ground of this spot sampler is a crowded, asymmetrical flurry of ornamental designs; these include fauna, such as birds, snails, a boar, and butterflies; a variety of fantastic flora in the form of flowering and fruiting branches and stylized blossoms known as slips; and geometric interlacing patterns similar to those of newly fashionable "knot" parterres, designs for which were first published in England by Thomas Hyll in his Proffitable Art of Gardening (1568). The sampler is divided roughly into two parts, with the natural world presented at the t

Sampler mid-17th century British The canvas ground of this spot sampler is a crowded, asymmetrical flurry of ornamental designs; these include fauna, such as birds, snails, a boar, and butterflies; a variety of fantastic flora in the form of flowering and fruiting branches and stylized blossoms known as slips; and geometric interlacing patterns similar to those of newly fashionable "knot" parterres, designs for which were first published in England by Thomas Hyll in his Proffitable Art of Gardening (1568). The sampler is divided roughly into two parts, with the natural world presented at the top and geometric motifs samplers may have come closest to fulfilling the etymological destiny of the sampler, or exemplar, as "an example to be imitated; a model, pattern; an archetype." They are composed of collections of patterns and stitches to which the maker might refer when she was in need of inspiration or guidance for a particular technique. They generally do not include a date or a name in the body of the work that would allow a connection to be made with an embroiderer at a certain point in her J. B. Wace cited the existence of samplers as early as the beginning of the sixteenth century, writing that one was purchased for Elizabeth of York, who died in 1503, and that Elizabeth, Countess of Oxford, who died in 1537, left her two sisters twelve samplers in her will, although it is not clear that these were the work of her own hand. The earliest extant English sampler is preserved in the Victoria and Albert Museum; it was inscribed and dated by Jane Bostock in 1598. A sampler with a very similar composition to the present example composed of tent-stitch slips and animals above a group of geometric designs worked in silk and metal threads, is also in the Victoria and Albert Museum (inv. no. ). Spot samplers were originally dated to the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century, but more recently they have been reassigned to the mid-seve

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