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Rare Textile Discovered in the RSN Collection
29th January, 2025
The RSN is home to more than 10,000 unique and priceless Collection and Archive pieces. Capturing the passion for embroidery throughout history, the charity’s treasure trove of textiles has also been storing an extremely rare and significant sampler.
This new discovery is a sampler made in Barbados in the 18th century and is one of only three samplers known to have been made on the island at that time. It is also the earliest known Barbadian sampler.
The textile gives a unique insight into the education of girls from slave-owning families in the Caribbean and will be of interest, not only to sampler and embroidery enthusiasts, but also scholars of girlhood, race, enslavement and the Atlantic world.
Dr Isabella Rosner, RSN Curator said: “This sampler was made by a young girl, named Martha Collymore, in 1771 and, at first glance, looked like a typical sampler made in England a full century earlier. However, on closer inspection, the style of some of the stitching and patterns did not fit with the date it was made, which prompted further research into the family name. This research revealed it was in fact made in Barbados, many thousands of miles away and is an extremely rare discovery.”
This special sampler is available to view and learn more about on the Royal School of Needlework’s Collections website, a free resource which aims to open the doors of the RSN’s Collection & Archive to the world.
You can read more about the Sampler in History today magazine, as well as Isabella’s blog post.
115 New Objects added to the RSN Collection & Archive Website
Along with the Barbados sampler, the latest launch of 115 new objects on the RSN Collection & Archive website includes 70 design cards from major Arts and Crafts figures, including designs by Gertrude Jekyll, Edward Burne-Jones, William Morris, Walter Crane and Selwyn Image, as well as additional textiles, including an early 19th-century double hemisphere map sampler, a wonderful variety of samplers from the 17th through 19th centuries, and an additional three Litany of Loreto pieces.
View the RSN’s Collection at Hampton Court Palace
To see some of the RSN’s Collection pieces up close, visit the RSN’s special exhibition, Tales of Textiles: The RSN Collection in Focus at Hampton Court Palace. Open on set days, the exhibition runs until June 2025.