The Shepherdess of the Alps

Sixteen-year old Evelina Hull worked this finely executed silk embroidered picture under the tutelage of Miss Hannah Spofford (ca. 1783-1827) at the Charlestown Academy. The image of a courting shepherd and shepherdess was closely copied from an engraving by Francesco Bartolozzi after a painting by Angelica Kauffmann. Published in London in 1785, the print illustrates a scene from "La Bergère des Alpes," ("The Shepherdess of the Alps"), written in 1766 by the popular French playwright and historian Jean-Francois Marmontel. The story’s Alpine setting, plot twists and turns, and the heroine’s ability to ultimately dictate the terms of her romantic relationship, resonated with early nineteenth century young American women and different scenes from the story are found in other schoolgirl samplers as well as objects such as porcelain figural groups. (See: MMA 52.2.3)

The heroine, Adelaide, is a Countess by marriage. While serving as an Officer in the French army, her husband, the Count D’Orestan, is dishonored in battle, and takes his own life. In her mourning, Adelaide decides to live in "contented poverty" as a shepherdess in the Savoy Valley of the Alps. Sometime later, while tending her flock, Fonrose, the son of the Marquis of Turin, becomes captivated by Adelaide. Believing Adelaide to be a shepherdess, he disguises himself as a shepherd, and in the scene stitched by Evelina, Fonrose plays his oboe hoping to attract her attention. Eventually, Adelaide agrees to marry Fonrose only if he understands that she is still mourning her husband and cannot love Fonrose the way he loves her. The story ends with Fonrose’s decision to marry Adelaide nonetheless.

Evelina Hull’s skilled needlework techniques include a variety of stitches used to create the texture, definition and volume seen in the leafy trees, foliage, figures’ costume and the wooly coats of the sheep. Gradated shades of silk threads, from front to back, help provide perspective to valley scene. When the needlework was completed, Miss Spofford, or an artist hired by the school, hand painted the faces and sky. It was then professionally framed behind glass with a black and gold églomisé border inscribed at the bottom: "Evelina Hull Charlestown Academy."

The co-educational Charlestown Academy, active from ca. 1804 to ca. 1815/16, was located on the corner of Cordis Street, a narrow residential street of newly built wood frame and brick Federal houses. Described in the diary of one of its instructors, the schoolhouse was a two-story building with a classroom on each floor. There are thirteen known Charlestown Academy samplers that date between 1810 and 1815. Five feature different scenes taken from literature, and eight are mourning pictures. The design source for all the school’s needlework came from published sources. Miss Spofford would have transferred the outline of the design of "The Shepherdess of the Alps" print onto silk for Evelina’s embroidery and so it is a mirror image of the original print. In addition, the shepherdess’s dress was altered to reflect neo-classical styling rather than the rustic style of the 1780s.

Eveline Hull was born in Charlestown, Massachusetts, on April 9, 1796, the daughter Isaac Hull (b. 1775) and Jerusha Billings Hull (b. 1776). She was 24, when she married Jonathan Frost (1788-1873), the brother of her Charlestown Academy classmate, Mary Frost (1794-1835), on January 31, 1821. It was Jonathan’s second marriage and Evelina and Jonathan oversaw a prosperous farm in Arlington (originally West Cambridge) where their eight children, four girls and four boys, were born between 1823 and 1837.

The Met owns an earlier, unfinished sampler worked by Evelina Hull in 1806 when she was ten years old (MMA 39.126.2). This sampler features an alphabet and verse bordered on three sides by a meandering vine of blossoming flowers. A far less skillfully produced sampler, it was created under the supervision of a different teacher, or perhaps her own mother. Eveline Hull Frost died when she was 61 years old on May 31, 1857, in West Stockbridge, Massachusetts. She is interred at the Mount Pleasant Cemetery in Arlington, Massachusetts, near her husband and two of her adult children and their spouses. Her sampler was passed down in the Frost family and donated to the Metropolitan Museum in 1939 by Evelina Hull’s granddaughter, Mrs. Joshua Marsden Van Cott.