Faith Trumbull

In 1754, 11 year-old Faith Trumbull (1743–1775), the daughter of Governor Jonathan Trumbull of Lebanon, Connecticut, was sent to boarding school in Boston. In the 1750s, formal education for girls was a luxury, and only the most educated and well-off families could afford that experience for their daughters.  At school in Boston, Faith practiced reading, writing, arithmetic, classical languages, and drawing, painting, sewing and embroidery. She learned art by copying elements from Old Master prints. Elements borrowed from a Dutch print are easy to see in her needlework picture of a milking scene, but Faithchanged a few details—the barefoot peasant woman from the print wears fashionable black, buckled shoes in Faith’s picture, and her peasant dress has become a shimmering gown in red and gold.

Faith’s needleworks include every element we associate with pictorial art—people, animals, landscape features, color, texture, light, shadow, and perspective—but  she achieved the effects using silk and thread (with some painted areas). There was very little other representational art in Connecticut in this period when professional painting did not exist. Faith’s younger brother John became one of the most celebrated 18th-century American artists, but he was just an infant when Faith created her needlework pictures. These pictures hung in the Trumbull family’s house, glimmering and gleaming and full of fascinating detail. John later recalled: “These wonders were hung in my mother’s parlor, and were among the first objects that caught my infant eye. I endeavored to imitate them.”

Faith Trumbull’s pictures are among the earliest and most ambitious pictorial embroideries in the Connecticut Historical Society’s exhibition, ConnecticutNeedlework, Women, Art, and Family, 1740 – 1840. They are artistic masterpieces created by a very young woman at a time when pictorial art was just developing in America. Come and see them all together while you can!  The exhibition will be on view through March 26, 2011.  For more information, visit the CHS website, www.chs.org.