Sargent House Museum Presents “Ornaments of the Mind” April 14 at 2pm

Sargent House Museum
Presents: “Ornaments of the Mind: Needlework and a New England Girl’s Education”

Laura Johnson, Associate Curator of Historic New England, will present a lecture on “female academies” of the early 19th century founded by women like Judith Sargent Murray, Judith Saunders and Clementina Beach.  Girls learned the “useful and ornamental arts” of reading, writing, and arithmetic as well as painting in oils and watercolors on fancy surfaces and plain and fancy needlework.

The Sargent House Museum recently acquired an excellent example of this fancy needlework, presented to Nancy Parsons Sargent by her nieces Anna Williams and Julia Maria Murray, Judith Sargent Murray’s only child.  The work depicts Cornelia, a model of what the Romans called “civic” motherhood, with her children, exclaiming that they were her real treasures.  Judith Sargent Murray, a product of the Enlightenment, and the American Revolution, was one of the first writers to extoll the virtues of “republican motherhood,” the practice of mothers teaching their children the new ideals and values of the early American republic.  The needlework was handed down through the Sargent family and donated by Virginia Pleasants.  Her niece will discuss the Sargent family connections.

The public is welcome at the lecture and at the public unveiling and installation of the piece that will follow.
A free will donation is suggested; members will be admitted free of charge.