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Overview
This embroidery was made by an unknown English maker in the seventeenth century. It depicts the biblical parable of Jesus and the Samarian Woman where Jesus is given water drawn from a well by the woman (John 4: 5-42).
Design
The embroidery uses motifs copied from book illustrations. This partly accounts for the flora being out of proportion with the overall work - the flowers and acorns appear enormous compared to the church and people.
The work's English landscape setting is evocative of mediaeval manuscripts, thereby revealing more about the maker's surroundings than the biblical parable, which is set in Samaria.
The embroidery is worked in naturally dyed coloured silk threads, using long and short stitches on a linen ground. One of the church windows has a tiny windowpane of mica, a finely flaked mineral with a mirror-like surface.
The work is an example of a seventeenth-century trend in which embroidered pictures, using biblical or classical stories as subjects, were framed and hung as decoration in the home.