Feb 28, 2002 - Sale 1926

Sale 1926 - Lot 71

Price Realized: $ 3,450
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 4,000 - $ 6,000
EXCEEDINGLY RARE ANTI-SLAVERY SILKFine anti-slavery keepsake, being a circular silk doily featuring a central transfer image of a female slave sitting on a rock beneath a palm tree while holding a small baby in her arms, with a blue and red embroidered border finished with tassles of the same color; the verso with a printed hymn titled "Negro Woman who sitteth pining in captivity;" 10 inches in diameter; in remarkable condition. [England], 1830s
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Additional Details



The text and image which appear on this silk doily are recorded in Inga Bryden and Janet Floyd's Domestic Space, Reading the Nineteenth Century Interior (Manchester University Press, 1999), pages 76-77. The text on the doily is from Anna Laetitia Barbauld's Hymns in Prose for Children (1781) which was used on the Birmingham Anti-Slavery Society's workbags "which depict a slave mother and her sick child, and which were inscribed with Barbauld's hymn."
While the American and British anti-slavery fairs of the 1830s offered many prints, broadsides, plates, cups, mugs and other "useful articles" with images and poems showing the cruelty of the slave-trade, very few of the fabric pieces have survived. These were generally made of silk, and thus very expensive. Of these silk pieces, only a handful have been documented. <