March Object of the Month: Blanche and Fitz-James, 1813
by Hylah Bevier
American 1795-1874
Silk embroidery on silk with painted hands, faces, and landscape
19” high x 22” wide
Accession number: 2512
This exquisite embroidered picture was made by Hylah Bevier in 1813, when she was a student at the Litchfield Female Academy in Litchfield, Connecticut. Founded in 1792 by a woman named Sarah Pierce, the Litchfield Academy quickly became one of the most important institutions of female education in the early United States. Pierce held revolutionary ideals about education—she believed that girls should be taught the same subjects as boys. Instructors balanced young women’s academic pursuits with artistic endeavors in music, dancing, singing, drawing, painting, and embroidery. Intensive needleworking projects like Bevier’s Blanche and Fitz-James were culminations marking a high point in a girl’s education. Beautifully framed, such objects were cherished and displayed prominently in the home.
The subjects of the artworks made by Pierce’s students reinforced lessons from history and literature and often stressed ideal feminine behavior. For her embroidered picture, Hylah Bevier illustrated a scene from Sir Walter Scott’s narrative poem The Lady of the Lake, first published in 1810 to great acclaim. The scene presents the melancholy death of the widow Blanche of Devan, a lowland Scottish woman, whose bridegroom was murdered on her wedding day. The anguish of her grief causes her, in Sir Walter Scott’s account, to descend into madness. Later, upon encountering the poem’s hero Fitz-James, Blanche warns him of an ambush right before she is struck with an arrow and mortally wounded. As Fitz-James kneels before the dying Blanche, blood streaming from her chest, he takes the lock of her bridegroom’s hair—which she has dutifully worn since his death—and cuts off a lock of Blanche’s hair, mingling the two together in death.
By depicting this scene of an ill-fated marriage drawn from contemporary literature, Hylah Bevier presented both her impeccable skills in needlework and her understanding of ideal female devotion and the powers of romantic love. Harriet Beecher Stowe—American author, abolitionist, and a fellow graduate of the Litchfield Academy—would later describe The Lady of the Lake as a source of “fresh and eager joy” in smalltown America, offering “the vivid sensation of delight” in “lonely mountain towns by a people eager for a new mental excitement.”
At its peak in 1816, the Litchfield Academy’s enrollment reached 157 pupils. During this energizing period, the Bevier sisters, who would later marry into the Hasbrouck family of Locust Lawn, were educated at the Litchfield Academy.
