Today's antiques world has caught up with Polk's enthusiasm. In the closing decades of the 20th century, Americana collectors, who once reserved their attentions for schoolgirl samplers, started focusing on silk pictorials embroidered in academies between 1800 and 1840 by advanced students of needlework. The value of these works is increasing as many fine examples preserved in their original frames emerge from obscurity. Scholarship shows that they were not merely a sentimental product of the feminine arts, but also a vehicle for educating girls when academics were exclusive to boys.

The art of embroidering canvases to create pictorial motifs -- raised, padded, and brilliantly spangled with pearls, coral, and metallic thread -- appeared in England during the mid-17th century. The practice crossed the Atlantic and evolved into canvaswork in the 18th century and then into silk embroidery in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

Beginning in 1712 in Boston, one of the earliest American schools for needlework, George Brownell's, also taught writing and arithmetic (deemed "necessary graces for young women"). These fashionable schools, which also provided basic scholastic instruction, multiplied throughout major American cities.

"In America, one major stimulus to the fad was the huge outpouring of silk-embroidered memorials to George Washington after his death in 1799," notes Linda Eaton, curator of textiles at Winterthur. Teachers also devised patterns, featuring willow trees and mourning figures draped over urns, to be dedicated to deceased members of students' families.