Richard Inksons double pocketbook Possibly Pennsylvania, dated 1776

Wool on linen with silk lining and wool twill tape binding

Inscribed interior panel, wool thread: Richard Inksons 1776

Ed and Mildred Bohne, Newmanstown, Pennsylvania, 1981

"Women Only: Folk Art by Female Hands," New York, American Folk Art Museum, April 6-September 12, 2010

American Radiance: The Ralph Esmerian Gift to the American Folk Art Museum, p. 302, fig. 262

Very good condition, one or two broken threads. Colors are brilliant.
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In 1763 an advertisement in the (Philadelphia) Pennsylvania Gazette for a lost pocketbook listed the contents of one man's "pocket": "Pieces of silver, some small Bills of Paper Money, sundry Invoices of Goods, a Ticket of Leacock Lottery, endorsed Camalt, and a Receipt for Fifty Shillings, in Part of Land, with sundry Endorsements on it."¹ Based upon a survey of similar advertisements in early American newspapers and examples in museum collections, it seems that such worked pocketbooks were most popular from about 1740 until 1790.² As opposed to leather pocketbooks, those made in needlework on linen canvas were almost always the product of female hands and were often made as gifts. Both women and men carried them to hold small valuables, but while men's held money and important papers, women's usually contained jewelry, sewing implements, and the like. Pocketbooks were most commonly sewn in the Irish stitch-which was worked quickly and provided a sturdy cover-and were fashioned in two shapes that resemble today's letter-size envelope: a single form closed by a flap and a double pocket that folded over in the center.³Those with double pockets often had the owner's name stitched along an edge, inside the fold. The pocketbooks were lined in silk and the edges were usually bound with a wool twill tape or a silk ribbon. -S.C.H.

¹ Susan B. Swan, "Worked Pocketbooks," in Betty Ring, ed., Needlework: An Historical Survey (New York: Main Street/Universe Books, 1975), p. 53.

² Ibid.

³ Today this stitch is also known as flame, bargello, and Florentine, but eighteenth-century usage almost always referred to it as the Irish stitch.