Snapshot In Time: Needlework has always been considered a craft but Georgiana Brown Harbeson made it fine art! She was not only a talented fine artist with a needle or a paintbrush she could also use a pen! In the 1930s, Harbeson both wrote and illustrated American Needlework: The History of Decorative Stitchery and Embroidery from the Late 16th to the 20th Century, a 232-page book which has become the country's seminal reference work on the fine art of needlework. It wasdedicated by her to "all women who love beauty."

Art Smart Fact: Many of the examples in Harbeson's book are from the Smithsonian Institute's permanent collection, including several of her own works. She refers to needlepoint pictures as needle paintings. While she was at various times a painter, writer, printmaker and illustrator, Harbeson's first love was embroidery.....crewel stitching ever so perfectly clever scenes on fine linen or canvas. She exhibited in a sizable number of world-class museum shows and won a prize in virtually every one of them!

Georgiana Harbeson married renown comic strip illustrator Frank Godwin and raised four children before becoming president of the Pen and Brush Society (when Eleanor Roosevelt also was a member), an organization of professional women in the fine arts which is still in existence today. The membership list reads like a Who's Who of important American women of the 20th century. However, most impressive in terms of fine art, Georgiana Brown Harbeson is listed in every major reference book including that bible of collectors, appraisers and curators everywhere Who Was Who In American Art.

About The Art: POCOHANTAS is from Harbeson's Needlepoint Series available only at Peggity's. This print series was produced by the ABC Learning Company for elementary school teachers in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. Artists would donate or sell their artwork to the company to be reproduced by silkscreen or lithograph for kindergarten and grade school teachers to use in teaching arts and crafts or other subjects. Only a few remain; a barely perceptible seal is embossed in the lower corner of this print which says ABC Learning Company. Founded 1925. Quality Teaching Aides. Not only is POCOHANTAS universally appealing on its own, it is a also terrific souvenir from the school days of yesteryear.