Prudence Punderson (1758–1784), The First, Second and Last Scenes of Mortality
This powerful image reveals both the artistic skills of colonial women in the traditional medium of needlework and the Puritans’ continuing cultural concern with the inevitability of death. Prudence Punderson, the Connecticut woman who embroidered this scene, rejected a marriage proposal and followed her Loyalist father into exile on Long Island in 1778. Sometime later, she married a cousin, Timothy Rossiter, and bore a daughter, Sophia, who may well be the baby in the cradle being rocked by “Jenny,” a slave owned by Prudence’s father. Long worried by “my ill state of health” and perhaps now anticipating her own death, Prudence has inscribed her initials on the coffin — and, in creating this embroidery, transformed her personal experience into a broader meditation on the progression from birth, to motherhood, to death. Connecticut Historical Society.