The eighteen-year-old "affectionate daughter" who here offers her parents the "first efforts of a youthful hand" was undoubtedly more skilled than the verse modestly acknowledges, for in the early nineteenth century girls as young as four years of age began to learn practical stitchery and would have completed a few basic samplers by about age nine. Ornamental needlework was the primary subject of middle-class girls' education, as the many "showpiece" samplers from this period, once proudly displayed on parlor walls, attest. This genteel "accomplishment" was most often acquired at an academy, with the teacher dictating the sampler's composition as well as overseeing its construction. This is one of a group of at least fifteen examples known as Philadelphia presentation samplers, made at an unidentified school in the city between 1816 and 1839, whose designs usually include a basket of strawberries and grapes and a respectful dedication. The Museum's collection of over six hundred European and American samplers, which includes the famous Whitman Collection, is one of the largest of its kind. H. Kristina Haugland, from Philadelphia Museum of Art: Handbook of the Collections (1995), p. 90.