This delightful crewelwork picture bears no clue to its maker's identity. Its small size suggests that she was very young, and after it was finished and framed, she must have smiled whenever she saw the result. Below the tangled branches of its flowering tree, a white-maned red horse seems undaunted by the giant carnation, and above them a mammoth butterfly is attracted to a cascade of coral-colored berries, while scattered fruit on the ground is about to be eaten by slithering wormlike creatures with white collars. On the left, a spotted bird carries a berry in its mouth.

Another, more complicated, picture was probably worked under the same instruction. It has eight people in a garden with plants in equally disproportionate array and a tree with similar garlands of coral-colored fruit being plucked by a large spotted bird; above the door of a yellow mansion it is dated "1758." Its maker is also unknown, but it descended in the Chandler family of Worcester, Massachusetts.

Canvaswork pictures were stitched by English girls in the seventeenth century, but Boston's earliest-known canvaswork picture is signed and dated "Ann Peartree 1739." The earliest to advertise such work appears to have been Susanna Condy. In the Boston News-Letter (April 27/May 4, 1738), she offered "All sorts of beautiful figures on Canvas for Tent Stick" as well as "Cruels of all sorts." Many other women soon advertised a variety of needlework instruction, but there is no way to specifically distinguish the form shown here and now often described as a crewelwork picture, for the word "crewel," with varied spelling, applied to slackly twisted two-ply worsted yarn, and pictures worked in tent stitch used the same yarn.

The majority of colonial canvaswork is in tent stitch, and only one definitely related group of crewelwork pictures is known. These pictures are often more crudely worked than the Esmerian piece and feature a seated shepherdess usually accompanied by a shepherd in a large black hat. Their school of origin is unknown.

Betty Ring, "Crewelwork Picture," in Stacy C. Hollander, American Radiance: The Ralph Esmerian Gift to the American Folk Art Museum (New York: Harry N. Abrams in association with American Folk Art Museum, 2001), 512–513.