The Abraham Pixler Family

Decorative family records were commonly kept in American households during the nineteenth century. This one portrays members of Abraham Pixler’s family, with the parents, Abraham and Eve, at the top of the sheet and their three children, Absalom, David, and Levi, beneath them. The composition is conventional, as it follows the basic layout of countless family-record needlework pictures and pages of illuminated calligraphy, but also innovative in its use of portraits in place of the more commonly used names and symbols.

Credit: Gift of Edgar William and Bernice Chrysler Garbisch, 1966