Indecent Proposal: French Eroticism in Love Frye’s Early American Embroideries

Abstract

Around 1747, Love Frye (née Pickman) stitched six embroideries that detail the Salem shore and replicate French engravings. Five of these works survive: four are currently housed at the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) in Boston, while the fifth resides in a private collection. Rather than viewing these embroideries in the context of their local colonial culture or as girlhood embroideries, I argue that Frye’s work represents a global connection between the Salem mercantile class and French elite culture. Such a reading adds to growing scholarship on the complex relationship between “women’s work” and global and imperial encounters. Three of Frye’s embroideries were based on etchings after Jean-Baptiste Pater and Jean-Antoine Watteau; additionally, two of these three embroideries were inspired by the poem “Le Baiser rendu” by Jean de La Fontaine. Several aspects of the poem’s content, including promiscuity and the extravagance of French courtly attire, reveal a shift in contemporary courtship culture in Salem away from Puritanism. Beyond its connection to Europe, the Pickman family directly participated in imperialism; their wealth came from cod fishing and trade in the West Indies, and patriarch Benjamin Pickman was an enslaver. I suggest Frye’s work is symbolic of her family’s situation and desire to imitate upper-class behaviors.