What a pleasure to find at the American Folk Art Museum the originals of some of the Shaker Gift Drawings I found reproduced in a book when we visited Canterbury Shaker Village last year! This "Sprig of Understanding" appears in Polly Jane Reed's "A Present from Mother Lucy to Eliza Ann Taylor" (1849), one of several drawings in which every image is labeled.
Some trees from drawings already shared with this blog:
A new one: Polly Collins' "The Gospel Union, Fruit-Bearing Tree" (1855)
It's not all trees, of course, most conspicuously in Semantha Fairbanks and Mary Wicks' "Sacred Sheet"(1843), a calligraphy of tongues!
