Embroidered Chair Back 1755-65 Mehitable Starkey American This piece of needlework is a panel made in Boston about 1760 by Mehitable Starkey and passed down in her family until purchase at auction by Ann and Philip Holzer. Unlike most Boston needlework pictures, which tend to be horizontal in composition, this piece is a tall vertical panel, with two discrete scenes placed one above the other: the top scene shows three people harvesting grain; a woman at the center holds a sickle aloft, while a man at her right cuts the wheat and a man at her left bundles it. The lower scene depicts a landscape with two reclining deer flanking a leaping deer. In the background are a group of brick dwellings and a windmill.Because of the unusual composition, Mr. Holzer surmised that, rather than a picture to be framed and displayed on a wall, the panel was intended to cover the outer back of an easy chair. He came to this conclusion after studying the Museum's spectacular Newport easy chair of 1758 (50.