Page 51 - Demo

Admirals in Miniature Emily Schulz Parsons and Renee Marshall
Before the rise of photography in the middle of the nineteenth century, portraits were painted in oil or watercolor and sketched in ink, pencil, charcoal or pastel. Oil portraits on canvas or board were expensive and were typically framed for static display. Portrait miniatures were much less expensive and had the added virtue of being portable. They were typically executed in watercolor, most often on a small ivory oval for display in a locket and commonly worn as a pendant, though larger portrait miniatures were sometimes framed for display in a cabinet or
on a wall.
In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, portrait miniatures were painted of men and women of whom no other likeness is known, including many officers of the Revolutionary War and Original Members of the Society of the Cincinnati. The Society’s collection of portrait miniatures now consists of fifty-one miniatures, including portraits of Revolutionary War soldiers, their wives, children, and descendants. Some are famous men for whom other portraits are known. Others seem to be the only surviving likenesses of their subjects.
We added two portrait miniatures to the collection this summer. In some respects, they are a study in contrast. They were created a century apart. One is of a famous Original Member, the other of a relatively obscure hereditary member.
The older of the two was painted in the heyday of portrait miniatures and the second at a time when miniatures had become something of an anachronism. The older, of a French member, was painted in America. The more recent one, of an American member, was painted in Europe.
Yet they have much in common. Each of the subjects is an admiral. Each of the portrait miniatures was painted posthumously, shortly after the subject died, and both seem to have been commissioned by a child of the subject as a private keepsake. And both portray their subjects wearing the Eagle insignia of the Society of the Cincinnati.
The older of the two miniatures is a portrait of François-Joseph-Paul, comte de Grasse, marquis de Tilly (1722-1788), more simply known as Admiral de Grasse. Celebrated in the United States as the victor at the Battle of the Chesapeake in September 1781, his reputation was clouded in France by his disastrous defeat at the Battle of the Saintes in April 1782. Forced to surrender his flagship, de Grasse was taken to Britain as a prisoner of war. After the war he joined more than two hundred Frenchmen who became Original Members of the Society of the Cincinnati. A court martial, convened at his request, acquitted him of wrongdoing at the Saintes, but his reputation never recovered. When de Grasse died in 1788, George Washington
This portrait miniature of Admiral De Grasse wearing his Eagle, painted between 1796 and 1802 by an artist known as Monsieur Geslain, was acquired by the Society this summer.
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