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wrote “the merits of the
Count de Grasse and the servic-
es which he had the happiness of
rendering to this country, have given
singular poignancy to the melancholly, which United America feels for his loss.”
Painted in Charleston, South Carolina, in the 1790s or early years of the nineteenth century by a French artist known only as Monsieur Geslain, the portrait depicts de Grasse wearing a French naval uniform and the Society Eagle insignia. Admiral de Grasse treasured his Eagle, having written to Washington that “this visible symbol can add nothing to the sincere attachment which I feel for the brave defenders of American Independence, and that this further association with them and with yourself will ever be to me a
Left: Count de Grasse, engraved by William Angus after William Miller and published in London by J. Fielding, J. Sewell & J. Debrett in 1782. The British Museum.
Below: The whereabouts of the late eighteenth-century miniature that served as the source for the Geslain miniature are currently unknown, but a black-and-white photograph of the missing object survives. Frick Art Reference Library.
source of boundless satisfaction.” This miniature is the earliest known portrait of de Grasse with his Eagle.
It was undoubtedly commissioned by one of the five children of Admiral de Grasse who outlived him—all of whom lived in Charleston for a time. The admiral’s son
Alexandre François Auguste de Grasse- Rouville (1765-1845), was the eldest,
and succeeded his father as comte de Grasse and marquis de Tilly. A
career army officer, he settled in Saint-Domingue in 1789, but in
1793 he and his family fled the Haitian Revolution on a mer- chant brig bound for Charleston, where they arrived, he wrote, “in
a state of complete destitution.” To support himself and his family he obtained a surveyor’s license and
taught technical drawing and the principles of fortification and artillery.
Auguste’s four sisters fled the French Revolution and joined him in Charleston at the end of 1795 or early 1796. Similarly destitute, they were fortunate to secure one thousand dollars
each from Congress in honor of their late father’s service. In 1797 Congress extended that with an additional grant of four hundred dollars each for five years. The eldest, Silvie (1773-1855), married Charleston merchant Francis de Pau in 1798. Amélie (b. 1768) and Mélanie (b. 1779) never married. They both perished in 1799, probably in the yellow fever epidemic that swept through Charleston that year. Adélaide (1776-1842) married a ship’s captain named John Grochan in 1801 and moved to New York sometime after
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