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The Geslain miniature was passed down through the family of de Grasse’s daughter, Silvie- Alexandrine-Maxime de Grasse de Pau. Unknown Artist ca. 1835. The Society of the Cincinnati.
1806. Auguste, meanwhile, returned to Haiti in 1801 and ultimately went back to France, where he served as an officer in Napoleon’s army.
Monsieur Geslain arrived in Charleston seeking portrait commissions in 1796, shortly after the de Grasse sisters arrived. He advertised his services in the city until 1802 and accepted commissions until at least 1810. Although Geslain must have painted many miniatures—portrait miniatures were at the height of popularity in America at the time, and Geslain presumably attracted enough business to maintain himself in Charleston for more than ˆfifteen years—only four of his miniatures are known today. One of them is the Society’s recently acquired portrait miniature of Admiral de Grasse, which bears the artist’s signature along the center left edge of the painting.
Working at least eight years after the admiral’s death, Geslain must have based his work on an existing portrait. The miniature very closely resembles another eighteenth-century miniature of de Grasse that descended in Silvie’s family and is now known only from a black-and-white photograph in the Frick Art Reference Library collection. When the photograph was added to the collection, the miniature was owned by Amelie Depau Fowler (1858-1946) and Meta Oliver Fowler (1860-1923), both of Baltimore. They were the unmarried daughters of DeGrasse Bostwick Fowler (1825-1890), a grandson of Silvie. If their miniature predated Geslain’s work, one of de Grasse’s children could have brought it to Charleston and supplied it to the artist for reference. The only major difference between it and Geslain’s composition is the addition of the Society Eagle to the latter. There are no other known portraits of de Grasse from this period that include the Eagle, so whoever made the commission may have asked Geslain to add it. “The Eagle of Cincinnatus was originally instituted to perpetuate from age to age the
remembrance of the American Independence,” wrote Auguste, comte de
Grasse, who succeeded his father as a member of the Society while liv- ing in Charleston.
Auguste or Silvie seem
most likely to have commis-
sioned the miniature, but whoever commissioned the painting, it descended in Sylvie’s branch of the family. In 1935 it was placed on loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for an exhibition of portraits and possessions of Original Members of the Society of the Cincinnati held in conjunction with the Society’s Triennial Meeting. The lender was Katherine Redmond (1898-1974), the widow of Johnston Livingston Redmond (1888- 1933), a recently deceased great-great grandson of Silvie. This was the first and only time the portrait miniature has been on public display. The miniature remained in the family’s hands until August 2019, when the Society purchased it at auction from Bourgeault-Horan Antiquarians of Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Now back from conservation it will be displayed in future Society exhibitions—perhaps in Charleston, South Carolina, during the 2022 Triennial.
Painted portrait miniatures declined in popularity after the rise of photography, but the form enjoyed a brief revival beginning in the 1890s, when the Royal Society of Miniature Painters was founded in London. Among the miniatures painted in that era is a watercolor portrait miniature of Rear Admiral John Cumming Howell (1819-1892), a member of the Society of the Cincinnati in the State of New Jersey in the
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