BEGATS AND BEQUEATHALS

I’m going through that information now and, when it adds to or corrects information I’ve posted here previously, I’m adding it to past postings. Since I don’t want readers of this blog who may have seen previous postings about particular people and topics to miss new information I’m adding to those previous postings, I’ll be making brief postings to tell you about new information I’ve added to postings I made in the past.

Among the items I gathered during my days at Clemson was a good digital image of a small miniature portrait of Floride Bonneau Colhoun, daughter of John Ewing Colhoun and Floride Bonneau and wife of John Caldwell Calhoun. While I was at Clemson, I visited Fort Hill, the historic house in which John C. Calhoun and wife Floride Bonneau Colhoun lived, which then became the home of their daughter Anna Maria Calhoun and husband Thomas Green Clemson.

Since I understood that a miniature portrait of Floride that has been published in various venues and is widely circulated (often misidentified at online sites as a portrait of Floride’s aunt Rebecca Calhoun Pickens), is at Fort Hill, I asked the historian there, Janet McNeil, about this portrait. She told me that Fort Hill does, indeed, own it, and it’s now stored in the vault of Clemson’s Special Collections and Archives in the Strom Thurmond Institute building.

Ms. McNeil then very kindly sent me an excellent photo of this miniature, which has a tag attached to the back of the portrait stating that it’s a portrait of Mrs. John C. Calhoun painted by Charles Fraser. I have now uploaded that image to two previous postings that had some information about this miniature portrait:

“This is NOT Rebecca Calhoun Pickens: A Footnote,” and

“Children of Ezekiel Calhoun and Jean/Jane Ewing: John Ewing Colhoun (1749 [or 1752] – 1802).”

Both of the postings I’ve just linked now note that this widely circulated portrait is held by Fort Hill Museum on the Clemson University campus, and that it’s a portrait of Floride Bonneau Colhoun, daughter of John Ewing Colhoun and Floride Bonneau and wife of John Caldwell Calhoun. According to Janet McNeil, Thomas Green Clemson and Anna Maria Calhoun took a trip to Europe, bringing this portrait with them, and it was then used as a model for the large portrait of Floride by Belgian artist Eugène François de Block that hangs in the master bedroom at Fort Hill, which was featured at the head of this posting.

Charles Fraser (1782-1860) was a Charleston-born and Charleston-based artist who was the leading miniaturist in Charleston in the antebellum period.