BEGATS AND BEQUEATHALS

I’ve now verified that the High Museum does, indeed, have this painting of Floride Bonneau Colhoun. In a folder entitled “Calhoun, Mrs. Floride,” in the Mary Stevenson Collection held by Clemson University’s Special Collections and Archives (box 15, folder 3, mss 353), I found a small publication entitled “Art of the Month in the Atlanta Art Association Galleries.” In May 1957, Atlanta Art Association (which founded Atlanta’s High Museum) featured the portrait of Floride Bonneau in a series it was then doing entitled “Art of the Month.” The pamphlet that the association produced as it featured this portrait of Floride states that the painting was done by José de Salazar.

José Francisco Xavier de Salazar y Mendoza (1750-1802) was a Mexican artist who settled in New Orleans in 1782 and is known for his portraits of various dignitaries and prominent citizens of colonial Louisiana. The Atlanta Art Association’s notes on Salazar’s portrait of Floride Bonneau suggests that he painted it while on a visit to Charleston, where he’s also known to have produced paintings.

The pamphlet also indicates that, with its depiction of Floride’s mop of rambunctious red hair, this portrait of Floride became known in Atlanta Art Association circles as the portrait of the “bushy-headed, keen-eyed lady.” In the same file in the Mary Stevenson Collection at Clemson that contains this May 1957 brochure from Atlanta Art Association, there are typewritten notes Stevenson made as she prepared a letter to Sandlapper Magazine about Floride and her sister Elizabeth Bonneau, who married Ezekiel Pickens, son of Andrew Pickens and Rebecca Calhoun. These notes state that this portrait of Floride previously hung at the Fort Hill house of Floride’s daughter Floride Bonneau Colhoun and husband John C. Calhoun. According to Mary Stevenson, after visiting Fort Hill in 1881, Ernest Ingersoll wrote that in the parlor there he saw a “queer” portrait of “Mrs. Calhoun’s mother when a girl, with her hair done up in an inconceivably bushy manner.” Mary Stevenson writes, “It has been rumored that the family sold the portrait because they did not think that Mrs. Colhoun’s hair-do was in very good taste.”

I have now added digital images of the May 1957 Atlanta Art Association pamphlet about this portrait of Floride Bonneau Colhoun to this previous posting.