AP News, March 26th, 2007
A haunting portrait of a slave girl painted by the wife of Gen. Robert E. Lee at her family's Virginia plantation in 1830 is being sold to Colonial Williamsburg for its museum collection, a New York dealer said.
The Virginia foundation confirmed that it has the "Enslaved Girl" watercolor "on approval" and said a final decision is pending.
"The provenance looks airtight. It would be an important acquisition," Colonial Williamsburg spokesman Jim Bradley told The Associated Press Monday.
Laurel Acevedo of Alexander Gallery on Madison Avenue said the rare picture has been with Colonial Williamsburg since last week. "We gave them a good price. We wanted it to go to a public institution," Acevedo said.
The portrait went on sale in January for $400,000 together with other memorabilia from the J.E.B. Stuart Collection of the Confederate general. Only the portrait went to Williamsburg, Acevedo said, declining to name the purchase price.
Measuring 4 inches wide and 5 3/4 inches high, the gold-framed watercolor on paper shows a somber girl with delicate features in a red dress with an apronlike white front balancing a wooden wash tub on her head. Trees and a split-rail fence are in the background.
Mary Anna Randolf Custis, daughter of George Washington's only grandson, painted the portrait in 1830 on the grounds of what became Arlington National Cemetery, a year before she married Robert E. Lee, her distant cousin.
Before Mrs. Lee gave the portrait to West Point cadet James Ewell Brown Stuart, class of 1854, while her husband was commandant, she inscribed "Topsy" on the dress in pencil, a reference to the slave child in Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin." The novel roiled the conscience of abolitionists such as Mrs. Lee, who had earlier defied strictures against teaching slaves to read.
According to historical background provided by the gallery, Stuart pasted the watercolor onto the back of a drawing of a cavalry soldier on horseback slashing a watermelon with his sword.
"Whether the attachment was a conscious act or whether Stuart was oblivious to its meaning, it fails to diminish the significance of pairing an innocent slave with the highly trained soldier a few years before the outbreak of war," the documentation says.
The real name of the child in the portrait isn't recorded, but she is known to have been one of the slaves at the 1,100-acre Custis family plantation spread out along the Potomac River within view of Washington, D.C.
The plantation in Arlington, previously owned by George and Martha Washington, was confiscated during the Civil War and used as a burial site for Union dead from the Battle of Bull Run. Arlington later became the nation's most hallowed cemetery for military dead.
The Lees fled the plantation in 1861 at the outbreak of the Civil War, when Robert E. Lee sided with the South and became a Confederate general, eventually commander in chief. He died in 1870 as president of Washington and Lee University, three years before his wife.
Acevedo said the gallery purchased the J.E.B. Stuart collection early this year from a private owner who had obtained it from descendants of the intrepid cavalry general, who died defending Richmond in 1864.
She said the gallery wanted it to go to a public collection "even though they normally can't pay as much as private collectors."
The lot included two pages of signatures from Stuart's West Point class and three fly leaves from a book signed by Stuart. "These pieces remain on sale at the gallery," Acevedo said.
