Skip to main content
Advanced Search
Back
8 of 13
2019.100.3,A&B
Portrait of Mary Garland Trueheart (Mrs. Daniel Trueheart, prob. ca. 1745-1801)
2019.100.3,A&B

Portrait of Mary Garland Trueheart (Mrs. Daniel Trueheart, prob. ca. 1745-1801)

Dateca. 1794
Attributed to William Hodgson (1748-1806)
OriginAmerica, Virginia, Hanover County
MediumOil on canvas
Credit LineGift of Mr. & Mrs. Bruce B. James, in memory of Margery Woodall James Fleet
Object number2019.100.3,A&B
DescriptionPortrait of a woman in a red gown with narrow black stripes. She wears a white neck handkerchief tied at her chest and a white cap. A watch and watch key are suspended by a chain from her waist. She is seated in a typical eastern Virginia "neat and plain" side chair beside a table with a tobacco pipe and a book. She holds a white rose in her left hand.
Label TextBorn in England in 1726, Daniel Trueheart and his father, Aaron Bartholomew Trueheart, immigrated to Virginia some time prior to 1740. He married Mary Garland in 1742 and together the couple raised 7 children at their home, Meadow Bridge in Hanover County. Throughout his life Daniel found work as a tavern keeper, plantation owner, and a hat maker.

The Trueheart portraits provide a valuable document of late 18th century life; depicting the sitters in the tavern that they operated surrounded by everyday objects such pipes, copper molds, and an issue of the Virginia Gazette. The inscription of 1794 on the newspaper helps to date the portrait to the year that their son, Bartholomew, married Mary Polly Seabrook.

For many years, the artist of the Truehearts' portraits was known simply as "the Payne Limner." The artist recieved this moniker based on a series of identified paintings worked in Goochland County, Virginia of the Payne family. More recent research has uncovered the artist to be William Hodgson, a British man of many artistic talents who was working in the Richmond area by the late 1780s.

ProvenanceCa. 1794, Daniel Trueheart [1726-ca. 1807] and Mary Garland Trueheart [1724-1801] (Meadow Bridges, Hanover Co., VA); ca. 1807, probably to their eldest son, Lewis Trueheart [1763-1815] (Hanover Co., VA); ca. 1815, probably by descent to his sister, Martha "Patsy" Trueheart Storrs [1774-1860], and Gervas Storrs [1771-1848] (Hanover Co., VA); dates unknown, by descent to Gervas Storrs (Baltimore, MD); dates unknown, by descent from the above to Virginia Davies Storrs Callaghan Bedell (Richmond, VA); ca. 1960, by gift from the above to her cousin, Margery Woodall James Fleet [1911-2018], and Algernon Sidney Buford James, Jr. (Richmond, VA); ca. 2018, by decent from the above to Bruce Beveridge James (Providence Forge, VA); 2019-present, given to The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.