Miss Breme Jones

DateProbably 1785-1787

Attributed to John Rose (ca. 1752 - 1820)

Subject Miss Breme Jones

OriginAmerica, South Carolina, Beaufort County

MediumWatercolor and ink on wove paper

DimensionsPrimary Support; very irreg.: 7 1/2 x 6 1/8in. (19.1 x 15.6cm) and Framed: 13 1/2 x 11 1/2 x 3/4in.

Credit LineMuseum Purchase, The Friends of Colonial Williamsburg Collections Fund

Object number2008.300.1

DescriptionA full-length portrait of an African-American woman in profile, moving to the left, her upper arms at her sides but her forearms stretched slightly out in front of her, her hands hanging slightly downwards. Her jutting lower lip, heavy jowl, thin neck, and slightly thickened waist suggest a woman of some age. Her black hair is tightly curled and close to her head. She wears black shoes and a blue striped dress with, over it, a white apron and a white kerchief crossed over her chest. She stands on a red, diagonally checkered floor, perhaps square brick pavers. A seeming baseboard or guttering runs along the edge of the floor at the rear. In the margin below the image there is a partial inscription (the final letters having been torn away). In the space to the left of the figure, at her chin-to-waist height, are four lines of script. When acquired in February 2008, the primary support was adhered overall to a wove paper secondary support and the piece was unframed.

After acquisition, a modern 3/4-inch splayed, black-painted frame was added.
Label TextUpon acquisition, this full-length profile portrait was stylistically linked to the Foundation's watercolor of The Old Plantation (1935.301.3), but only recently has research named the artist and provided plausible, if brief and conjectural, biographical information concerning Miss Breme Jones.

Slaves were often given their owners' surnames, as is speculated here. Assuming Breme Jones was owned by the still-unidentified first wife of artist John Rose, she would have come into Rose's possession at the time of his marriage. The fact that Mrs. Rose died in or soon after 1778, leaving two small children, Sarah Mary (b. October 23, 1776) and John Simeon (b. March 21, 1778), opens other possibilities.

Whether Breme Jones cared for her ailing mistress or, later, took charge of the motherless children, or both, either service may have endeared her to Rose, prompting him to paint her sympathetically and to add, alongside her image, four adulatory lines from John Milton's "Paradise Lost" (see "Inscriptions"). These lines repeat nearly verbatim four from Book Eight of Milton's epic poem in blank verse, first published in 1667. (In the poem, the words are spoken by Adam, who is describing Eve to the angel Raphael.)

For greater detail, see Susan P. Shames, _The Old Plantation: The Artist Revealed_ (Williamsburg, Va.: The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 2010).
InscribedAt the bottom in the lower margin, in back-slanting, filled-in block letters, in ink or watercolor, is: "BRE[remainder torn away]."

In brown ink in script to the left of the figure is: "Grave in her steps/Heaven in her eye's/And all her movement/Dignity and Love".

When acquired, a second, separate piece of paper was glued over the entire back of the primary support. When the secondary support was removed, inscriptions were found on the verso of the primary support. One of these reads: "Miss Breme Jones." (Although a loss after the final "e" in the first name leaves it somewhat uncertain as to whether another, missing letter originally appeared there, the spacing of the letters suggests that the first name is complete as given here). The second inscription on the back repeats the four lines of poetry on the front with a few discrepancies: "grace in her steps/Heaven in [her] eyes/and all her movement/Dignity and Love". N. B. Milton's word was "grace" (as on the back), not "grave" (as on the front). Other discrepencies include the underlining, in the inscription on the back, of the words "grace," "Heaven," and "Love" (which cannot be shown in the computerized transcription).

ProvenanceOwnership prior to CWF's vendor is undocumented. CWF's vendor, Judy Shaw of Doe Run Valley Books, bought the watercolor about 1985 from a dealer, estimated to be in her late sixties, who lived in the Society Hill area of West Philadelphia near the University of Pennsylvania --- but whose name Shaw only partially recalled as "Mary Jo." According to Shaw, "Mary Jo" accepted objects from older homes in Philadelphia on consignment and had a shop in a mall in Chester County, Pennsylvania.