Sarah Seabrook
Framed: HOA: 42 1/2″; WOA: 35 1/4″
James Rind (1771-1803) was the youngest son of William and Clementina Rind, printers of the Williamsburg colonial newspaper, The Virginia Gazette. Orphaned at the age of three, Rind grew up in the households of Attorney General Edmund Randolph (1753-1813) and St. George Tucker (1752-1827), where he learned the legal profession. In addition to his law practice, Rind wrote political essays for Richmond’s Federalist newspapers and edited two compilations of Virginia laws published in 1792 and 1801. His most famous court case involved a successful defense of several enslaved men who had been arrested and tried as part of “Gabriel’s Rebellion.” In 1800, during the heated political exchanges of the day, Rind, a Federalist, was challenged to a duel by Meriwether Jones, a Jeffersonian. Rind suffered a bullet to the abdomen which, according to family tradition, contributed to his early death in 1803.
ARTIST: William Hodgson (1748-1806) was a London-born artist who emigrated to Virginia during the Revolutionary War. Previously called “The Payne Limner”—based on ten surviving portraits of the Payne family—he worked in Richmond and the surrounding counties of Henrico, Hanover, and Goochland in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Approximately 18 of his works are now known. None of these works bears a signature or date, and the attributions are based on the strong stylistic similarities among the various portraits. The discovery of a portrait of Elizabeth Christian Humber (d.1835) (MESDA acc. 5984.1), Hodgson’s daughter’s mother-in-law cemented the attribution.
DESCRIPTION: An oil on canvas full-length portrait of a young girl of approximatley seven years of age. She is wearing a white gown with a lace collar, a red sash tied in a bow over her left shoulder and around her wast, a small bouquet of flowers in her hair, a double strand of pearls, and an artificial red and white silk flower at her bodice. She holds a gold watch in her hands.
