Object Status:
Unlocated
Accession Date:
January 1782
Primary Source Reference:
Du Simitière Memorandum Books, Library of Congress, fol. 64v
Additional Source Text:
"About four inches Square, printed on paper, in water colours. He is represented sitting on a stool holding a bowl of grog, his cloths torn and ragged, facing him sits his old mother and behind her chair his sister with a sucking child at her breast, listening also attentively, the expressions of the different passions that agitate their minds extremely well expressed in their countenance, backing the young man, a little boy has laid hold of his gun and accoutrements as if going a soldier, two negroes in the back ground are laying the cloth whilst another is cooking some thing in the chimney, the scene is in a log house built and furnished in the manner that they are in that part of the country. the picture is laid in a Sea-green border above an inch broad, and set in a broad black and gold frame under glass invented and painted by Monsieur [Pierre Charles] L'enfant ingener in the Service of the United States."
Notes:
The Battle of Camden (16 Aug 1780), also known as the Battle of Camden Court House, was a major victory for the British in the Southern theater of the American Revolutionary War. British forces routed the numerically superior American forces about four miles north of Camden, S.C., thus strengthening the British hold on the Carolinas following the capture of Charleston.
The donor, Pierre Charles L'Enfant (1754-1825), was a French-American military engineer who designed the basic plan for Washington, D.C. known today as the L'Enfant Plan (1791). At the time he made this donation he was on Gen. George Washington's staff.
