Page:Women Artists in All Ages and Countries original scans.djvu/309

MARY SWINTON LEGARE. 301

have an unrivaled effect. A group of two girls and a boy is admirable in composition, color, and expression. Miss Hall’s “‘ management of infant beauty” is, indeed, unsurpassed; her flowers and children, Dunlap ob- serves, ‘‘combine in an elegant bouquet.”

One of the best of her original compositions is a group of a mother and child—Mrs. Jay and her in- fant. The first, clasping the babe to her bosom, has a Madonna-like beauty ; the child is perfect in attitude and expression. Another group of a mother and two young children, the widow and orphans of the late Matthias Bruen, has a most charming expression. One of the children was painted as a cherub in a separate picture, much valued by artists as a rare specimen of skill. Miss Hall has also painted the portraits in min- lature of many persons distinguished in the best social circles of New York. Several of her groups have been copied in enamel in France, and thus made inde- structible. Three children of Mrs. Ward, with a dog and bird; a child holding a grape-vine branch; with portraits of Mrs. Crawford, widow of the sculptor, Mrs. Divie Bethune, and the daughters of Governor King, may be mentioned among numerous works, a single one of which has sufficient merit to establish the au- thor’s claim to the reputation she has long enjoyed, of being the best of American miniaturists.

MARY SWINTON LEGARE (MRS. BULLEN).

The family of Legaré (once spelled L’Egarée) is of the old stock of French Huguenots who furnished the best blood of Carolina. Madame Legaré, an honored ancestress of our subject, being a firm Huguenot, im- mediately after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes sent to America her only child, Solomon, then seven-