A rare embroidered and painted "Plan of the City of Washington" Worked by Grace Turner Cleaver (1786-1862), Alexandria, VA, circa 1802

After a plan of the city drawn by Pierre Charles L'Enfant and Andrew Ellicott, published by James Thackara and John Vallance of Philadelphia, 1792, worked with silk threads, watercolor and ink on a silk ground, framed.

19 in. x 28 1/2 in. (sight)

Note

This is the fifth embroidered map of the "Plan of the City of Washington in the territory of Columbia" known to exist. Related examples, all believed to have been worked under the guidance of a Mrs. Cooke, who ran a school for young ladies in Alexandria, are found in the collections of Colonial Williamsburg, Dumbarton House (The National Society of the Colonial Dames of America) and Winterthur. The fourth example, by Susanna Wilkinson Atkinson, dated 1807, sold at Freeman's, Lot 86, April 19, 2016, and is in a private collection.

Literature

See, Gloria Seaman Allen, Columbia's Daughters (2012), pg. 58-67.

Provenance

By descent in the family of Grace Turner Cleaver to the present owners.

Census records record that Grace Turner Cleaver was born in England. While her mother is unknown, her father, John Cleaver, may have operated an Ordinary or Tavern in Alexandria, Virginia in the early 1800's. Cleaver was granted "a license to keep an ordinary" and provide "good, wholesome, cleanly lodgings and diet for Travelers, and stables, fodder, hay and provender or pasturage" for horses, in Alexandria, 1802,1803,1804,1805 and 1808. In February of 1813, Grace married Lemuel B. Clark (1775-1849) a physician born in Lebanon, Connecticut, in Norfork, Virginia. Lemuel was the son of Lemuel Clark (1753-1831) who served in the Revolutionary War under Captain David Tilden in the relief of Boston. Grace had five children, some born in Pennsylvania. Both Grace and Lemuel died and are buried in Trenton, New Jersey.