American School, mid-19th c 'Portrait of a Boy in a Blue Velvet Jacket, His Hand on a Rosebush, in a River Landscape', perhaps c 1860s 47in x 32 in., in a period gilt frame E5000-8000 Note: This may be a memorial picture, through its inclusion of a rosebush, and especially the black fabric belt, which possibly suggests family losses during the Civil War Indeed this jacket recalls tunics worn by cadets in the 1850s: one from a military school is worn by Peter Ormsby, age 16, in an 1851 Kentucky portrait (Antiques, April 1974, p 814); a 7-year- old's version appears in a portrait of S.S.L Cook, in 1854 (Vera Jacobs Speakes and Estill Curtis Pennington, Mississippi Portraiture, Laurel, 1987, p 81); and one very close to this design, on a late 1850s New Orleans portrait of a young Beauregard boy, attributed to Francisco Bernard (M and M Wiesendanger, 19th C Louisiana Painters and Paintings, Gretna, 1971, p 12) Three Civil War portraits of young girls, however, provide the best parallels to this image: Nicola Marshall's 1863 Memorial of the Hale Girl has these same proportions and rosebush (Birmingham Museum, Made in Alabama, 1995, p 175); Lizzie N Wier, painted in North Carolina in 1864 by W.C.A Frerichs, has these roses and a similar landscape (E.C Pennington, A Southern Collection, Augusta, 1992, p 31); but the closest of all is a remarkably similar memorial portrait of Katherine Ann Cox of c 1863, tentatively attributed to William Carroll Saunders (1817-1892) of Alabama, also active in Mississippi (MS Portraiture 1987, p 82) That painting shares precisely similar size proportions, figure placement, and gesture ( also involving a rosebush on the extreme edge of the picture), together with an identical landscape, and an analogous, almost na‹ve simplicity of handling.