Attributed to John Wesley Jarvis (British/New York, 1780-1840, active New Orleans 1820-1834), "Captain (later General) Horatio H. Davis, U.S.A.", 1820-1822, oil on canvas, unsigned, 30 1/8 in. x 25 1/8 in., in a period giltwood frame, inscribed in chalk on the reverse of the top rail with the names of "Gen. Davis" and of "Mrs. Thomas" Evershed of New Orleans (née Marie Noémi Davis, daughter of the sitter), owner of the painting in 1911. Provenance: General Horatio H. Davis (1794-1857); his daughter Marie Noémi Davis Evershed (1833-1910s); her sister Marie Adèle Davis Raimondi (1846-1934); her daughter Marie Catherine Noémi Raimondi Haydel (1877-1900s); her daughter Hilda Victorine Haydel (1896-1950s); her son John Resor Sr. (all of New Orleans); thence by descent to the present owner. Note: The father of this dashing young officer, Col. Samuel Boyer Davis (1766-1854) of Delaware, before becoming a prominent American patriot in the War of 1812, had been a Captain in the French Navy; following his 1793 marriage to Marianne Rose Elisabeth de Boisfontaine, their son Horatio was in fact born on board his father's ship, the Guerrière (23 July 1794). Shortly afterward, S. B. Davis became a planter in Louisiana, and Harbormaster of New Orleans (1805); young Horatio was educated at St. Mary's College in Baltimore, and (as Captain of the 32nd Infantry of Pennsylvania) joined his father (as Colonel, 44th Regiment, Louisiana Volunteers) in defending their adopted homeland in the Battle of New Orleans (8 January 1815). Horatio - who eventually became a Warden of St. Louis Cathedral, a Colonel in the Mexican War, and Adjutant General of Louisiana - married in 1820 Antoinette Caroline Noémi du Bourg: they were the parents of twelve children, born between 1822 and 1848 (see Provenance). John Wesley Jarvis, who had been brought to the United States at age five, studied with Edward Savage in Philadelphia (1796-1801), before moving to New York, where he eventually became the city's foremost painter of portraits during the 1810s and 1820s. By December of 1820 he had transferred to New Orleans: his first visit ran through April 1821, and his second extended from December 1821 into the late spring of 1822; he returned for three more winters, from the end of the same decade into the mid-1830s. It was presumably during his first visit, when he was accompanied by his young apprentice/assistant Henry Inman (1801-1846), and when he had his well-known meetings with the newly-arrived John James Audubon (1785-1851), that he would have encountered Captain Horatio Davis. The present portrait appears to be a characteristic work of the first or second of Jarvis's New Orleans sojourns (of 1820-1822), as demonstrated by a series of persuasive comparisons. Jarvis had been commissioned to paint a series of portraits of the heroes of the War of 1812, for New York City Hall: his 1816 canvas there of "Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry" exhibits very similar treatments of face, collar, epaulet, and ruffled hair, as well as the same idiosyncratic belt-buckle (normally solid and embossed, but shown in both these portraits as a hollow rectangular clasp). In New Orleans in 1821, Jarvis painted "Mrs. William Palfrey" (Morris Museum of Art, Augusta, GA), in a portrait whose brushwork and especially whose size (30 in. x 25 1/2 in.) are extremely close to this canvas; also apparently in the 1820s, Jarvis painted her grandson, "Henry William Palfrey," whose lifted right hand (another Jarvis trademark) is rendered in precisely the same form as Captain Davis's. Another identical canvas size, and closely related physiognomy, connect this painting to Jarvis's 1823 portrait of "William Harris Crawford" (PA Academy of the Fine Arts); while his painting of "General Jacob Bro" (Christie's, New York, 16 January 1998, lot 126) displays another exactly equivalent epaulet, as well as the same distinctive cocked-hat (folded, under Captain Davis's left arm; but raised, in another of Jarvis's typically extended gestures, in General Bro's left hand). The loosely-painted background of this characteristic Jarvis portrait, finally, may well have been laid in by his assistant in New Orleans, Henry Inman: similar treatments appear in the related paintings of Inman's 1834 "Self-Portrait," and his 1837 "Thomas Sully" (both PA Academy of the Fine Arts). References: J. K. Howat, et al., 19th-Century America (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1970), no. 24 ("Perry"); Mrs. T. N. C. Bruns, et al., Louisiana Portraits (New Orleans, 1975), p. 199 ("H. W. Palfrey"); Historic New Orleans Collection, Encyclopedia of N. O. Artists, 1718-1918 (New Orleans, 1987), pp. 201-202 (Jarvis citations); Susan Danly, Facing the Past (Philadelphia, 1992, for PA Academy of the Fine Arts examples); and E. C. Pennington, A Southern Collection (Morris Museum, Augusta, GA, 1992), pp. 22-23 ("Mrs. Palfrey").