C. R. Parker (American/New Orleans, b. before 1806 - d. after 1848), "Portrait of a Girl, Probably Ann Elizabeth Lewis Wynn as a Child", oil on canvas, signed and dated "1838" lower left, 36 in. x 27 in., in a period giltwood frame. Note: Ann Elizabeth Lewis (1811-1834) was descended from the Virginia family of Meriwether Lewis, through parents who had emigrated from North Carolina through Georgia (where Ann was born), and on to the Alabama border, where they settled on the Chattahoochee, opposite Columbus. Near Macon, in 1828, Ann married her distant relation William Lewis Wynn (1799-1868). Since Ann was not quite seventeen, they apparently waited a few years before starting a family; but even so the tragic outcome was that the birth of their daughter Ann Elizabeth Wynn (1834-1916), at Columbus, proved fatal to the mother for whom she was named, and Ann Elizabeth Lewis Wynn died only a week later, aged 22. Her disconsolate husband never remarried, but moved to New Orleans and a plantation in Assumption Parish, with his young daughter, who in her own 22nd year (1856) married Colonel (later General) George Gibson Garner, C.S.A. (1830-1877). That couple had a plantation in Iberville Parish, as well as the town house at 5005 St. Charles Avenue that became the Orleans Club; but Lizzie Wynn Garner moved in her later years (evidently with this and other family portraits) to Jackson, Mississippi, to the family of her married daughter Lucy Edelin Garner (including Lucy's husband Marcellus Green, and his brother Joshua J. Green, through whose families the paintings descended). This portrait, painted in 1838 by the peripatetic C. R. Parker (who is known to have been active in New Orleans in that year), appears a memorial image, with its conspicuously detailed and front-facing physiognomy probably copied from a childhood miniature of the subject; the commission would thus have been made to Parker by her husband. Such an elegiac context is borne out by the prominent inclusion of a turtledove (symbolizing devotion-which would otherwise be curious, in an image of a young girl), as well as the closely-following "Fido" of fidelity. Indeed, the very quickness of the subject's movement toward the edge of the canvas may very possibly have offered, to her husband and descendants, a subtle reminder of Ann Elizabeth's too-quickly fleeting life. References: US Census and Military Service Records; New Orleans Death Records Index, 1804-1949; and family sources.