#hisitory

Palazzo dello Spagnolo, Naples’ Rione Sanità, Italy,

To state the obvious, the sitters seem to have been portrayed by the same artist, and were a group of two women and a gentleman.

The two women, wearing a simlar bun-like hairstyle, also share similar facial features; both have the same chin and nose. Only the volume of the hair, the softer line between chin and neck in the first woman and the suggestion of a sheer shawl imply that she may be older than the second lady.

The gentleman is rather portly with more than a hint of a double chin and wears a queued wig.

Now, I was curious as to who these people could be, and...

Could they be Samuel Graves, Margaret Graves and Elizabeth Simcoe?

The hairline of the wig rising from the forehead at an almost right angle and chin seem very similar. I'm not quite sure about the nose, but that might have to do with the shadows in the portrait.

Same pointy chin, same rather remarkable nose.

Sadly I have, save for an almost cartoonishly exaggerated doodle of her as an old woman, never seen another portrait of any sort of Margaret Graves.

However, assuming that I could be correct and these are Samuel and his adoptive niece, then it would only make sense for the second woman to be Margaret. Besides, Elisabeth had, save for two paternal aunts, no female relatives of whom you'd expect any sort of facial resemblance. Why would any of the two paternal aunts be depicted with Elizabeth's maternal aunt's husband?

If I'm correct here, and the three are The Three, then these silhouettes were probably made by Mary Anne Burges during one of her extended stays with the Graves' whenever she needed to escape her somewhat troublesome home life. If Mary Anne is the artist, these would have had to have been made prior to 30 December 1782, when Elizabeth (then still Gwillim) married her uncle's godson, a certain John Graves Simcoe. In that case, the Archives of Ontario would be wrong by a full decade, having dated the silhouettes to the 1790s.

Now, I could be wrong of course, because naturally I want my theory to be true, but if I were correct, that would be quite exciting.