Description
An enslaved girl balances a wooden tub on top of her head in this watercolor portrait made by Mary Randolph Custis in 1830. The barefoot girl wears a full-length apron over a short-sleeved, reddish-orange checked dress. Likely one of the Custis family slaves, her name is unknown. Custis or someone else later added the name Topsy in pencil at the bottom of her apron, probably as a reference to an enslaved girl in the novelUncle Toms Cabin(1852).The intention of this attribution is not known. Custis, the only surviving child of George Washington Parke Custis and Mary Lee Fitzhugh, married Robert E. Lee, her distant cousin, in 1831, the year after this portrait was made.
