JOHN PAUL JONES.
The portrait of John Paul Jones which forms the frontispiece of this number is a copy, reduced, of a sepia drawing owned by Mrs. J. V. L. Pruyn, of Albany, N. Y., who has kindly authorized its reproduction in the Proceedings. Beyond the fact that the drawing is old and came from France, nothing is known of it. It is, however, of considerable artistic merit, is unquestionably a likeness of Jones, and has all the marks of having been drawn from life.
Readers of the Proceedings may be interested to learn that the colored portrait which forms the frontispiece of Vol. I of Buell’s Life of Jones, and the history of which he gives in an appendix quoted on page 595 of No. 115 of the Proceedings, is quite certainly fraudulent. The Chief Trustee of the Imperial Hermitage informs me that no such miniature as Buell describes exists in the Hermitage collection, and that no trace of such a miniature can be found in the old inventories. Neither is there such a miniature in the (personal) library of the Emperor in the Winter Palace, nor in the collection in the apartments of the late Emperor Alexander II.—Editor.