“If instead of purchasing the pictures in question you could give me some work to execute here and bring home with me next year, that would be more agreeable providing I could thereby obtain some money immediately. I can very easily execute any commission you care to give me.
“Trusting that this application made at the last moment and after years of hard effort will meet your approval and bring the desired aid so urgently required.”
Laurence Brumidi
WORKING SKETCH FOR THREE GRACES
Lola Germon is responsible for the early preservation of this little sketch of Brumidi’s nine beautiful maidens. It was a gift to Mrs. Ashmun Brown from her Aunt Lola. These maidens as painted in fresco on the ceiling of the District of Columbia Committee Room of the Senate are reproduced elsewhere in this book. This working sketch has had tender care, the colors being as softly beautiful today as those in the ceiling fresco itself.
This letter from Laurence S. Brumidi stirs many a question but the next truth uncovered about Laurence Brumidi left only silent years following the letter from Paris. Laurence was admitted to St. Elizabeth’s asylum in Washington, D. C., on May 26, 1916, and, according to the St. Elizabeth records, he died there on November 9, 1920, at the age of fifty-four.
Since the birth records at the Vital Statistics Bureau of the District of Columbia go back only as far as 1872, it has been impossible to find a record of the birth of Laurence. The District Records in the Marriage License Bureau of the Muncipal Court in Washington do not record a marriage for Mr. Brumidi in the early 1860’s. The marriage, of course, could have taken place in any nearby city.
In 1879 Mr. Brumidi made a Will which was filed, but not probated. In this Will, a copy of which follows, the artist referred to Laurence as “my boy,” bequeathed to him all of his “estate and property, real and personal” and made no mention of Laurence’s mother or of his half-sister, Elena, in Italy: