AMERICAN, 18TH/19TH CENTURY

This gold locket with strands of hair ascribed to George Washington was among the relics from the Thomas Robinson house in Newport, Rhode Island. While later nineteenth- and twentieth-century family owners of the house hailed from the Morton and Smith families of Philadelphia, it is possible that this locket originated from the family’s eighteenth-century Newport ancestors. During the American Revolution, from July 1780 to June 1781, the Vicomte de Noailles was quartered at the Robinson house before setting off to Yorktown where he negotiated the surrender of the British on behalf of the French army. The Vicomte and his family maintained a lively correspondence with the Robinsons and the French family sent their Newport hosts gifts, including a set of Sèvres porcelain. As the locket references Washington’s age of 49, which dates the strands of hair to 1781, it is very possible that it entered the Robinson House through the family’s close relationship with the Vicomte. See, Anna Wharton Wood, "The Robinson Family and Their Correspondence with the Vicomte and Vicomtesse de Noailles," Bulletin of the Newport Historical Society, no. 42 (October 1922), pp. 1-35).