English-trained artist Thomas Flintoff immigrated to Texas in the 1850s, where he worked for a decade, painting portraits of a number of prominent Texans and carrying out important commissions from the state. The Jones Children of Galveston, his only known portrait of children, offers one of the artist’s largest and most ambitious works.

The children portrayed are, from top to bottom, Llewellyn Memucan “Curley” Jones (1850–1930), Warwick Jones (1844–1861), Walter Charles Jones (1848–1906), holding a peach, and Ella Burdette Jones (1847–1933), hugging a pet fawn said to belong to a neighbor. In the tradition of western art, fruit appears frequently in portraits of children, and it is often invested with symbolic meaning. The peach might refer to Virginia Point, a three-thousand-acre family estate near Columbus, Texas, where the Jones children were born and where their father raised cattle, cotton, and peaches. Among other meanings, the peach symbolizes immortality and longevity, and it is tempting to speculate that the peach held these meanings for the Joneses, who had just relocated to their Virginia Point estate near Galveston after a yellow fever epidemic had taken the lives of three of their seven children. A narrative possibility exists as well; Walter, whose attention is directed towards the fawn, holds the peach as if attempting to feed it.

William Jefferson Jones (1810–1897), the children’s father, was selected to serve as associate judge for the Supreme Court of the Republic of Texas after fighting in the Cherokee War near Austin in 1839. He married Elizabeth Gibberson (1818–1903), whom he had met in Matagorda County, in 1841. Of their children, Warwick joined Terry’s Regiment of the Texas Rangers in 1861 and died a year later of tuberculosis; Walter Jones served in the Confederate Navy, inherited his father’s real estate interests at Virginia Point, and served as mayor of Galveston from 1899 to 1901; Curly owned a general store in Vox Populi; and Ella married a Confederate veteran and settled in Galveston.

Related examples: Other works by Flintoff from his period in Texas are located at the San Jacinto Museum, San Jacinto, Texas; the Barker Library, the University of Texas at Austin; and Austin College, Sherman, Texas.

Adapted from book excerpt: David B. Warren, Michael K. Brown, Elizabeth Ann Coleman, and Emily Ballew Neff. American Decorative Arts and Paintings in the Bayou Bend Collection. Houston: Princeton Univ. Press, 1998.