Alice DeLancey (1745-1832), a native of New York, married Ralph Izard in 1767. A son of one of the 6 great planter families who dominated the Colonial Council, Izard nevertheless became active in Revolutionary politics. This portrait was painted in 1774 in London. The young couple lived abroad from 1771-1780; he was elected United States Minister to Tuscany in 1777, and when he was prevented from taking the post, they lived in Paris. There he took a role distrustful of France (and of Benjamin Franklin) in the negotiations leading to the Treaty of Paris ending the Revolutionary War. His pro-British sympathies led him to be a leading South Carolina Federalist after the adoption of the Constitution. Alice Izard bore fourteen children; her daughter Eliza married Thomas Pinckney Jr., the son of the Revolutionary War general and governor (see Colonel And Mrs. Thomas Pinckney, Jr.), an illustration of the intermarriages that tied together the leading families of the South Carolina political and economic elite. Miniature by Henry Spicer.
Courtesy of the Gibbes Museum of Art/Carolina Art Association.
