Hepzibah Swan

With her close friend Sarah Wentworth Aprthorp Morton, they founded the Sans Souci Club in Boston, which revelled without regret.

Her estranged husband, James Swan, who lived out his adult life in splendour in a Paris debtors' prison, also sat for his portrait that was painted by Gilbert Stuart.

She was to commission a portrait of her longtime companion, General Henry Jackson (1747–1809) who is also buried in the family lot at Forest Hills Cemetery.

But while this sophisticated and charming doyenne of Boston society was said to have enjoyed the rapt attention of many, she was also said to be a pendant to no one man in particular, neither in her long and eventful life nor in her soignee portrait.

During the war, they entertained French naval officers stationed at Newport who brought their ships to Boston for repair, refitting and supplies.

On his return to Boston James built a grand countryseat on Dudley Street in Dorchester not far from Royal Governor Shirley's mansion.

Planned in large part in the French style by Mrs. Swan, she consulted with another protégé and close friend, the architect Charles Bulfinch, who is given attribution for the design of the most remarkable house of its time in the region.

[3] Mrs. Swan bought out two of the original investors in the largest and most far reaching real estate venture in postwar Boston when she became the only female member of the four person Mount Vernon Proprietors that acquired the John Singleton Copley pasture in 1796.

The tomb was raised on an earth berm surrounded by a hedge of lilacs and surmounted by an obelisk of blue marble probably quarried and made in Italy.

One of them was the Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette in June 1825, on his triumphal visit to Boston for the 50th anniversary of the Battle of Bunker Hill.