The sketch of a woman feeding a Cockatoo hung in one of the bedrooms at my grandmother’s house. Mostly done in dark pencil some parts were filled in with paint on paper. The drawing is one of my favorite pieces done my great-grandmother, Martha Lake “Heart” (Carmichael) Medlock. Every time we visited, I would take some time to look at it, taking in the artistry, the style of the woman’s hat and clothes, and the way Heart signed her name in the corner: a heart inside a “C.”

We visited my grandmother at least twice a year, driving the 500 miles between Alexandria, Virginia, and Clemson, South Carolina, stopping at favorite spots for lunch. One time, we stopped at a Cracker Barrel somewhere in North Carolina and among the memorbilia on the wall was the same image that Heart painted. In my memory, the image was part of a magazine of some sort. It had not occurred to me that the sketch was a copy of something Heart had seen somewhere.

This year, we were at a different Cracker Barrel which made me think about the image at the Cracker Barrel in North Carolina. I realized I could do an image search to find out more about the original image!

The original drawing was done by Eleanor Parke Custis, a descendant of Martha Washington. Eleanor was born in Washington, D.C. and attended the Corcoran School of Art. She began her career as a watercolorist and had illustrations published in Scribner’s Magazine, Harper’s, Doubleday, and Harcourt. She dated “Girl with a Cockatoo” in 1913.

I’m still on the search for where Heart may have seen the image. She married Henry Medlock in April 1914 and signed her name as MCM after their marriage, which narrows the time frame that she would have seen it between sometime in 1913 to early 1914. I have not yet located it in one of the magazines mentioned, but have not finished looking either.