I possess a partiality for irregular houses, when you go up and down steps, out of one room into another and when you come upon more rooms when you think you have seen all there are, and where then is a bountiful provision of little halls & passages, and where you find older rooms in unexpected places with lattice windows and green growth pressing through them.
Frances Adeline Miller Seward Portrait by Henry Inman
c. 1843
Oil on canvas portrait of Frances Adeline Miller Seward, wife of Secretary William H. Seward. Painted by Henry Inman. Signed and dated, August 1843. Frances is depicted here as a young woman with brown eyes and brown hair pulled back and styled to frame her face, wearing a dark garment with v-neckline and white ruffles. The background is a mottled blue with pink highlights.
Frances Seward was born in Cayuga, New York. She was the younger child of Judge Elijah Miller and Hannah Foote Miller. Frances was a well-educated woman who had politcal activites of her own such as the women's rights movement, abolistist, and temperance. She loved her Auburn home and would be the person to inherit it after Miller's death in 1851 due to the Woman's Property act of 1848. Frances passes away in 1866 and is now buried in Fort Hill Cemetary in Auburn.
