John Bruce

The portraits on porcelain of the Victor Harbor blacksmith John Bruce, and his wife Elizabeth, hung for over 100 years in the Bruce cottage at Victor Harbor, until shortly prior to its sale and demolition in 1989. Great grand-daughter, Elizabeth McDonald donated the portraits, together with family papers, photographs and books to the Library in 2012.

Elizabeth Bruce (nee McCulloch) was a housemaid to Millicent Glen-the daughter of Bishop Short, and after whom the town of Millicent was named-at the Woakwine Station near Robe, in the late 1850s. Here the young Elizabeth met and married John Bruce. Returning to Victor Harbor where the rest of John's family had settled, the young husband died of tuberculosis, leaving the widow with two young boys to bring up on her own, while taking work as a laundress and housemaid.

Painting on porcelain, Henry Clayton, a fashionable Melbourne-based artist of the 1870s, almost certainly completed the portraits from photographs, after John Bruce's death.

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