Hepzibah Swan née Clarke (died August 14, 1825) was an American socialite of Boston, Massachusetts. She was a wealthy and well connected heiress who was among the most cosmopolitan, intelligent, and erudite of ladies in Federal Boston. Madame Swan was said to be charismatic, not least because of her wealth but also in good measure because of her effusive personal charm. Lifelong friends included revolutionary war heroes Henry Knox, Henry Jackson, Charles Bulfinch, Sarah Wentworth Apthorp Morton, and Harrison Otis.
Life
In 1776 she married Scotland-born James Swan, and in the course of the marriage had four children: Hepzibah, Christiana, Sarah and James.
Swan commissioned several portraits from painter Gilbert Stuart, including one of her husband, and those of her friends Henry Knox and Henry Jackson, and others. Her own portrait was also painted by Stuart, and is now in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Hepzibah and James Swan were both pro French; Mrs. Swan in particular was a devout Francophile all her life. 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. Swan had purchased the land in 1781 when he was adjutant general of the Commonwealth. It was a 60-acre estate with a house near the road that the State of Massachusetts had confiscated from Loyalist Nathaniel Hatch. Hatch and 1000 other Tories had fled with the British army to Halifax, Nova Scotia in 1776.
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. The mansion was set on a high earth berm facing east across Dorchester Bay. Completed in 1796, its signature architectural feature was a two-story circular drawing room 32 feet in circumference with a domed ceiling. The bow was pulled out from two traditional Federal style wings and surrounded by a colonnade. Everyone called it the Round House and Mrs. Swan filled it with French furnishings; much of it appropriated by the republican French government from royal palaces and sold to Swan's import company. Several pieces are now in the collections of the Sargent House Museum, Gloucester, MA and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.