AFA 18th Anniversary

18th Anniversary 152 www.afamag.com | w ww.incollect.com Fig. 8: Charles Willson Peale (1741–1827), Self-Portrait as a Revolutionary War Captain in the Philadelphia Brigade, 1777–1778. Oil on canvas, 13 x 12½ inches. Courtesy, American Philosophical Society. This image was recently in the exhibition at the American Philosophical Society Museum in Philadelphian (April 7- December 30, 2017), Curious Revolutionaries: The Peales of Philadelphia, about the Peale family’s role in shaping early American public culture through innovations in art, science, and technology. John George Washington Hancock (“Johnny”) was born in May 1778. In June, Hancock briefly returned to Congress after the British abandoned Philadelphia, but soon went home to Boston. He was overwhelmingly elected the first American governor of the State of Massachusetts in 1780 and went on to serve nine terms. Tragically, on January 27, 1787, Johnny died when he hit his head in an ice- skating accident. Johnny’s portrait (fig. 3) was either painted during one of the last years of his life or posthumously, so a probable date for the portrait is between 1785 and 1787. 19 The portraits of the children were probably placed in the exquisite sapphire-blue enamel and gold, double-sided locket to be worn as a piece of mourning jewelry. There is one similar locket known, which contains a miniature (also by Peale) of a young General Hans Christian Febiger (1746–1796) on one side (Fig. 9). At his death, his wife reset the miniature as a mourning pendant, with the reverse containing a black and sepia painting on ivory of a weeping woman leaning over a tomb, with an inscription mourning his death at age fifty. 20 Considered together, the Hancock family miniatures are illustrative of the evolution and use of the portrait miniature in America: the earliest, of Thomas and Lydia by Copley, were oil on copper, patterned after early English models; those of John and Dorothy by Peale were mementos to commemorate a marriage, designed to be worn as intimate jewelry; that of baby Lydia, and probably the one of Johnny, served as memorials; and the Goodridge miniature of Dorothy as an old woman was painted in a larger, rectangular format meant to be framed and displayed, or to be carried in a case. Lithography (invented in 1796) was used to reproduce and make multiples of artworks for sale or publication. Daguerreotypes, and then photography, came to largely supplant the painted miniature. As Robin Jaffe Frank so beautifully put it in her book on miniatures, “Regardless of whether the sitters’ accomplishments remain memorable to us today, the existence of their likenesses in miniature means that somebody cared deeply about them.”  21 Pamela Ehrlich is an independent researcher, archaeologist, and artist. She thanks the efforts of all the people who collect, preserve and protect the records and material culture of America, and is especially grateful to Ms. Maureen O’Brien and Ms. Anne E. Bentley, and to Mr. Thomas Wood and Mr. John Anderson who generously shared their family history.