Kirsten Hammerstrom

How do you know when a painting is made? For Charles Willson Peale, diaries, letters, and receipts play a large role in determining when his portraits were made. Peale kept extensive diaries and lists, which scholars have used to identify and date his work. Most of his materials are at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, but fortunately, much of the documentation has been compiled and published. Still, you’ll see the painting of Lambert Cadwalader listed as ca. 1772, or 1771, depending on who is citing it. 

The Philadelphia Museum of Art owns the Peale portrait of Lambert Cadwalader, dated to 1771. What’s particularly interesting about this portrait is that it has been described as “completed before September 1, 1770”  by a furniture scholar, and was dated ca. 1772 in a 1990s exhibit publication. At least that catalog gets the plush lining more or less correct, and admits that Lambert is shown in “what could be his actual clothes.”  The American Philosophical Society catalogue of Peale portraits, published in 1952 by the man who compiled Peale’s papers, describes Lambert’s suit as “ ca. 1772. Robin’s egg blue suit with buttons to match. Coat lined with white satin.”* Well, no. 

In fact, this is a “skcy blew sute” made in January 1771 by Philadelphia tailor Joseph Graisbury, with “staitape had at New York.” ** (Lambert’s papers do not survive in enough quantity to verify a trip to New York, but as a young bachelor he’s very likely to have traveled for business and/or pleasure.)

The ledger is hard to read in the images I took– the gutter is deep by the time you reach page 241 of 278– but by May, it looks like Graisbury is removing and replacing the white shag lining and inserting new facings. I can imagine that what felt delightful in January could be oppressive by Philadelphia’s humid May weather. (This is all part of my thesis project.)

The American Philosophical Society has meteorological records from 1773, so we can get a sense of Lambert’s environment. 

The 1773 high for 3:00 PM in May (without) was 76.5, while the high measured indoors at 3:00 PM was 81. Even the temperatures in the 60s might have made that wool-lined-with-shag suit uncomfortable, though for Lambert and his cohort, style was surely also a factor in the clothing choices they made. 

Still: this information narrows the window for the painting considerably. In that suit, sans a button, Lambert must have posed for Peale sometime between February and May, 1771, making a date of “first quarter, 1771” eminently plausible. It’s a minor detail, but connecting a painting to a tailor’s order provides concrete material evidence of what a man wore, and the narrow date might also give us a sense of what Cadwalader and Peale discussed during their hours together. Eventually both were revolutionaries, despite the vast financial gap between them. One does wonder what they talked about that late winter/early spring. Perhaps it was the riot act? The invocation of “His Glorious Majesty” and “God Save the King” are jarring to the modern eye, but remind us of the tensions that already existed between subjects and ruler.

Footnotes:

*Sellers, Charles Coleman, and Charles Willson Peale. “Portraits and Miniatures by Charles Willson Peale.” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 42, no. 1 (1952): 1–369. https://doi.org/10.2307/1005692. 45.

** Joseph Graisbury Ledger Book, Reed and Ford Papers, Collection 0541, Volume 7, Historical Society of Pennsylvania. 241.