The Charles Willson Peale portrait of John Cadwalader and his family contains the British Empire and the coming revolution in one object. From the canvas to the subjects depicted, the painting distills England’s global trade and the international scope of the war to come.[1] The Cadwalader family portrait conveys ideas beyond fashion, as depicted objects embody class, labor, and trade while projecting the Cadwaladers’ self-image as British citizens.
Goods and ideas flowed through Philadelphia, as colonists consumed fabrics, groceries, books, and magazines imported from London. A merchant who later served as a Colonel in the Continental Army, John Cadwalader embodied the contradictions of American-British identity. Peale depicts the complexity of that identity in the family clad in the goods of an Empire.
The Cadwalader family poses in the front parlor of their city home at Second and Spruce Streets in Philadelphia, and the painting documents not only the family’s wealth but their “elegant, unself-conscious, self-absorbed” happiness.[2] Peale’s composition bridges conversation piece and portrait conventions, depicting the intimacy and dynamism of the family group in the half-length portrait size much the way Cadwalader bridges the mercantile and landed classes. With the artist’s keen assistance, Cadwalader projects—asserts and permanently records—his place in the British Atlantic world. He’s American landed gentry, grounded on his wife’s inherited Eastern Shore acres; he wears the Empire and claims his place within it. He’s part of a system of perceived citizenship, his status achieved through wealth, education, and manners.[3] Four years after this portrait, Cadwalader will take up arms against this system (as will Peale) to combat what they see as an oppressive, non-representational government. But now, in 1772, in the freshly remodeled parlor replete with paneling, deep blue paint and matching damask draperies, Cadwalader is committed to posterity in an image comprised literally and figuratively of the goods of the Empire.
Canvas is the foundation, the ground on which this image was built. Druggists like the Christophers Marshall and Charles Marshall sold “Painters Colours of most kinds, either in lumps, powdered, or ground in oil” and “prepared canvas,” specifically calling out types “suitable for limners.”[4] The Marshalls (first father and sons, and then sons) imported a variety of goods, in the “late vessels from London,” ending their lists of drugs, chemicals, and artists’ supplies with the “cinnamon, cloves, mace, nutmegs and pepper” that launched a thousand ships to the Indian Ocean.[5]
Surrounded by exotic smells emanating from the spices that formed the backbone of British global exploration and commerce, the canvas, likely woven in Holland or Silesia, sat with the Venetian red, Prussian blue, King’s yellow, and Frankford black pigments that drew their names from the global trade.[6] The Marshalls supplied Peale with the paints, canvas, brushes, and other materials he needed when he first arrived in Philadelphia in 1762.[7] Without this trade, the painting could not exist– for the materials to make it would not be on hand, and the male subject, John Cadwalader, could not afford Peale’s commission.
Cadwalader engaged in mercantile trade with his brother Lambert after they completed their education in England and a Grand Tour of the continent. Cadwalader’s interests reflected his standing in Philadelphia’s elite. Horses and horse racing, fishing and fox hunting, theatre and assemblies filled his non-business hours.[8] Cadwalader signed the Nonimportation Agreement of 1765, publicly averring an identity as an American businessman; by 1769, the brothers’ partnership had ended. In 1768, John married Elizabeth Lloyd, whose wealth comprised nearly £11,000, over 3,000 acres of Eastern Shore plantation, and 78 enslaved persons.[9] This alliance changed his world almost immediately as he assumed the management of estates, plantations, and people, transforming his status from merchant to gentleman. Cadwalader mimicked English landed gentry traveling between country estates and city town homes as he divided his time between Shrewsbury (Maryland) and Philadelphia, where he dressed his enslaved servants in livery of imported deep blue woolen cloth and silver lace.
Peale shows us a cultivated man of refinement dressed in super-fine broadcloth woven on English looms. The buff-colored waistcoat adorned with five-and-a-half yards of wide gold lace and bright gold buttons imported from London was stitched by tailor John Cottringer in his house on Chestnut Street, then the heart of Philadelphia’s nascent fashion district.[10] Down the street, Mary Symonds, originally from Wolverhampton, stitched the embroidered ruffles that spill from Elizabeth Cadwalader’s changeable silk sleeves. The fine book muslin, woven in India, was likely “worked’ by a woman supplying embroidered goods to London wholesalers. The final stitches Symonds made were the last link in a chain of labor that stretched around the globe.
Daughter Anne sits on a mahogany table. Wearing a pink slip made of imported silk under a tambour-embroidered frock of fine Indian cotton muslin, she reaches for a peach, a tree species originally brought from China. The table, made by Thomas Affleck, born in Scotland, with carving by James Reynolds, born in Wolverhampton and trained in London, glows darkly under its polish. The glassy tabletop reflects the child’s soft skirt in its lustrous grain pattern, creating what Jennifer Anderson calls “an aura of refinement.”[11] The wood came to the colonies from the Caribbean, and sourcing it was a strategic issue for lumber-poor Britain; access to logwood (though not mahogany) was written into the 1763 Treaty of Paris even as it reaffirmed Spanish sovereignty in Honduras. Access to Honduran ports and mahogany was included in the 1783 Treaty of Paris, assuring the lumber-strapped island could import the luxury wood. In the Cadwalder’s front parlor sat tables and chairs made from a strategic material symbolic not only of refinement (wood brought from rough-hewn planks to a shiny surface) but also of the might of the British Empire (wresting logs from tropical forests controlled by Spain).[12]
James Reynolds also made the frame that surrounds the painting. Carved in white pine and burnished with gold leaf, Reynold’s handiwork frames Peale’s depiction of his work in a visual metonymy.[13] Alone among the objects shown and present, the frame is made of native North American wood, harvested in the hinterlands of the continent to supply cosmopolitan consumers. Reynolds, Peale, and Cadwalader all saw themselves as American, like the frame, but also British, like the fashions they wore. This tenuous identity of British American citizenship would not survive the Tea Act.
[1] Zara Anishanslin. Portrait of a Woman in Silk (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017): 11.
[2] Darrell Sewell, “Charles Willson Peale’s Portraits of the Cadwalader Family Philadelphia Museum of Art Bulletin, 91 no.384/385 (Autumn, 1996): 24-34, here 33.
[3] Kevin M. Sweeney. “High-Style Vernacular: Lifestyles of the Colonial Elite,” in Of Consuming Interests: The Style of Life in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Cary Carson, Ronald Hoffman, and Peter J. Albert (Charlottesville: United States Capitol Historical Society, 1994), 4.
[4] The ads read, “Christophers and Charles Marshall, Druggists and Colourmen,” combining Christopher Senior and Junior into one shorter designation. See The Pennsylvania Chronicle, (Philadelphia, PA) October 31, 1768.
[5] The Pennsylvania Packet; and the General Advertiser (Philadelphia, PA) October 4, 1773, page 4.
[6] Matthew Brenckle, “Canvasing the Navy,” USS Constitution Museum website, July 19, 2016 https://ussconstitutionmuseum.org/2016/07/19/canvasing-the-navy/:; Pennsylvania Packet, October 4, 1773
[7] Carl Bridenbaugh and Jessica Bridenbaugh, Rebels and Gentlemen: Philadelphia in the Age of Franklin. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962):165-166.
[8] Nicholas B. Wainwright, Colonial Grandeur in Philadelphia: The House and Furniture of General John Cadwalader. (Philadelphia: Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 1964): 2-3.
[9] Jack L. Lindsey, “Colonial Philadelphia and the Cadwalder Family.” Philadelphia Museum of Art Bulletin, 91 no.384/385 (Autumn, 1996): 5-9, here 6-7.
[10] Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Cadwalader Family Papers Series 2, Box 8 Folder 3. Bill of goods, John Cottringer to John Cadwalader, January 1770, paid February 1771.
[11] Jennifer Anderson, Mahogany: The Cost of Luxury in Early America (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 2012). 54
[12] Anderson, Mahogany, 90.
[13] Luke Beckerdite, “American Rococo Looking Glass: From Maker’s Hand to Patron’s Home” American Furniture 2009. (Milwaukee, WI: Chipstone Foundation, 2009) Figure 24
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