Portrait of Eleazer Mccomb

1783-1784

Maker

Charles Willson Peale (1741-1827)

Measurements

30 in x 24 1/2 in

Materials

Oil on canvas

Credit Line

Gift of H. Rodney Sharp

Accession Number

1958.3222

Inscription

"C W Peale / fecit” is painted in black in the lower right.

Condition Notes

In 1976, the painting was cleaned, in-painted where necessary, and relined after an earlier relining was removed.

Provenance

Ex colls. Mrs. Joshua (Stella P.) Clayton, H. Rodney Sharp.

Comments

Eleazer McComb (1740–1798) was a merchant in Dover, Delaware, who contributed to the American Revolution as an officer and to state government in various capacities. He served briefly in national office as a member of the Congress of the Confederation (popularly called the Continental Congress) from 1783 to 1784.

Peale’s portrait of McComb shows a man of substance and poise sitting in a stylish mahogany chair at a table with a silver inkstand, letter opener, and a small bundle of letters, evoking success as a merchant and civic leader. The pose shows him with his right hand tucked inside his coat, a gesture with a long history.  (See Arline Meyer, “Re-dressing Classical Statuary: The Eighteenth-Century ‘Hand-in-Waistcoat’ Portrait,” The Art Bulletin 77, no. 1 [Mar. 1995]: 49–53, 61–63.)

Bibliography

Portraits in Delaware: 1700–1850 (Wilmington, Del.: National Society of the Colonial Dames of America in the State of Delaware, 1951), 59, 103.

Charles Coleman Sellers, Portraits and Miniatures by Charles Willson Peale, Trans-actions of the American Philosophical Society 42, part 1 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1952), 134, no. 512.