Loan Exhibition of Portraits of the Signers and Deputies to the Convention of 1787 and Signers of the Declaration of Independence: Including Their Families and Associates, in Commemoration of the 150th Anniversary of the Formation of the Constitution of the United States

Wythe's profile, as it appears in Loan Exhibition of Portraits of the Signers and Deputies to the Convention of 1787 and Signers of the Declaration of Independence (Washington, D.C.: Constitution Sesquicentennial Commission, 1937), 171. Original at the Colonial Williamsburg Rockefeller Library Special Collections.

An exhibition of portraits of signers of the United States Constitution and of the Declaration of Independence was organized by the United States Constitution Sesquicentennial Commission for the 150th anniversary of the ratification of the Constitution in 1937. The exhibition was held at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington. D.C., and ran from November 27, 1937, to February 1, 1938.

On loan at the exhibition was a small, cut silhouette of George Wythe, on loan from the Wythe House in Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia. According to the exhibition catalog, the silhouette is stamped "Peale's Museum," and was presumably made by Charles Wilson Peale and Peale's enslaved servant, Moses Williams, sometime in 1803. Wythe would have been living in Richmond, at the time.

The silhouette is described by Edwin Hemphill in his 1937 disseration, "George Wythe the Colonial Briton": "In the Wythe House there is also a small circular profile, giving the impression of a semi-caricature, done by the famous elder Peale with the aid of an extinct "profilograph" invention. A contemporary letter excerpted in the catalog describes Peale's process for creating silhouettes in profile.

A similar silhouette of Wythe was created by William Bache, in 1803 or 1804. Thomas Jefferson corresponded with Charles Wilson Peale after Wythe's death in 1806, regarding having a portrait made of Wythe, from a profile in Jefferson's possession.

Chapter text, "GEORGE WYTHE (1726-1806)," 1937

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224. GEORGE WYTHE (1726-1806)

By a member of the Peale Family

George Wythe was a lawyer, judge, legislator, and a professor of law at William and Mary College. He was a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses, and he disclosed his political attitude in the Stamp Act agitation by his fearless boldness in stating colonial rights. He was in the Continental Congress 1775-76, and he signed the Declaration of Independence, although absent when it was voted. He continued his service in the State Legislature, and was active in making the changes necessary to adopt colonial conditions to those of independent statehood. He became Chancellor of Virginia in 1778. Through his Chancery reports and in his professorship at William and Mary College he became foremost in the establishment of American jurisprudence. He taught John Marshall (No. 125). As a Delegate to the Convention of 1787 he shared in the final shaping of the "Virginia Plan," but left the

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convention on June 4. He was a member of the Ratification Convention of Virginia. This silhouette now hangs in the parlor of the former home of George Wythe in Williamsburg, Virginia, and it bears the stamp of "Peale's Museum." The following excerpt is from a letter that is displayed in the Wythe House, in which an interesting description is made of the method Peale used in making his silhouettes. "The famous Peale, the profile drawer, has just gone from here yesterday and I send you one of my blocks. You may get 4 profiles for ⅛ and if you get drawn twice he will let you have two blocks. The profiles show very well in frames which he sells for ⅔ a piece. The machine is very ingenious. You sit on a table and apply your left ear to a piece of wood scooped out like a spoon and he then draws a small bit of brass over all your face, which is connected with a small fine pin, which marks the paper. He then cuts out the profile with a pair of scissors and you put it on a bit of black silk or paper and it shows remarkably.... He is gone to Williamsburg, and I suppose will proceed to Richmond." The letter is dated September 29, 1803, and is addressed to Francis Jerdone, Providence Forge, Virginia. It is signed by Alex. Macaulay.

Lent by The Wythe House,
Williamsburg, Virginia

See also

• Biography of the Signers to the Declaration of Independence
• Depictions of Wythe
• "George Wythe the Colonial Briton"
• Jefferson-Peale Correspondence
• William DuVal to Thomas Jefferson, 12 July 1806

External links

• Read this book at Hathitrust.