A Portrait by Pelham

We know that Henry Pelham followed his older half-brother John Singleton Copley into an artistic career.

However, aside from Pelham’s engraving of the Boston Massacre and his magnificent engraved map of Boston under siege, it’s hard to find artwork that he created.

Most of the portraits identified with Pelham are miniatures, and a lot of them are derived from his brother’s larger paintings.

For example, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts owns one small portrait attributed to Pelham showing the lawyer Peter Chardon (1737-1766). Experts believe Pelham created it based on Copley’s portrait of the man.

Likewise, Pelham probably miniaturized Copley’s portrait of the Connecticut merchant Adam Babcock, and the result is also now at the M.F.A. (picture shown here).

In New York, the Metropolitan Museum has a miniature of the Newburyport merchant Stephen Hooper that matches a line in Pelham’s correspondence. Another carries the signature “H P 1779,” which isn’t a positive identification but narrows the field.

The Dr. Joseph Warren Foundation just shared a quotation showing that the full-sized portrait of Elizabeth (Hooton) Warren shown above was made by Pelham. The M.F.A. has attributed this painting to the “Circle of John Singleton Copley,” which could mean almost any portrait artist from the period except Copley himself. Pelham and Copley really were a small artistic circle in Boston, however.

Descendants of Elizabeth Warren and her husband, Dr. Joseph Warren, owned portraits of them both. In seeking to sell the paintings in the 1850s, they described the doctor’s picture (the famous one now at the M.F.A.) as by Copley and “that of Madame Warren by Pelham.” Since at that time hardly anyone knew who Pelham was, there would be no reason to make a false attribution.

Portrait artists often priced their work in pairs, especially for married couples. Copley created handsome matched portraits of Elizabeth and Ezekiel Goldthwait, for instance. The Warren pairing suggests Copley and Pelham teamed up to create such a pair, perhaps at a discount from a complete set of Copleys.