Hutzell: Rare painting offers a window into Revolutionary War Annapolis

The painting at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania is cracked with age, untitled and unsigned.

Cherry-orange flames leap from the deck of a ship anchored in a wide river, a plume of black smoke boiling into the October sky. A small boat rows quickly away as men cheer and dance on shore.

“The Burning of the Peggy Stewart” was rediscovered just three years ago, hidden in the home of a family with ancient ties to Maryland.

If historians are correct, the painting is a lost work by James Peale. That makes it a rare window into the unfolding Revolution from one of the most famous names in early American art.

“James Peale may very well have been a witness to this, and he may have recorded the event in drawings,” said David R. Brigham, the historical society librarian and CEO. “He certainly knew the landscape. He knew this scene, and he may have made drawings of it without ever thinking of painting it at the time that he made them.”

As America’s 250th celebration draws to a close, you may have heard of the Peggy Stewart and its doomed cargo of taxed tea.

The British government levied taxes on its colonies starting in the 1760s, trying to recoup the cost of the French and Indian War. It gave birth to “no taxation without representation.”

When tea was taxed in 1773, some colonies rebelled — leading to the famous Boston Tea Party. The Continental Congress adopted a trade boycott in September 1774, and when the Peggy Stewart sailed into Annapolis harbor, patriots were furious.

They erected a gallows outside owner Anthony Stewart’s home. The loyalist merchant paid the tax but agreed to burn his ship on Oct. 19 to protect his family.

Today, heroic renderings of the event hang in the Maryland State House and the Baltimore City courthouse, paintings by artists who kept the Annapolis tea party from being forgotten.

But they romanticized what the Revolution looked like. Peale lived through it. He was in Annapolis when the Peggy Stewart burned, a 25-year-old studio assistant to his more famous brother, Charles Willson Peale.

“A picture like this is interesting because it has historic value in that it documents an event,” said Carol Soltis, a Peale scholar and curator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

The anchorage where the Peggy Stewart met its fate is long gone, buried beneath Naval Academy buildings built on filled-in sections of the river.

The painting shows what it might have looked like. The brick-red Annapolis windmill dominates the foreground, with burnt-orange bluffs visible across the Severn River as they appear today.

The Peale brothers fought in the Revolution, James with the Maryland 400 at the Battle of Brooklyn and Charles at Trenton and Princeton with the Pennsylvania militia.

Afterward, they settled in Philadelphia and founded a family of American artists who spanned four generations.

“The Burning of the Peggy Stewart” is first mentioned in a catalog of the Peales’ Philadelphia Museum in 1813. Brigham believes it may have been painted to build public support for the War of 1812.

Soltis, who will publish her research on the painting later this month in the society’s Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, said it also fits into a series started decades earlier.

Starting in the 1780s, the Peales painted famous moments in the Revolution and portraits of revolutionaries, including George Washington and William Paca of Annapolis, a signer of the Declaration of Independence.

“We have no documentation on this picture until 1813,” Soltis said, “and what I find interesting is that this did not appear in earlier catalogs.”

The painting may have been in the Peales’ private collection. James died in 1831, four years after his brother. A final listing appears in an 1848 auction catalog, attributing the painting to James.

Soltis suspects it was among unidentified artworks sold at auction in 1854, when the Peale museum in Philadelphia went bankrupt.

“This is the sale where the relative of the present owner most likely purchased it,” she said.

Or it could have been a private sale before the auction. No one is sure.

“She can’t say definitively that her ancestors bought it in the ’50s,” Brigham said. “We don’t have any evidence that it was owned by anybody else.”

The owner’s great-grandfather lived in Baltimore in the mid-19th century and would have known about the Peggy Stewart. He passed the painting to his son, who moved to New England, where the story isn’t well-known.

The owner, who has not been publicly identified, got the painting from that house. She took it home, but didn’t ask her father about it before he died.

As the 250th Declaration anniversary approached, she started looking for answers. She contacted Soltis, thinking it might be a Charles Willson Peale. Soltis suggested it might be “The Burning of the Peggy Stewart.”

The owner showed the painting to Annapolis historians and the owner of the Peggy Stewart House — site of the face-off with angry patriots. They convinced her it was the burning.

That sent her back to Soltis. Its age, style and subject hinted that James was the artist. A portrait of Charles among the onlookers, wearing the same hat as in another painting, is another clue.

The depiction of Paca, however, was the detail that convinced Soltis.

“He’s painted in exactly the same costume, same dress that he was painted in a famous portrait, still in Maryland, by Charles Willson Peale,” she said.

The owner loaned the painting to the historical society for its summer exhibit, “Paths to Independence, 1765-1787.” It closes this week.

What happens next is unclear. The owner could keep it, lend it to other museums or put it up for auction.

“This is what happens to pictures sometimes,” Soltis said. “They descend in families and people don’t pay much attention to them. ... It’s a story I’ve heard before.”

They can reemerge suddenly, providing a fresh perspective on history.