Images(2)

Portrait of Jacob Giles Morris

Dateca. 1830

OriginAmerica, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia

MediumOil on canvas

DimensionsOH: 38 1/2 in.; OW: 33 1/2 in.

Credit LineGift of Ellen Rumford Barrett

Object number2017-246,A&B

DescriptionHalf-length portrait of a wavy-haired young man with his arms folded, turned slightly to one side. The sitter is wearing metal spectacles, a black jacket, waistcoat and stock over a white shirt. A short length of what appears to be a watch chain crosses just above his jacket lapel. He is depicted before gradiant green and brown background. The frame was originally gilded but is now coated with black overpaint. The liner has also been covered with a modern gold paint.
Label TextBorn into a prominent Philadelphia family and prosperous from a young age, Jacob Giles Morris (1800-1854) spent the majority of his life supporting various organizations around his home city and traveling extensively abroad. He was a leader of charitable groups, including the Pennsylvania Institution for the Instruction of the Blind, the United Benevolent Association, and the Pennsylvania Hospital. Socially, he helped found the United Bowmen of Philadelphia (along with Titian and Benjamin Franklin Peale), served as a member of the Philosophical and Historical Societies and was even a director of the Academy of Fine Arts. Giles was an early collector of American coinage and paper money. In fact, his collection is now held by the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, along with other objects and photographs and even a dollhouse associated with the Morris and Canby families of Southeastern Pennsylvania and Delaware.
Jacob married Lydia S. Coates (1804-1837) in 1822, and together they had three children, although only Sarah Wistar Morris (1829-1850) lived to adulthood. When his health declined in 1829, Jacob set off to Europe with his wife and surviving daughter, a journey he made several more times. On his second trip to Europe, between 1835 and 1838, Morris, his wife and his daughter were in Paris during the assassination attempt on King Louis-Phillippe by Giuseppe Marco Fieshi on July 28, 1835. Following the incident, Morris was a part of a delegation of 50 Americans who paid a visit to the King to "congratulate him on his escape". In 1854, a week into his return voyage from his final trip abroad, his ship [the Arctic] collided with another steamer [the Vesta] and sank, taking nearly three hundred passengers, including Morris, down with it.
ProvenanceJacob Giles Morris (1800-1854) possibly to his sister, Caroline Morris Wistar Pennock (1811-1882); to their younger sister, Elizabeth Clifford Morris Canby (1813-1892); to her daughter and only surviving child, Elizabeth Canby Rumford (1848-1933); to her younger son as a gift ibn 1929, Lewis Rumford (1877-1961); to his nephew, Lewis Rumford II (1905-1997); to his daughter Ellen Rumford Barrett as a gift in 1985.