Portrait of Yarrow Mamout

Portrait of Yarrow Mamout is a portrait painting of Yarrow Mamout created by Charles Willson Peale in 1819. It is currently housed in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Portrait of Yarrow Mamout
Scan by Philadelphia Museum of Art
Artist	Charles Willson Peale
Year	1819
Subject	Yarrow Mamout
Dimensions	61 cm × 50.8 cm (24 in × 20.0 in)
Location	Philadelphia Museum of Art
Accession	2011-87-1

Background

Charles Willson Peale was an American painter and museum founder who specialized in portraiture, painting over a thousand works in his lifetime.^[1] Yarrow Mamout was a formerly enslaved Guinean financier who lived in Georgetown, Washington, D.C.^[2] Soon after he had arrived in Washington D.C. from Philadelphia in November 1818, Peale was first made aware of Yarrow through Peale's nephew Joseph Brewer.^[3]

Composition

Peale created the entire painting over the course of day, from January 30 to 31, 1819.^[4] The painting depicts a slouching Yarrow dressed in a greatcoat and a woolen hat with a cheerful expression.^[5]

Provenance

27 years after Peale had died in 1827, his museum was dissolved and the painting of Yarrow, then misidentified as George Washington's slave William Lee, was sold to Charles S. Ogden for six dollars. Ogden later gave the painting to the Historical Society of Pennsylvania in 1892. In 1947, historian Charles Coleman Sellers, a descendant of Peale, corrected the identity of the sitter to Yarrow. In 2011, the Philadelphia Museum of Art acquired the artwork, where it is still kept.^[6]