Nathaniel Gorham

Nathaniel Gorham of Charlestown, across the harbour from Boston, was president of the Continental Congress in 1786. The next summer he sat for Massachusetts at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, where he took the chair whenever the delegates met as a committee of the whole, and in September 1787 he signed the Constitution.

The museum dates this portrait to about 1793, and by then his fortunes had turned. In 1788 he and Oliver Phelps had contracted with Massachusetts for some six million acres of western New York, to be paid for in the state's depreciated paper. When the new federal government took over the states' war debts, that paper rose in value and the partners could no longer pay. They gave up the part they had not yet bought from the Seneca and sold off much of the rest, and Gorham died in 1796 deep in debt.

Peale shows him at half length in a green coat inside a painted oval. The canvas went to Gorham's son-in-law Peter Chardon Brooks, a Boston merchant who had married his daughter Ann in 1792, and came down in the Brooks family before Edwin H. Abbot gave it to the museum in 1948.