by Daniel K. Richter

He stares at you ruddy faced, with penetrating brown eyes and a self-confident, almost arrogant, look. He wears no hat. (Aren’t Friends supposed to keep them on?) Instead, his still-luxuriant, if a bit thinning, hair curls down to his shoulders. This is most assuredly not the man on the Quaker Oats box.

She has sharp eyes, too, but the look on her face is wearier, maybe even disapproving. No ruddiness here. Her skin is almost sickly pale. Everything else is in shades of brown: bonnet, dress, and background. It is hard to imagine her on a cereal box either.

The two small chalk portraits by Francis Place (1677–1728) of York, England, have belonged to The Historical Society of Pennsylvania since 1957, when they were purchased from descendants of the artist. Signed, but undated and untitled, they are called the only surviving images made from life of Pennsylvania’s founder, William Penn, and his second wife, Hannah Callowhill Penn.

A quite different kind of relic of Pennsylvania’s founding era also rests in the vault at HSP. It is the original copper plate from which surveyor Thomas Holme printed A Portraiture of the City of Philadelphia in the Province of PENNSYLVANIA in America—the mother of all American grid plans—in 1683. After almost three and a quarter centuries, it remains remarkably shiny (apart from a few greenish fingerprint stains), its hard straight lines a stark contrast to the soft colors of Place’s chalk.

These three items, so evocative of Pennsylvania’s founding moments, justly rank among the most treasured artifacts in the Society’s collections. Yet none of them tell a straightforward story. Their mysteries say something about the elusiveness of historical knowledge.

* * *

It can’t be proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that the portraits really are of William and Hannah Penn. Based on the age of the man it depicts, Place’s unfinished image is usually presumed to have been made in the 1690s, most likely between 1696, when William and Hannah married, and 1699, when the couple began their two-year sojourn in North America. But there is no written record that Penn ever met Place, that he ever visited the artist’s hometown of York (although it may have been on his route to visit his sister who lived in Yorkshire), or for that matter, that he ever sat for a portrait. Indeed his descendent Granville Penn denied that he ever did so.

Of course in 1833 that same Granville Penn also donated to The Historical Society of Pennsylvania the only other portrait of William Penn that most (but not all) scholars accept as authentic. This is an 18th-century copy of a now-lost original, dated October 14, 1666, William Penn’s 22nd birthday. It shows a young man in armor (Penn would not yet have converted to Quakerism) whose brown eyes, forehead, and flowing hair bear considerable resemblance to the Place portrait, allowing for the fleshier face and dying follicles of an older man. But the mouth and, especially, nose do not quite correspond. Place’s figure turns to the sitter’s right, the “Armor Portrait” to his left, and the latter is a copy of unknown accuracy, so it’s very hard to judge whether these two images depict the same person. But at least they agree on eye color and plausible 17th-century attire. Other purported portraits of Penn show blue eyes and 18th-century wigs and clothing—including that signature broad-brimmed Quaker hat, which only came into fashion after both William and Hannah had passed from the scene.

The second Place image is even more problematic than the first. If it is Hannah Callowhill Penn, it cannot have been made at the same time as the presumed portrait of William. In the 1690s, Hannah, born in 1671 (not, as some scholars have erroneously stated, 1664) would have been in her mid-20s. Place’s woman is clearly much older. But there is no particular reason to assume the two portraits were made at the same time, especially in light of the facts that they differ slightly in size and that one is more finished than the other.

Hannah’s portrait, like William’s, can be compared to an 18th-century copy of another image reproduced from a now-lost original. John Hesselius’s somewhat amateurish likeness of a still-older woman bears as much similarity (and dissimilarity) to Place’s version of the woman as does the “Armor Portrait” to Place’s version of the man. It would have been most unusual for a Quaker woman to flout so publicly the virtue of modesty as to sit for one, much less two, portraits, but then the aristocratic Penns were hardly usual Quakers. And Hannah, who managed nearly all the affairs of the proprietorship of Pennsylvania from 1712, when William suffered an incapacitating stroke, until her death in 1726, was nothing if not unusual.

The earliest written reference to the Place portraits that anyone has yet been able to find (HSP staff labored hard to track things down in 1957) dates from 1829. That year, in a huge multivolume tome called History and Antiquities of the County Palatine of Durham, Robert Surtees, a local antiquary and distant descendent of Place, described the remarkable collection of artifacts that another descendent, James Allan, had accumulated at Blackwell Grange in Darlington. Among these were “several admirable crayon-drawings by Francis Place,” including one described only as of “William Penn and his wife.” The portraits changed hands several times thereafter, but always stayed in the same extended family until they were put up for sale by Sir Henry Havelock-Allan in 1957. As Darlington local historian Amy E. Wallis then wrote to the editor of the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, “I fear we can give no more authorative date as to the execution of the drawings, nor if, in fact, they are of William [and] Hannah Penn, than the tradition in the family.”

So acceptance of the Place portraits’ authenticity comes down to an apparent conflict between oral tradition and written documentation. But perhaps the conflict is only apparent, for the written documentation does not really contradict the oral tradition of the family; it just fails to provide convincing support. Why, then, shouldn’t we trust the oral tradition? Why do historians so privilege written sources (which everyone knows can also lie) over unwritten tradition?

* * *

Such thoughts perhaps make us turn eagerly to the firm solidity, the unquestioned origins and authenticity, of that shiny copper plate bearing the mirror image of the map that still seems as firmly impressed on many Philadelphians’ brains as it was on the printed versions “sold by Andrew Sowle in Shoreditch London” three centuries ago.

Yet what makes this graven image any more real than Place’s chalk likenesses? William and Hannah Penn were actual people, and if we trust oral tradition, we can feel confident that Place’s portraits convey something powerful to us about their character. By contrast, Holme’s Portraiture is of a Philadelphia that never existed in the real world. Its orderly grid of streets (with the exception of those marked “Broad” and “High,” not yet numbered or named after trees), its impressive central and four symmetrically placed subsidiary squares, and its dotted house lots, identically running from south to north and from riverfront to interior on the banks of both the Delaware and the Schuylkill—were entirely a work of the imagination, designed to let investors in England envision the properties they were encouraged to buy.

The real Philadelphia that grew up on the ground bore scant relationship to the city Holme (and William Penn) imagined. For a century and a half, virtually no one wanted to live on the banks of the insufficiently navigable Schuylkill. Instead, almost everyone crowded as closely as possible to the banks of the Delaware and the bustling docks that sprang up there. The first few ranks of Holme’s streets were, it is true, made real (although they weren’t quite laid out as he platted them), but the blocks they traced were quickly subdivided by a warren of secondary streets and alleys that created an urban density utterly invalidating Penn’s dream of a “greene countrie towne.” And instead of moving inland toward the central square, excess population continued to crowd the Delaware, spreading into the unforeseen neighborhoods of Southwark and the Northern Liberties.

A 1794 Plan of the City and Suburbs of Philadelphia, also in the Society’s collections, tells the tale. A hundred years after Holme, the populated area of the city is a rough triangle, not a rectangle, with its tentative western apex at 11th and Filbert (a street not envisioned by Holme) and the concentration of settlement remaining east of 6th Street. Of Holme’s five public squares, only the Southeast, known today as Washington Square, is identifiable on the map, labeled unceremoniously as “Potters field Grave Yard.” The outline of the Northeast (Franklin) Square has disappeared, replaced by the “German Calvinist Grave Yard,” the “Old Powder House,” and interloping streets separating these two features from the nearby Lutheran and Moravian cemeteries. The mostly imaginary grid of streets depicted west of 11th utterly obliterates the other squares in what appears empty space (most of it actually used for pasture) sprinkled with the occasional brickyard and kiln.

And yet despite the hard evidence on the ground—reinforced by urban development that in the 19th century relentlessly filled up the grid and in the 20th turned Logan Square into a circle while isolating Franklin Square within a tangle of approach ramps for the Ben Franklin Bridge—Holme’s plan has somehow remained very real in Philadelphians’ sense of themselves and how their ideal city ought to look. In other words, despite firm evidence to the contrary, the tradition of Holme’s plan lives on, in many ways more powerful as a historical force than the bricks and mortar that so often have contradicted it.

* * *

In the end, then, it may be less interesting to ask which of these three relics is more “authentic,” which more historically “real,” than to contemplate the ways in which artifacts, written documentation, and oral tradition intertwine to create our sense of the past. For there is also no documentation that puts William Penn under an elm tree at Shackamaxon to negotiate with the Lenapes for the land on which Holme would project his grid. Yet the tradition that preserved memories of that event in the minds of both Native Americans and Pennsylvanians of European descent—even as the latter mostly honored the tradition in the breach—has nonetheless been a central fact of American history. Like Penn’s Treaty, the Place portraits and the Holme map remind us that sometimes the most important historical phenomena are the ones that are most ambiguous.

 Become a Member of The Historical Society of Pennsylvania and receive Pennsylvania Legacies.

Image:  Chalk portrait of William Penn by Francis Place.