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Lot Essay
Previously thought to depict Major John Berrien (1759-1815), this painting is more likely a portrait of his father, Judge John Berrien (1711-1772). The sitter holds a copy of Lex Parliamentaria, an eighteenth-century handbook for members of the English Parliament that was used extensively by American lawmakers around the time that this portrait was executed in 1789. Thomas Jefferson considered it an invaluable reference book and in 1790 wrote, “For parliamentary knowlege [sic] the Lex parliamentaria is the best book” (Jefferson to Thomas Mann Randolph, Jr., 30 May 1790). As a lawyer, a Colonial Justice of the New Jersey Supreme Court and a member of the House of Assembly from Somerset County, Judge John Berrien would have very likely consulted this source. The portrait was first noted as a likeness of the Judge’s son, Major John Berrien (1759-1815) in 1952 by Peale scholar Charles Coleman Sellers, but the younger Berrien was a successful military officer and later the Collector of Customs and State Treasurer in Savannah, Georgia. He had no ties to the legal profession and would not have been depicted holding such a volume. The portrait’s date of 1789, seventeen years after the elder Berrien’s death, most likely led Sellers to believe it referred to the son. However, Peale often painted portraits posthumously (see for example, Peale’s 1804 portrait of James Mitchell Varnum (1748-1789) in the collections of the National Park Service) and this may have been commissioned as a memorial by a family member, possibly his son of the same name. Since going to press, Christie’s has learned that the portrait was owned by descendants of Major John Berrien before being sold out of the family in the mid-twentieth century. Although the exact descent is not known, this provenance supports the likelihood that the portrait depicts a member of the Berrien family. While it is possible that this portrait came into the family by marriage, this provenance supports the likelihood that that the portrait depicts a member of the Berrien family and thus, as noted above, most probably Judge John Berrien.