Peter Pelham was born circa 1695, when his father would have been in his early twenties. He was a son of Peter Pelham, named "gentleman" in his will. Many reference books give the artist's birth year as 1684, but passages in the Copley-Pelham letters, make it certain that Peter Pelham, Sr. , was born later than 1671. The Registers of St. Paul's Church, Covent Garden, London (vol. I, 1906) show that Peter Pelham, Jr. , and his wife Martha had children beginning with the christening of George Pelham, January 20, 1720. His portrait, painted by his stepson, Copley, presumably from life or from records of his appearance about 1750, is not that of a man of sixty-six years. The senior Pelham is revealed in letters to his son in America as a man of some property. He died at Chichester, Sussex, in 1756. He may have been a kinsman of the distinguished Pelhams of Sussex described in Mark Antony Lower's Historical and Genealogical Notices of the Pelham Family (1873), but the relationship has not been proved.
Career
Peter Pelham was one of several artists of London who learned then a new technique of the mezzotint engraving. Of his use of the medium one writer has said: "Pelham handled the rocker heavily, and so gave to his prints a darker appearance than usual". He obviously was well trained as a portrait painter, and he must have had influential connections, for between 1720 and 1726 he produced portrait plates of Queen Anne, George I, the Earl of Derby, Lord Wilmington, Lord Carteret, Lord Molesworth, Dr. Gibson, the Bishop of London, and others. Why, amidst such engagements, Pelham should have emigrated is mysterious, if, as seems not to have been doubted, the impecunious schoolmaster, limner and engraver of Boston, Massachussets, is identical with the well-employed mezzotinter of London. It is possible that he left in disgrace.
His portrait of Gov. Samuel Shute, of Massachusetts, painted at London, 1724, was brought, according to plausible family tradition, to Boston to serve as introduction to local celebrities. Though the actual date of his emigration has been given variously, the record of Peter Pelham's activities at Boston is well established. His portrait of the Rev. Cotton Mather, now at the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, was painted as copy for the very familiar mezzotint engraving, reproduced frequently. "Proposals" for printing this engraving were published in the Boston News-Letter, February 27, 1728. Portraits of several other New England clergymen followed. Pelham was seemingly intimate with John Smibert, the Scottish painter, who settled in Boston in 1730, for he painted Smibert's portrait and made several engravings after Smibert's works.
Such professional labors did not produce a sufficient living for an ever-growing family, and Pelham opened a school at which he taught dancing, arithmetic, and other subjects. Their home, school, studio, and tobacco shop were on Lindall Street. In this household were reared the future artists, John Singleton Copley and Henry Pelham. Peter Pelham died intestate in December 1751.
Achievements
Peter Pelham was famous thanks to his engravings.
Connections
His first wife dying in Boston, Peter Pelham married on October 15, 1734, Margaret Lowrey, and after her death he married, May 22, 1748, Mary (Singleton) Copley, widow of Richard Copley, tobacconist, late of Limerick, Ireland.
