"Mrs. Morris," after Gilbert Stuart

Henry Wolf

This engraving is after the painted portrait by Gilbert Stuart, done around 1795, of Mrs. Robert Morris (Mary White). It hung for several decades in the collection of the New York Public Library, and was featured in a portrait show there in 1942 where it was praised by Eleanor Roosevelt. In 2005 it was auctioned off in a fundraiser for the struggling New York Times. Mary' husband, Robert, was a signer of the Declaration of Independence. The Philadelphia banker was known as the "financier of the American Revolution," funding George Washington's army during the Revolutionary War. However, Mary herself would prove more popular by the end of her life. According to biographer writer Annie Turner:

Mary White Morris died twenty-one years after her husband, at age seventy-eight. Near the end of her life, she was so recognizable to the American community that even a glimpse of her at a window could cause an audience to applaud for so long that it "seemed as if [the ovation] would never cease." (Excerpt from a short biography written by Annie Turner for librarycompany.org)

In 1915, the year before his death, the American wood engraver Henry Wolf won the Grand Prize for his printmaking at the Panama Pacific International Exposition (PPIE) in San Francisco. The Wolf prints we have were available for sale at the PPIE and many, such as this, were the actual prints exhibited and have the label from the PPIE, with his return address and the edition size and original price of $18.00 noted.