Like Thomas Eakins, Charles Willson Peale is inextricably linked with Philadelphia, yet the young artist was living in his native Maryland in 1770 when John Cadwalader's commission for family portraits allowed him to test the market for his talents in the city. Cadwalader's order for five large portraits in elaborately carved and gilded frames, to be hung in the house on Second Street that he was renovating and furnishing in grand style, was unique in colonial America, and Peale rose to the occasion, applying all he had learned about stylish portraiture from Benjamin West in London. This portrait of the Cadwalader family is clearly the centerpiece of the group, and the artist has detailed the gold embroidery on Cadwalader's waistcoat, Elizabeth Cadwalader's large jeweled earring, and the serpentine-front card table--part of an outstanding suite of American rococo furniture (see side chair)--to express the young couple's affluence and taste. The affection and pleasure of family life that animate the scene are unique to Peale in eighteenth-century American painting, and reflect the artist's profoundest feelings about his own growing family. Darrel Sewell, from Philadelphia Museum of Art: Handbook of the Collections (1995), p. 261.