Margaret Bordley Peale
(1772-1772)
BIRTH
January 13, 1772
PLACE
DEATH
1772
PLACE
FAMILY
MOTHER
Rachel Brewer Peale
(1747-1790)
BROTHER
Rembrandt Peale
(1778-1860)
BROTHER
Rubens Peale
(1784-1865)
CHILDREN
Charles Willson Peale
(1741-1827)
HOMES
RELIGIOUS VIEWS
RELIGION NOT DOCUMENTED
DENOMINATION NOT DOCUMENTED
MEMBERSHIPS
AWARDS
Margaret Bordley Peale was the infant daughter of artist Charles Willson Peale and Rachel Brewer. Born in 1772, she died that year and became the subject of her father’s painting of Rachel mourning beside her body, now at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Peale enlarged the picture in 1776 and revisited it in 1818. Its preservation makes this brief childhood visible in the family’s history, while her precise birthday and cause of death require stronger confirmation.
EARLY LIFE
The exact date and place of Margaret Bordley Peale’s birth have not been established in the source used for this entry. The surviving biographical summary provides only limited evidence about childhood, schooling, and the daily circumstances of the household, so those details are not reconstructed here without documentation. What can be stated securely is that this person belonged to the interconnected family world from which HistoryGPS traces participants, relatives, and later descendants of the Revolutionary generation.
Margaret Bordley Peale died of smallpox in 1772 while still an infant and had no adult career. Her father, Charles Willson Peale, painted a commemorative portrait of her and later enlarged it to include her mother, Rachel. The work survives as Mrs. Peale Lamenting the Death of Her Child.
CAREER
DEATH
Margaret Bordley Peale died of smallpox in 1772 while still an infant. Her parents were the artist Charles Willson Peale and Rachel Brewer, and her brief life is remembered chiefly through the picture her father made after losing her. The Philadelphia Museum of Art explicitly identifies smallpox as the cause, strengthening the disease attribution beyond the uncertainty recorded in an earlier family summary. The available account does not give a reliable day-by-day clinical history, and it would be misleading to invent a rash sequence, treatments, or a scene of her final breath. Peale first painted a commemorative image of the dead child. In 1776 he enlarged the composition to include Rachel grieving beside her, turning the private loss into the painting now known as Mrs. Peale Lamenting the Death of Her Child. He returned to the work again in 1818. The picture and its later alterations record the persistence of the parents' grief, rather than a literal visual record of every moment at Margaret's bedside. Her exact birth and death days remain uncertain, but the year, her infancy, and the smallpox attribution are supported by the museum's account.
POPULAR BIOGRAPHIES
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