Born in Oyster Bay, Long Island, Feke lived and worked in Newport, Philadelphia, Boston, perhaps Virginia, and Barbados, where he died in 1751. Borrowing from the tradition of Baroque aristocratic portraiture, Feke included swags of brightly colored drapery, columns, elegant dresses, and props in his relatively large, imposing canvases. His grand portraits of colonial sitters dressed and posed in the guise of English nobility evoke dignity, grace, and a spare elegance.

An excellent example of Feke’s combination of grandeur and simplicity, the Bayou Bend portrait features a young woman standing erect in front of an Ionic column and beside a swath of crimson drapery and a Rococo marble-topped table on which she rests her hand. The sitter is dressed in a crystal-buttoned, radiant blue silk dress, accentuated at its arrow waist by a tassel belt, and a salmon pink underskirt. She gracefully holds a peony in her left hand, displaying her long, tapering fingers.

This portrait descended in the Willing family of Philadelphia, along with another portrait of a woman, both identified previously as Margaret and Mary Willing. Henry Wilder Foote first suggested that these portraits represented the McCall sisters, one of whom married into the Willing family. In 1968, R. Peter Mooz identified the Bayou Bend portrait as Anne McCall (Mrs. Samuel McCall, Sr., 1720–1785), one of three portraits Feke painted during his 1746 trip to Philadelphia. According to Mooz, this portrait of twenty-six-year-old Anne, along with portraits of her twenty-one-year-old sister Mary (1725–1799) and their mother, Anne Yeates (Mrs. George McCall, 1697–1745/46; see Related examples), formed a trio of paintings. Each is depicted in a similar style dress and holds a peony. X-rays reveal that the Bayou Bend sitter originally wore a white lace cap similar to that worn by Mary McCall in her portrait.

At the time Feke painted Anne, she had been married for nine years to her cousin Samuel McCall, Sr. (so designated to distinguish him from Anne’s brother Samuel, ten years his junior, who became head of the family at their father’s death in 1740). Maintaining a three-story house on Water Street, Philadelphia, she delivered six children, only two or three of whom had survived by the time Feke painted her in 1746. Her father and husband were prominent merchants in Philadelphia, and her family was a member of the elite Philadelphia Dancing Assembly, to which a number of Feke’s patrons also belonged.

Related examples: The pose and composition are related to the mezzotint of Queen Caroline by John Faber (1684–1756) after Joseph Highmore (1692–1780); see Mooz 1971a, p. 152. Feke portraits of other McCall family members include Mary McCall, 1746, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; Margaret McCall, the sitter’s sister (1731–1804), 1749, the Dietrich American Foundation, Philadelphia; Anne Yeates McCall, 1746, destroyed by fire (ex coll. Mrs. John M. Keating, Wawa, Pennsylvania).

Book excerpt: David B. Warren, Michael K. Brown, Elizabeth Ann Coleman, and Emily Ballew Neff. American Decorative Arts and Paintings in the Bayou Bend Collection. Houston: Princeton Univ. Press, 1998.