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Provenance

The sitter, Alexander Graydon [c. 1708-1761], Bristol, PA;[1] his wife, Rachel Marks Graydon [Mrs. Alexander Graydon, d. 1807], Philadelphia;[2] their son, Alexander Graydon, Jr. [1752-1818], Philadelphia;[3] his brother, William Graydon [1759-1840], Harrisburg, Pennsylvania;[4] his son, Henry Murray Graydon [d. 1900], Harrisburg, Pennsylvania;[5] his daughter, Julia Graydon [d. 1954], Harrisburg, Pennsylvania;[6] sale of her estate, 28 October 1954, at her Harrisburg residence; bought by (Edgar H. Sittig, Shawnee-on-Delaware, PA);[7] sold 8 November 1954 to Colonel Edgar William and Bernice Chrysler Garbisch; gift 1966 to NGA.

[1] For his biography see Alexander Graydon, Jr. Memoirs of His Own Time (Philadelphia, 1846, reprinted by the New York Times and the Arno Press, 1969 as Alexander Graydon's Memoirs of His Own Time, John Stockton Littell, ed.), 18-19, 33-35. Much of this information is also in Graydon's Memoirs of a Life, Chiefly Passsed in Pennsylvania, Within the Last Sixty Years (Edinburgh, 1822) and his Life of an Officer, Written by Himself During a Residence in Pennsylvania, Edinburgh, 1828.

[2] For her biography see Alexander Graydon, Jr. Memoirs of His Own Time (Philadelphia, 1846, reprinted by the New York Times and the Arno Press, 1969 as Alexander Graydon's Memoirs of His Own Time, John Stockton Littell, ed.), 20, 409.

[3]Dictionary of American Biography 4, part 1: 524-525.

[4]Appleton's Cyclopaedia of American Biography, James Grant Wilson and John Fiske, eds., revised edition, 6 volumes (New York, 1898-1899), 2: 732; Mary Ellen Graydon Sharpe, A Family Retrospect (Indianapolis, 1909), 20-21.

[5] Sharpe 1909, 24-25 mentions that he died "a few years ago," and does not mention his daughters.

[6] Her sister Alice Graydon [d. 1948], Harrisburg, Pa. may have been joint owner of the portrait.

[7]Letter from Edgar Sittig to William P. Campbell, 27 August 1971 (NGA curatorial file).

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