The letter that the male sitter has apparently just pulled from his correspondence folder is addressed to [Ja]cob Gerard Koch (1761-1830), a prosperous merchant and prominent citizen of Philadelphia. Born in Holland, Koch emigrated to America before 1778. His business as an importer and merchant of "German" linens made him wealthy enough to purchase a country estate, Fountain Green, at the Falls of the Schuylkill in about 1801 and leave an immense estate in 1830 of more than a million dollars. A conspicuous patriot during the War of 1812, he contributed five thousand dollars toward the building of a frigate. Contemporaries remarked upon his exceptional corpulence; he weighed more than three hundred pounds. The letter bears a postal hand stamp "SHIP" and a manuscript rate marking "6." Although the six-cent rate was in use for a long time (1794-1861), the earliest known use of the "SHIP" hand stamp was in 1817, which suggests to historian Frederick S. Dickson that the paintings should be dated between 1817 and 1820, when Koch retired from business and moved to Paris. At that time he was married to his second wife, Jane Griffith (born in Ireland about 1772), whom he had married in Philadelphia in 1801. She survived her husband and lived in Paris until 1848.
In 1833 Mrs. Koch wrote to her brother-in-law Matthew Huizinga Messchert in Philadelphia to order a copy of the portraits from THOMAS SULLY, who referred to them in his journal as by "R. Peale," confirming the stylistic evidence that points to an attribution of the original portraits to Rembrandt Peale. Closely comparable with the Koch portrait, for instance, would be Rembrandt Peale’s portrait of General Samuel Smith from the period of about 1817-18, in Baltimore’s Peale Museum, and his portrait of Isaac McKim of the same period at the Maryland Historical Society.
Peale frequently posed his male subjects with one arm over a chair back to create a pyramidal composition, as in the portrait of Koch. Together with a general simplification and geometrizing of form, this most stable of compositions contributes to the neoclassical order of the portrait, which, however, is balanced by the strong contrasts and turbulent sky painted in the romantic tradition. As was his custom, Peale carried out the wife’s portrait in an even more romantic manner, with flowing lines, softer modeling, and a less direct gaze. While the male and female types are dissimilar, the unified architectural space between the portraits leaves little doubt that they are a pair. This background is among the most elaborate and impressive that Rembrandt Peale painted. Together with the richness and high quality of the figure painting, it marks the pair as among the artist’s finest works.
