Author: Sansom, Joseph
Biography:
SANSOM, Joseph (1767-1826: findmypast.com)
He was a Philadelphia Quaker, son of Hannah (Callender) and Samuel Sansom, brother and business partner of the East India merchant William Sansom after whom a street in Philadelphia is named. He was a gifted amateur artist who specialized in painted silhouettes, preferably taken from life; he became a connoisseur and collector. In 1791 and 1796 he was present at treaty negotiations with Five Nations leaders whose likenesses he recorded. In 1798 he married Beulah Biddle (1768-1837); they had no children, but travelled together and made collections. (In 1803 he offered Jefferson, at cost, a collection of models of antiquities that he had purchased in France and repented of; the President appears to have declined.) Sansom designed several medals commemorating eminent figures in US history, which were engraved and produced in 1806-7 and earned him election to the American Philosophical Society in 1808--at which time he donated some Roman relics and geological specimens for their collections. As a writer he is known for accounts of his travels in Europe and North America based on trips undertaken in 1801-2 and 1817, especially Letters from Europe (1805) and Sketches of Lower Canada (1820). He died in Philadelphia. The Historical Society of Pennsylvania holds a substantial number of his silhouettes; his important collection of minerals and some personal papers are preserved at Haverford College. (ancestry.com 29 Aug. 2020; "To Thomas Jefferson from Joseph Sansom, 16 May 1803," Founders Online 29 Aug. 2020; Wendell E. Wilson, "Joseph Sansom," mineralogicalrecord.com 29 Aug. 2020; C. C. Sellers, "Joseph Sansom, Philadelphia Silhouettist," Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 88 [1964] 395-438)