Franks Children with Lamb and Rose

Attributed to Gerardus Duyckinck, the Levy-Franks portraits are remarkable for the span of three generations depicted in the series. This pair of double portraits depicts several of the children of Bilhah Abigail Levy Franks and Jacob Franks. Some questions, however, remain as to the precise identities of the young sitters in these works known as Franks Children with Lamb and Rose and Franks Children with Bird. Painted around 1735, the portraits show three of the elder Franks children then living with their parents in New York: Moses, David, and Phila Frank—aged about sixteen, fifteen, and thirteen respectively. (Their older sister Richa also has a portrait in this suite.) It is thought with relative certainty that the girl shown in the Lamb and Rose portrait is Phila, but it is less certain which brother is which in the two portraits. Additionally, a younger child features in Franks Children with Bird, likely their brother Aaron (born in 1732), or possibly their sister Abigail, nicknamed “Poyer” by her mother, (born around 1734), both of whom died before adulthood.

Moses and David, raised in in New York as part of the small Jewish community around congregation Shearith Israel, left town to seek business opportunities in Philadelphia in 1740. They went to work with their maternal uncles Isaac and Nathan Levy, by then well established in various aspects of shipping and trade. By 1761 Moses had evidently decided that his future lay with the London end of the family business. His portrait was painted that year by Sir Joshua Reynolds, and within five years he had become a major contributor to the Ashkenazi Great Synagogue at Duke’s Place. In 1765 he married his first cousin Phila, daughter of Aaron Franks. This Phila was, in turn, the first cousin to his brother Naphtali’s wife, also named Phila, the daughter of their uncle, Isaac Franks. Moses and Phila had one child, a daughter named Isabella, who married outside her faith with the knowledge and approval of her parents. Moses and his family were patrons of the arts and letters, reputed to have been great friends of the scholar and antiquarian Horace Walpole, 4th Earl of Orford, and of the composer Emanuel Siprutini, who dedicated his work Six Solos for a Violincello to Moses.

Moses and David had enacted a brief partnership in the early 1740s, but soon it was David and his uncle Nathan Levy who joined together to create the Levy Franks firm, which quickly emerged as one of the largest and most successful in British America. In 1742 nephew and uncle were counted among the seventy-two Philadelphia merchants and shopkeepers who met to standardize a rate of exchange. They owned ships named Drake, Sea Flower, Myrtilla, and, in honor of David’s sisters, Richa and Phila. It was the Myrtilla that, in August 1752, in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of Penn’s Charter of Liberties for Pennsylvania, that carried the Liberty Bell from England. Though David maintained a modest level of participation with the Jewish community (continuing, for instance, to pay his annual dues to Shearith Israel), he began to establish broader social ties as he climbed through the ranks of Philadelphia Society. He secured membership in the Library Company of Philadelphia and the very exclusive Mount Regale Fishing Company. In 1743 he married an Episcopalian, Margaret Evans. With the Revolution, David’s loyalties took a decidedly Tory inclination. He had family in England—brothers Naphtali and Moses as well as a variety of uncles and cousins—and he counted as a brother-in-law the Loyalist General Oliver De Lancey. When the English were garrisoned in Philadelphia, Franks and his family attended the numerous Tory balls and celebrations. His daughter Rebecca became infamous for gallivanting with English officers and was one of the prominent damsels of the famous Mischianza celebration. Once the British fled the city, things became increasingly uncomfortable for Franks, especially when he was caught trying to send a letter to British-held New York without permission. After a week in jail and a trial in which he was acquitted, Franks was told to leave the United States for the duration of the war and ordered to pay a heavy fine. David, like most of the Franks family, ended up removing to England, where his daughter Rebecca married an officer of the British army, Lt. Colonel Henry Johnson.

Phila Franks, though described by her mother as a good and obedient child, would, at age 20, cause a complete rupture in the family when she secretly married Oliver De Lancey, a member of a prominent New York Huguenot family. Her mother, who had a flair for the dramatic, recorded that “I Shall Never have that Serenity nor Peace within I have Soe happily had hitherto.” Phila had continued to live with her parents for some six months after the marriage, through the winter of 1742–1743, but left the family home to join her husband in the spring. So tremendous was the shock that her mother wrote, “My Spirits Was for Some Time Soe Depresst that it was a pain to me to Speak or See Any one.” Despite the pleading of her husband and remaining children, Abigail was unable to reconcile herself to the marriage and never saw Phila again.

Phila’s husband was, according to some contemporary reports, something of a hothead. He was indicted for attacking Judah Mears, the brother of Phila’s step-grandmother and thus step-great uncle to his wife. In 1749 Governor George Clinton further claimed that Oliver De Lancey had stabbed and killed one Dr. Colchoun during a drunken argument. However, Clinton and De Lancey were enemies, so this claim should be taken with a grain of salt. During the Revolution, De Lancey served in the British army as an officer, replacing John Andre as Adjutant General. The De Lanceys fled to England with their four children after the British defeat.

Franks Children with Lamb and Rose

c. 1735