Peirce, John (1836-1897)
Role:Dates:
Portrait Location: Library Annex
Artist: ()
Portrait Date:
Medium: Photograph
Dimensions: 30 x 23 in. (76.2 x 58.42 cm.)
Framed Dimensions: 43 x 36 in. (109.22 x 91.44 cm.)
Brown Portrait Number: 76
Brown Historical Property Number: 1672
John Peirce was a native of Rhode Island, a graduate of the class of 1856, and a scientist who briefly taught chemistry at Brown University. Peirce never knew his biological father, who died before his August 16, 1836, birth. His mother remarried the influential Seth Padelford, who made a fortune in the finance industry, and who served as lieutenant governor of Rhode Island from 1863 until 1865 and governor of the state from 1869 until 1873. Peirce grew up in the Padelford household in Providence, and was sent to Brown University, graduating in 1856. The young graduate was a bit of a dilettante: he worked for a maker of dyes and drugs for a year, and then left for a stay in Europe with his stepfamily. Upon his return to the United States, he took up the study of law, but never practiced the profession. Instead, he took an assistant professorship of chemistry at his alma mater, and he taught that discipline at Brown for two years, from 1862 until 1864. In 1864, he resigned from teaching and never taught again, preferring instead to concentrate on research. He took research positions at Harvard and Yale Universities, but eventually left academia entirely, turning instead to managing his substantial financial holdings and to dabbling in a variety of subjects which interested him, including pharmacology, photography, and textile science. Like his contemporary, Eli Whitney Blake, whose portrait also appears in Brown's collection, he was particularly interested in electricity and the telephone; at one point, he invented a telephone mouthpiece. Blake served Brown as a trustee from 1894 until 1895; he died in Providence in 1897.
This image of Peirce is not a painting at all, but a painted photograph. Peirce's stepsisters, Emily Rhodes Remington and Maria Louise Padelford, gave this portrait to Brown in 1900.