What's in a portrait?

While evidence of the Colden family has mostly been erased from the local landscape, the former prominence of the family is reflected in other ways. Oil portraits of Cadwallader and Alice, Jane’s parents, are in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum. In the American wing the museum displays the paneling and woodwork from the first floor west parlor of the house of Cadwallader Colden Jr. and I’ve recently discovered they own a miniature painting on ivory of Jane’s sister Elizabeth Colden Delancey (1720-1784). The New York Historical Society is another repository for things Colden including the papers and manuscripts of Cadwallader Sr. and various family portraits. Two miniatures on ivory depict Alice Christy Colden (1768-1788/89) the daughter of Jane’s brother David and Jane’s great niece Matilda Hoffman (1791-1809).

Looking for Jane has yielded descriptions of her intellect and curiosity and her superior domestic skills. We get a glimpse of her light side when Jane writes her sister describing a minor injury her new husband incurred while spinning her about. What I haven’t discovered is a picture of her. By examining the portraits of her close female relatives, particularly Elizabeth, four years her senior (lower left) and mother Alice (upper left), it seems likely she had dark hair and eyes, and pale skin. Her mother looks capable and sharp while her sister looks fragile and perhaps timid. In my imagination, Jane would look more like her mother and would never wear Elizabeth’s incredible bonnet or timid expression. I guess a missing portrait doesn’t really matter since I have so obviously formed an image of my own.

Holland and Cherryderry

Coldengham was largely self-supporting. The farm grew flax and raised sheep to produce linen and wool that was carded, spun and woven on site. The girls in the family learned to sew as well as knit and with occasional help from itinerant sewers and, I imagine, the family slaves, produced all of the everyday clothing. The ability of the farm to be self-supporting was probably also due in large part to the use of slave labor, mentioned in a letter of Alice Colden (Jane’s mother) from 1732 as “four Negro men and two wenches.”

Some fabrics were imported from abroad including Holland cloth, a fine linen sometimes striped with a colored cotton warp and named for the country where it was first manufactured. Holland was used for women’s dresses and men’s shirts and letters show that Jane’s father was sent 24 yards of Holland for that purpose by his aunt Elizabeth Hill. It has also been recorded that Governor Stuyvesant was christened in an “infant shirt, of fine Holland, edged with narrow lace.” In the Boston Records for the year 1760 “18 shifts one dozn of them very fine hollan” were listed as lost in the Boston fire attesting to the value placed on the imported fabric.

Cherryderry is a striped or checked woven cloth of silk and cotton and has various names including “charadary” and “carridary” which more closely reflect it’s origins in India than the further anglicized “cherryderry.” It was imported beginning in the late 17th c. and was used for women’s dresses and handkerchiefs. It was later manufactured in England but there are no references to it being worn at ceremonial events or mentioned much at all although it is part of a 1740 price list. There it sells for .31 per yard and is the least expensive of all the fabrics including coarse muslin. The only historical reference I find is of a runaway slave caught in Boston in 1728 while wearing a “narrow striped Cherrederry gown.”