Benjamin Franklin’s descendants are selling their Philly portrait of him through Christie’s

Siblings Benjamin Franklin Pepper Jr. and Holly White still remember when the portrait of their great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather Benjamin Franklin came into their childhood home in Alexandria, Va.

It was 1966 and their family had just returned from two tours in Mexico, where their father, a Franklin descendant, was working for the CIA.

White and Pepper told me their dad had the family’s entire living room designed around the massive 51-by-44-inch portrait, which features the Founding Father in a pensive pose looking over documents. And when the holidays rolled around, their ancestor was included in the festivities.

“The Christmas tree was always near enough so that any family pictures included the portrait of him in them,” White said.

Now, Pepper, 69, of Denver, and White, 67, of Bald Head Island, N.C., are selling the 1834 painting by Philadelphia portrait artist Thomas Sully and his daughter Jane Cooper Sully — valued between $100,000 and $200,000 — through Christie’s Important Americana auction in January. They’re also selling four other pieces of Franklin memorabilia, including a mezzotint of Franklin, a terracotta portrait medallion of him, and two documents containing his signature, the estimated values of which range between $1,000 and $12,000.

White, who always keeps a tiny book of Franklin’s sayings with her, said she’s proud to be related to someone whose “humor and intellect collided in this beautiful expression of a person who made a difference.”

“I don’t often feel that I have a fraction of his talents and ability, but I’ll apply the pieces of me that are a part of that fabric,” she said.

Pepper said Franklin’s legend loomed large in their family, but it wasn’t something brought up in casual conversations outside the home.

“At a certain point you realize some people are fascinated by it, some are nonplussed, and I’ve been point-blank told ‘You’re making it up,’” Pepper said. “You don’t introduce yourself as ‘Hi, I’m Ben, descended from Benjamin Franklin!’ Some people do inquire about the name and it evolves through conversation sometimes.”

The portrait was likely acquired by Pepper and White’s great-grandfather, Benjamin Franklin Pepper, or his father, William Pepper, a longtime provost of the University of Pennsylvania and one of the founders of what would become the Free Library of Philadelphia.

A noted Franklin fan, William Pepper married into the Franklin family when he wed Frances Sergeant Perry, Franklin’s great-great-granddaughter.

For five generations now, at least one son of the Pepper family has been named Benjamin Franklin.

“The family is very uninterested in inventing new names,” Pepper said.

White and Pepper said before working with Christie’s, they knew little about the portrait, except that it used to hang at Ballygarth, their great-grandmother’s Chestnut Hill home, and that it always inspired them.

“I remember standing in our living room, staring at it and ruminating on what he was thinking about,” Pepper said. “He was an inventor, a politician, an author — how did his head not blow up?”

White, who had the portrait in her home for the last five years, said she’d stand by it on days when she “wasn’t feeling particularly wise.”

“I’d say ‘Surely, if I just stand nearby this the wisdom will come,’” she said.

The original portrait, for which Franklin sat in London, was painted by David Martin in 1767 and is in the collections of the White House. Franklin liked the portrait so much he commissioned a replica from Martin, which he sent to his family in Philadelphia.

That replica was eventually acquired by Philadelphia artist Charles Willson Peale, who hung it in his museum and painted his own copy. The original Martin replica now hangs in the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the copy Peale painted is at the American Philosophical Society, which Franklin founded.

According to Martha Willoughby, an American furniture and decorative arts specialist with Christie’s, documentation indicates that Sully — the “preeminent Philadelphia artist of the 19th century” — painted his copy while looking at the Martin replica in Peale’s museum (a replica is done by the original artist; a copy is done by someone else).

“Copying was a very different idea than we have of it now, it was an art in itself, it wasn’t as derogatory as we see it to be,” Willoughby said. “Artists would learn and teach themselves by copying.”

She said the fact that Sully’s daughter is listed as a co-artist on the painting most likely indicates she was learning from her father while working on the piece.

Sully, a native of England who became a “portraitist to the stars,” was renowned in his time for his flattering paintings of prominent Philadelphians, according to Willoughby.

Last year, a self-portrait by Sully fetched $63,000 through a Christie’s auction and in 2012, a Sully portrait of George Washington also auctioned by Christie’s sold for more than $1 million.

She said what she loves about this piece, which is sometimes called “the thumb portrait,” is Franklin’s pose.

“He’s totally engrossed in thought and he was admired for his mind, I love that,” she said. “This is Franklin in the beginnings of this resistance of British rule, and that’s something I also find quite powerful.”

White and Pepper said making the decision to sell the portrait was painful, but their own children don’t have walls large enough to hang it on and it’s become harder to properly curate. More than anything though, they told me they just want other people to see it.

“I always wished there were more eyes on it,” White said. “I felt selfish that we had it and it was just us and our friends who saw it.”

While they know they can’t dictate the buyer, White hopes it goes somewhere that was important to Franklin, and since Philly already has two versions, she’d like to see it in Boston, London, or Paris.

“If it goes to a private collection and is kept in somebody’s house, hopefully they’ll have the decency to have big, big parties or do something that it gets to see the indirect light of day,” Pepper said.

The Important Americana auction, which includes the Franklin lots, is scheduled for Jan. 18 and 19 at Christie’s, 20 Rockefeller Plaza, New York, N.Y., 10020. Prior to the sale, the pieces will be available for viewing to the public, free of charge, at Christie’s from Jan. 12 to 18.