18. Went up to Court and stayed all Night. In the Evening Mr. Peale & J. P. Custis came to Mount Vernon.
The court met 18–19 May; GW attended both days (Fairfax County Order Book for 1772–74, 27–34, Vi Microfilm).
Charles Willson Peale (1741–1827), a resident of Annapolis, came to Mount Vernon with a letter of introduction from Jonathan Boucher. Peale had forsaken his saddlery business, to which he had been apprenticed as a youth, to take up painting. He visited John Singleton Copley in Boston in 1765 and studied painting with Benjamin West in London 1767–69. He was now making his living painting miniatures, and on occasion larger portraits, of gentry and merchants in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia.