Published in the Columbian Magazine for July 1787 to illustrate a brief account of the State House, where the Federal Convention was then sitting. This building earlier housed the Second Continental Congress. In 1781 the wooden steeple rising above the brick tower was removed because it was badly decayed. Trenchard did his engraving from a detail in Peale's portrait of M. Conrad Alexandre Gérard, first French minister to the United States (Edward M. Riley, “The Independence Hall Group,” Amer. Philos. Soc., Trans. , 43 [1953]: pt. 1, 23–24).