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From a canvas on display here an unusual sort of Philadelphian, Robert Morris, looks out on a rare sort of exhibition and its visitors with a dour expression that seems appropriate, considering the shabby way his fellow citizens repaid him for historic deeds.

Though Morris became known as ''the financier of the American Revolution,'' raising the funds that kept George Washington's army going through the grim winter of 1776-77, he finally committed the ultimate sin for a Philadelphia merchant of his day.

He fell into poverty and wound up in a debtors' prison.

The Morris painting is part of an exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, an institution that, despite a limited endowment and penny-pinching support from city budgets, has gained so many strengths that its director, Anne d'Harnoncourt, a former New Yorker, finds them hard to count. And its exhibitions, such as the highly successful recent display of Dutch masters, usually tend to have, like the museum, an international flavor.

Focus on China Traders

But the current exhibit, the climax of both ''a mystery story and a paper hunt,'' according to the curator who assembled it, focuses on its hometown. The Oriental works and American portraits, as well as an accompanying catalogue, offer insights into both the strengths and foibles of the leaders who made Philadelphia the cultural and mercantile center of the post-Colonial nation. It also focuses on a chapter in history that has been little noticed outside the art world.

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For the show, ''Philadelphians and the China Trade,'' Jean Gordon Lee, the curator of Far Eastern art, traced the works to the 42 China traders who once owned them, many of them men best known for other pursuits.

The Morris painting, by Gilbert Stuart, who was better known for his pictures of Washington, shows a signer of both the Declaration of Independence and the Articles of Confederation who borrowed on his own personal credit to help finance the Revolution.

But he was also Morris the merchant, a man who, in a city better known for modesty and caution, was daring enough to invest his wealth in the ship that opened the China trade for a young nation. Under English strictures, the colonies had been able to obtain the treasures of the Orient only through British traders. Though his trading prospered, Morris's daring also led to real estate ventures that proved his undoing. Riches From the Far East

Others soon followed in the China trade. And their ships returned laden with such mundane commodities as nankeen, a cotton cloth, but also with such treasures as those on display here: fine porcelains painted by Chinese artists, many with designs reflecting a restraint favored by modest Quakers; fine silks and silk gowns; decorated chests filled with tea; silverware; wallpaper printed with scenes of the Orient; fans so delicately carved from ivory that they look like lace; richly lacquered game boxes, and ingeniously designed furniture such as a rosewood dressing table with a top that folds back to allow a center section to rise, revealing brass-handled drawers.

Other paintings in the display show such traders as Benjamin Chew Wilcocks, a man so tall the Chinese called him the ''high devil,'' whose flamboyant life style led him far from his Quaker heritage, and Robert Waln and Samuel Howell, two Quakers who were disowned by their meetings of the pacifistic Religious Society of Friends because they armed their ships against the hazards they might encounter at sea.

And there was Stephen Girard, who, like many other forerunners of modern ''proper Philadelphians,'' were not too squeamish to deal in opium. With the wealth he acquired, Girard was able to enter banking, and it enabled him to help finance the United States Government through the War of 1812 and on his death to leave to charities the greatest fortune any American had ever accumulated, about $7 million. An estate founded partly on the opium trade helped build Girard College, the school for orphan boys. From Trading to Real Estate

Others turned their money to other uses. William Sansom, whose name is preserved on a principal Center City street, turned his trading gains to real estate development and gave the city the first of the uniform row houses that became a Philadelphia hallmark.

Then and later, as the coupling of family names among both traders and subsequent collectors shows, Quaker tended to marry Quaker and money wedded money. Benjamin Chew Wilcocks, the scion of two old families, for example, married Sarah Waln, and his younger sisters married sons of another prominent Philadelphia family, Joseph Reed Ingersoll and Charles Jared Ingersoll.

The exhibition, which closes Sept. 23, is accompanied by another that shares museum space but was collected by another institution, the Philadelphia Maritime Museum. It is titled ''The Canton Connection: Ships, Captains and Cargoes.''

Few descendants of those early traders now hold prominent positions in Philadelphia public life. But the fact that they are still around, many with at least some of the old wealth intact, is evident in the names of old families included among lenders of artifacts who made the exhibit possible, such names as Biddle, Chew, Ingersoll and Ross.

A version of this article appears in print on July 28, 1984, Section 1, Page 6 of the National edition with the headlin