Charles Willson Peale
Charles Willson Peale
1741 - 1827
Painter and museum founder. After serving as a saddler’s apprentice in Annapolis, MD, from 1754 to 1761, he worked at various trades, including painting signs and portraits (see fig.). In 1766 some prominent Marylanders underwrote his studies in London with BENJAMIN WEST, from whom he absorbed the fundamentals of the British portrait tradition. While in London Peale probably attended the informal life classes offered at St Martin’s Lane Academy, precursor to the Royal Academy Schools, and drew from casts in the Duke of Richmond’s collection in Whitehall. He visited the studios of such important British portrait painters as JOSHUA REYNOLDS, FRANCIS COTES, and ALLAN RAMSAY and studied the techniques of miniature painting, sculpture and engraving (see fig.). In London he executed his first major commission, a full-length allegorical portrait of William Pitt, Lord Chatham (1768; Montross, VA, Westmoreland Co. Mus.), from which he engraved a mezzotint. In 1769 Peale returned to Annapolis; his portrait of Mrs Thomas Harwood (1771; New York, Met.), with its careful drawing, delicate colours, and elegance of pose and materials, reveals his debt to both West and Reynolds as well as his mastery of the subtleties of English 18th-century portraiture. He introduced into America the British conversation piece, of which The Stewart Children (1770–75; Lugano, Baron Thyssen-Bornemisza priv. col.) is a fine example, and the heroic portrait, such as that of John Beale Bordley (1770; Barra Found., Washington, DC, N.G.A.), in which he symbolically expressed American opposition to British Colonial control. The first artist to paint George Washington (1772; Lexington, VA, Washington & Lee U., Chapel Mus. and c. 1777; New York, Met., see fig.), between 1779 and 1795 he executed six more life portraits of America’s hero (see fig.); especially important are the great portrait of 1779 celebrating the Princeton victory (Philadelphia, PA Acad. F.A.) and the sitting of 1795 idealizing the civilian leader (New York, NY Hist. Soc.).
In 1776 Peale moved to Philadelphia. During the Revolution he served in the Pennsylvania militia and participated in radical politics. Between 1788 and 1791 he painted a particularly fine group of domestic portraits, for example the complex and elegant Robert Goldsborough Family (1789; priv. col., see Richardson, Hindle and Miller, pp. 214–15). From 1791 to 1810 he concentrated on his museum, originally established in 1784 as a portrait gallery, to which he added collections of archaeological, biological, and botanical specimens, and gave primary attention to inventions, natural history—working with WILLIAM BARTRAM on ALEXANDER WILSON’s American Ornithology—and art institutions: the COLUMBIANUM ACADEMY (1795) and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (1805). His discovery in 1801 of mastodon bones influenced the scientific debate over the extinction of species and provided the subject for The Exhumation of the Mastodon (1805–8; Baltimore, MD, Peale Mus.), a large painting that combined portraits of family members with landscape in order to convey moral significance.
Peale’s enthusiasm for painting was rekindled when he retired to his farm, Belfield, in 1810. Experimenting with lighting effects and new colouring methods that he had learnt from his son (4) Rembrandt Peale, he produced some of his most artistically important works: Hannah Moore (Mrs Charles Willson) Peale (1816; Boston, MA, Mus. F.A.), James Peale by Candlelight (1822; Detroit, MI, Inst. A.) and his famous self-portrait The Artist in his Museum (1822; Philadelphia, PA Acad. F.A.). Towards the end of his life he painted charming landscapes such as Belfield (1815–18; Detroit, MI, Inst. A.).
Peale’s best work reveals a command of technique and composition, as in the Staircase Group (1795; Philadelphia, PA, Mus. A.), a trompe l’oeil vertical double portrait of his sons (3) Raphaelle Peale and Titian Ramsay Peale (i) (1780–98), life-size and depicted on a winding staircase ascending from a doorway, at the base of which an actual step completes the sense of verisimilitude. So faithful is Peale’s rendering of both figures and objects in the painting that it is said that President Washington, on visiting Peale’s museum, bowed to the boys as he passed.
Group portraits such as The Peale Family (c. 1770–73 and 1808; New York, NY Hist. Soc.) possess a delightful pictorial quality, while his clear colour, naturalistic poses, and sensitivity to the relationship between the individual and nature render his paintings lively and frequently beautiful. During his lifetime, he painted over a thousand works, many the only life portraits existing of American military and political leaders.
Peale married three times and had eleven surviving children. Three sons became prominent artists, and two, Titian Ramsay Peale (i) and Titian Ramsay Peale (ii) (1799–1885), were fine naturalist–artists. [Lillian B. Miller. "Peale." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed September 10, 2014, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T065922pg1.]
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