Charles Willson Peale

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(b Queen Anne's Co., MD, 15 April 1741; d Philadelphia, PA, 22 Feb 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. In 1766 some prominent Marylanders underwrote his studies in London with Benjamin West, from whom he absorbed the fundamentals of the British portrait tradition. 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. 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.

Part of the Peale family

See the Abbreviations for further details.

Charles Willson Peale (1741-1827), American painter and scientist, was a solid and sometimes strikingly original painter, as well as an inventor and a museum founder.

Charles Willson Peale was born in Queen Annes Country, MD, on April 15, 1741. His father was an adventurer from Rutlandshire, England, who emigrated to Maryland after he had been caught embezzling. In Maryland he took a position as a schoolmaster and married. He died, leaving no inheritance, when Charles was 9, and the boy and his mother were forced to fend for themselves. At the age of 13 Charles was apprenticed to a saddler; shortly afterward he learned watchmaking. By the time he was 21 and married, he had added clock-making and upholstering to his repertoire and had taught himself painting after having been inspired by an amateur artist.

Successful Portraitist

Peale received some instruction from the Maryland artist John Hessalius. In 1766 wealthy citizens of Maryland raised £83 to send him to London to further his training in art, studying with Benjamin West. He remained until 1769. While there he painted an elaborately symbolical portrait, Pitt as a Roman Senator. On his return Peale settled in Annapolis. In 1772 he painted the first portrait ever done of George Washington. The exuberance of the Peale family and their warmth toward one another is recorded in the Peale Family (1773), which includes the artist, his wife, mother, brothers, sister, his old nurse, and an unidentified baby. Peale had such great success as a Portraitist just prior to the Revolution that he was able to move his business to Philadelphia. His portraiture combines a freshness and affability with a certain naive stiffness.

Peale served with distinction in the Revolution. As a first lieutenant in the militia, he crossed the Delaware with Washington and spent the dreadful winter at Valley Forge, where he did miniatures of some 40 officers. He gained the intimate friendship of Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson.

In 1781 Peale added an exhibition gallery to his Philadelphia studio, where he housed 44 of his portraits of outstanding American leaders. His wife died in the 1790s as a result of her eleventh pregnancy, and Peale soon remarried. In all, he fathered 17 sons and daughters, who were named after famous painters chosen from the pages of a dictionary of painters.

Peale liked to present a tour de force in some paintings. The Staircase Group (1795) shows his sons Titian Ramsay and Raphaelle, life-size, climbing a narrow stairway. The painting was exhibited in a doorframe as a trompe l'oeil, and the shadows the figures cast and an accurately painted card on a step added to the effect. On one occasion, Peale's desire for novelty took a macabre turn. In Rachel Weeping (1772) he shows his first wife weeping over her dead child prominently laid out in the foreground. In the portrait of his brother James (1822) the sitter is shown in a novel way: he is seated at his desk at night, his face illuminated by a lamp.

Scientific Interests

Throughout his lifetime Peale maintained an enduring and active interest in many branches of science. He did silhouettes with the physiognotrace, a machine used to record profiles. He patented a fireplace, porcelain false teeth, and a new kind of wooden bridge; perfected the polygraph, a kind of portable writing desk which could make several copies of a manuscript at once; invented a rude motion picture technique; and wrote papers on engineering, hygiene, and other subjects.

In 1786 Peale established the first scientific museum in America. It contained living species of snakes, turtles, toads, and fish as well as stuffed birds and animals. The crowning touch was an entire mastodon skeleton, which he helped excavate on a farm in upstate New York in 1801. He depicted this event in an extraordinary painting, The Exhuming of the Mastodon (1806-1808). It contains 75 figures and shows the great wheel used to lift the water from the marl pit where the bones were embedded, the plank room, and the army tent where the excavators slept. It is loosely classified as one of the first American genre pieces. In the painting The Artist in His Museum (1822) Peale shows himself lifting a curtain to reveal the contents of his museum.

Peale fought to have his museum established as a state institution, and in 1802 it was transferred to the upper floor of the State House (the present Independence Hall). He established the Columbianum in 1795, America's first public exhibition of both modern paintings and the Old Masters. Out of this he organized the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, which received its charter in 1806 and which stands today as the oldest art school in America. He died in Philadelphia on Feb. 22, 1827.

Further Reading

Charles Coleman Sellers, Charles Willson Peale (2 vols., 1947; 1 vol., rev. ed. 1969), is an extremely lively and well-documented account, with ample quotations from Peale's elaborate "Letterbooks." Peale is discussed in Charles H. Elam, comp., The Peale Family: Three Generations of American Artists (1967). For general background see Oliver W. Larkin, Art and Life in America (1949; rev. ed. 1960).

Additional Sources

Peale, Charles Willson, Charles Willson Peale and his world, New York: H.N. Abrams, 1983.

Sellers, Charles Coleman, Mr. Peale's Museum: Charles Willson Peale and the first popular museum of natural science and art, New York: Norton, 1980.

Charles Willson Peale
Charles Willson Peale (1741-1827), self-portrait from 1822
Born	April 15, 1741(1741-04-15) Chester, Queen Anne's County, Maryland
Died	February 22, 1827 (aged 85)
Nationality	American
Field	Painting

Charles Willson Peale (April 15, 1741 – February 22, 1827) was an American painter, soldier and naturalist.

Contents 1 Early life 2 Career as painter 3 Involvement with the polygraph (duplicating device) 4 Peale's Museum 5 Personal 6 Notable works 7 External links 8 References

Early life

Peale was born in Chester, Queen Anne's County, Maryland, the son of Charles Peale and his wife Margaret. In 1749 his brother James Peale (1749-1831) was born. Charles became an apprentice to a saddle maker when he was thirteen years old. Upon reaching maturity, he opened his own saddle shop; however, when his Loyalist creditors discovered he had joined the Sons of Liberty, they conspired to bankrupt his business.

Career as painter

Finding that he had a talent for painting, especially portraiture, Peale studied for a time under John Hesselius and John Singleton Copley. John Beale Bordley and friends eventually raised enough money for him to travel to England to take instruction from Benjamin West. Peale studied with West for two years beginning in 1767, afterward returning to America and settling in Annapolis, Maryland. There, he taught painting to his younger brother, James Peale, who in time also became a noted artist.

Peale's enthusiasm for the nascent national government brought him to the capital, Philadelphia, in 1776, where he painted portraits of American notables and visitors from overseas. His estate, which is on the campus of La Salle University in Philadelphia, can still be visited. He also raised troops for the War of Independence and eventually gained the rank of captain in the Pennsylvania militia by 1777, having participated in several battles. While in the field, he continued to paint, doing miniature portraits of various officers in the Continental Army. He produced enlarged versions of these in later years. He served in the Pennsylvania state assembly in 1779–1780, after which he returned to painting full-time.

Peale was quite prolific as an artist. While he did portraits of scores of historic figures (such as John Hancock, Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton), he is probably best known for his portraits of George Washington. The first time Washington ever sat for a portrait was with Peale in 1772, and there would be six other sittings; using these seven as models, Peale produced altogether close to 60 portraits of Washington. In January 2005, a full length portrait of "Washington at Princeton" from 1779 sold for $21.3 million dollars, setting a record for the highest price paid for an American portrait.

One of his most celebrated paintings is The Staircase Group (1795), a double portrait of his sons Raphaelle and Titian painted in the trompe l'oeil style.^[1] It is in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

The Artist in His Museum (self-portrait, 1822)

Involvement with the polygraph (duplicating device)

Around 1804 he obtained the American patent rights to the polygraph from its inventor John Isaac Hawkins, about the same time as the purchase of one by Thomas Jefferson. Peale and Jefferson collaborated on refinements to this device, which enabled a copy of a handwritten letter to be produced simultaneously with the original.

Peale's Museum

Peale had a great interest in natural history, and organized the first U.S. scientific expedition in 1801. These two major interests combined in his founding of what became the Philadelphia Museum, and was later renamed the Peale Museum.

This museum is considered the first. It housed a diverse collection of botanical, biological, and archaeological specimens. Most notably, the museum contained a large variety of birds which Peale himself acquired, and it was the first to display North American mastodon bones (which in Peale's time were referred to as mammoth bones; these common names were amended by Georges Cuvier in 1800, and his proposed usage is that employed today).

The display of the "mammoth" bones entered Peale into a long standing debate between Thomas Jefferson and Comte de Buffon. Buffon argued that Europe was superior to the Americas biologically, which was illustrated through the size of animals found there. Jefferson referenced the existence of these "mammoths" (which he believed still roamed northern regions of the continent) as evidence for a greater biodiversity in America. Peale's display of these bones drew attention from Europe, as did his method of re-assembling large skeletal specimens in three dimensions.

The museum was among the first to adopt Linnaean taxonomy. This system drew a stark contrast between Peale's museum and his competitors who presented their artifacts as mysterious oddities of the natural world.

The museum underwent several moves during its existence. At various times it was located in several prominent buildings including Independence Hall and the original home of the American Philosophical Society.

The museum would eventually fail in large part because Peale was unsuccessful at obtaining government funding. After his death, the museum was sold to, and split up by, showmen P. T. Barnum and Moses Kimball.

Personal

In 1762, Peale married Rachel Brewer (1744-1790), who bore him ten children. The sons included Raphaelle Peale (1774-1825), Rembrandt Peale (1778-1860), and Rubens Peale (1784-1865). Among the daughters: Angelica Kauffman Peale married Alexander Robinson, Priscilla Peale married Dr. Henry Boteler, and Sophonisba Peale married Coleman Sellers.

In 1791, he married Elizabeth de Peyster (d. 1804), his second wife, with whom he had another six children. One son, Franklin Peale, born on October 15, 1795, became the Chief Coiner at the Philadelphia Mint. His last son, Titian Ramsay Peale (1799-1885), became an important naturalist and pioneer in photography. Their daughter, Elizabeth De Peyster Peale (1802-57), married William Augustus Patterson (1792-1833) in 1820.

Hannah More, a Quaker from Philadelphia, became Peale's third wife in 1804. She helped raise the children from his previous two marriages.

Peale could accurately be described as a "Renaissance man", having expertise not only in painting, but also in other diverse fields, such as carpentry, dentistry, optometry, shoemaking, and taxidermy. In 1802, John Hawkins patented the second official physiognotrace, a mechanical drawing device, and partnered with Peale to market it to prospective buyers. Peale sent a watercolor sketch of the physiognotrace, along with a detailed explanation, to Thomas Jefferson. The drawing now sits with the Jefferson Papers in the Library of Congress.^[2] Peale wrote several books, among which were An Essay on Building Wooden Bridges (1797) and An Epistle to a Friend on the Means of Preserving Health (1803). Peale named all of his sons for artists or scientists, and taught them to paint. Three of them, Rembrandt, Raphaelle, and Titian, became noted artists in their own right.

He was the brother-in-law of Nathaniel Ramsey, a delegate to the Congress of the Confederation. The World War II Liberty Ship SS Charles Willson Peale was named in his honor.

Notable works

John and Elizabeth Lloyd Caldwater, 1772	Portrait of Henrietta Maria Bordley at age 10, 1773, Honolulu Academy of Arts	George Washington in uniform, as colonel of the First Virginia Regiment (1772)	"Rachel Weeping" (1772; enlarged 1776; repainted 1818)
George Washington at Princeton (1779)	Armand Tuffin de La Rouerie (1782)	Arthur St. Clair, 1782	Nathanael Greene (1783)
Benjamin Lincoln {1784}	Henry Knox (1784)	Timothy Matlack (c. 1790)	Portrait of Thomas Jefferson (1791)
Charles Pettit (1792)	The Staircase Group (Portrait of Raphaelle Peale and Titian Peale) (1795)	Joseph Brant, 1797	James Wilkinson 1797
Exhuming the First American Mastodon (1806)	Meriwether Lewis {1807}	William Clark [1810]

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Charles Willson Peale

• Voice of America article on record price for American portrait
• Charles Peale's Gravesite
• Portrait of General David Foreman, Berkshire Museum
• The Winterthur Library Overview of an archival collection on Charles Willson Peale.
• Famous Painter Also Founded Museum, Achieved Recognition as a Naturalist - Delmarva Heritage Series
• History of Peale at Belfield, now the grounds of La Salle University, Philadelphia, PA
• Union List of Artist Names, Getty Vocabularies. ULAN Full Record Display for Charles Willson Peale. Getty Vocabulary Program, Getty Research Institute. Los Angeles, California.

References

1. ^ National Gallery of Art - Deceptions and Illusions: Five Centuries of Trompe l'Oeil Painting
2. ^ Paper Profiles: American Portrait Silhouettes http://206.180.235.133/jaic/articles/jaic41-03-001_5.html

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