Raphaelle PealeStill Lifes

Raphaelle Peale Still LifesNICOLAI CIKOVSKY, JR.

with contributions byLINDA BANTEL

JOHN WILMERDING

National Gallery of Art, Washington

Pennsylvania Academyof the Fine Arts, Philadelphia

Distributed byHarry N. Abrams, Inc., New York

The exhibition is made possible by a generous grant from The Pew CharitableTrusts. Additional funds to support its presentation at the National Gallery havebeen provided by The Circle of the National Gallery of Art

The exhibition is organized by the National Gallery of Art and the PennsylvaniaAcademy of the Fine Arts

Exhibition datesNational Gallery of Art, Washington16 October 1988-29 January 1989Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts16 February-i6 April 1989

Copyright © 1988. Board of Trustees, NationalGallery of Art. All rights reserved. This book may notbe reproduced, in whole or in part, in any form(beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and108 of the U.S. Copyright law and except by reviewersfor the public press), without written permissionfrom the publishers, National Gallery of Art,Washington, D.C. 20565

This catalogue was produced by the Editors Office,National Gallery of Art, Washington. Edited byTarn Curry. Designed by Chris VogelOrange peel ornaments drawn by Mark Leithauser

The type is ITC New Baskerville, set byBG Composition, Inc., Baltimore, Md.Printed by Schneidereith £ Sons, Baltimore, Md.,on 8o Ib. Lustro Dull text

FRONT COVER: Detail of fig. 39

BACK COVER: Detail of fig. i

FRONTISPIECE: i. Raphaelle Peale, Still Life withOranges, c. 1818. The Toledo Museum of Art, Gift ofFlorence Scott Libbey

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cikovsky, Nicolai.Raphaelle Peale still lifes / Nicolai Cikovsky, Jr.; with

contributions by Linda Baritel and John Wilmerding.Contents: Catalogue of an exhibition held at the

National Gallery of Art, Washington. 16 Oct. 1988-29 Jan. 1989, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts,16 Feb.-i6 Apr. 1989.

ISBN 0-89468-121-4 (pbk.)ISBN 0-8109-1474-3 (Abrams)i. Peale, Raphaelle. 1774-1825—Exhibitions.

2. Still-life painting. American—Exhibitions.3. Still-life painting—igth century—United States—Exhibitions. I. Ban tel, Linda.II. Wilmerding, John. III. National Gallery of Art(U.S.) IV. Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.V. Title.ND237.P29A4 1988759-13—dc *9 88-28872

CIP

The clothbound edition distributed byHarry N. Abrams, Inc., New YorkA Times Mirror Company

Contents

7 Foreword

g Preface and Acknowledgments

13 Raphaelle Peale in PhiladelphiaLINDA BANTEL

31 Democratic IllusionsNICOLAI CIKOVSKY,JR.

73 America's Young Masters: Raphaelle,Rembrandt, and RubensJOHN WILMERDING

95 Texts and DocumentsCOMPILED BY NICOLAI CIKOVSKY, JR.

119 A Checklist of Contemporary Exhibitions

125 Lenders to the Exhibition

126 List of Illustrations

2. Raphaelle Peale, A Dessert [Still Life with Lemonsand Oranges], 1814. Collection of JoAnn and JulianGanz, Jr.

Foreword

APHAELLE PEALE WAS AMERICA'S FIRST

professional still-life painter and one of thefinest artists of the new nation. At the turnof the eighteenth century when Peale wasactive, still life was regarded as a subject ofsecondary artistic concern. In fact, untilnow Peale's pioneering achievement hasbeen almost entirely ignored. SinceRaphaelle Peale's death in 1825 there hasbeen only one exhibition of his work, andno exhibition has been dedicated to the stilllifes that were his greatest effort and mostsignificant contributions to posterity. Today,when the still lifes of Cé/anne and VanGogh, Picasso and Matisse have been cen-tral to the accomplishments of modernpainting, we can better appreciate the be-ginnings of conventional still-life paintingin this country.

It is fitting that an exhibition that bringsone of our country's important artistic tal-ents a new measure of attention shouldopen at the National Gallery. It is even moreappropriate that the exhibition has beenjointly organized with the PennsylvaniaAcademy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia,since Raphaelle Peale spent most of his crea-tive life in Philadelphia and exhibited mostof his still lifes at the Academy. This book,

too, is a joint undertaking, containing con-tributions by Nicolai Cikovsky, Jr., the Na-tional Gallery's curator of American art, byJohn Wilmerding, its former deputy direc-tor and now Ghristopher Binyon Sarofim '86Professor in American Art at PrincetonUniversity, and by Linda Bantel, director ofthe Museum at the Pennsylvania Academy.

The exhibition at the National Galleryand the Pennsylvania Academy of the FineArts has been generously supported by amajor grant from The Pew CharitableTrusts. Additional funds to support its pre-sentation at the National Gallery were pro-vided by The Circle of the National Galleryof Art.

As always, we are deeply indebted to thelenders who have entrusted some of theirmost treasured objects to our care. Theirgenerosity is the best measure of thevalue of our undertaking.

J. Carter BrownDIRECTORNATIONAL CALLERY OF ART

Linda BantelDIRECTOR OF THE MUSEUM

PENNSYLVANIA ACADEMY OF THE FINE ARTS

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3. Raphaelle Peale, Still Life with Orange and Book,c. 1815. Private collection

Preface and Acknowledgments

HIS IS THE FIRST EXHIBITION DEVOTED TO

Raphaelle Peale's still lifes. It is necessarilya small exhibition, because no more thanabout fifty of his still lifes survive. The exhi-bition includes thirty-two paintings thatrepresent, in our judgment, Raphaelle'shighest achievement as a still-life painter. Asmall selection of paintings by Raphaelle'sfather, Charles Willson Peale, his uncleJames, and his brother Rembrandt suggeststhe extent of still-life painting in the artisticenterprise of the first generations of thePeale family.

Several colleagues have been helpful innumerous ways. William H. Gerdts' work onAmerican still-life painting is the indispen-sable resource for anyone working on thatsubject, particularly for the study ofRaphaelle Peale's achievement and influ-ence. In subsequent publications he has re-fined and enhanced our knowledge ofPeale's work. Phoebe Lloyd has studiedRaphaelle Peale with remarkable insightand surprising results and will soon publishher findings.

William Gerdts and James Maroney pro-vided essential assistance in locatingRaphaelle Peale's paintings. At the NationalPortrait Gallery, Lillian B. Miller, SidneyHart, David Ward, and Rose S. Emerick of

The Peale Family Papers provided unfail-ingly generous and expert guidance to itsresources and patiently answered endlessquestions.

Others who have also been particularlykind and helpful are: Sona Johnston, cura-tor of American art, The Baltimore Museumof Art; Susan Grey Detweiler, curator, TheBarra Foundation; Linda S. Ferber, chief cu-rator, and Barbara Dayer Gallati, associatecurator of American painting and sculp-ture, The Brooklyn Museum; Nancy RivardShaw, curator of American art, Detroit Insti-tute of Arts; Gunnar Dahl; Beverly Carter,administrative assistant, Paul Mellon Collec-tion; Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon; John K.Howat, The Lawrence A. Fleischman Chair-man of the Departments of American Art,The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Ella M.Foshay, curator, The New-York Historical So-ciety; Gary Reynolds, curator, Newark Mu-seum; David W. Cassedy, assistant curator,Museum Department, The Historical Soci-ety of Pennsylvania; Darrell Sewell, curatorof American art, Philadelphia Museum ofArt; Jefferson A. Gore, curator of fine arts,Reading Public Museum and Art Gallery;Mark A. Umbach, curator, James H. Ricaucollection; Pamela Roach; Meg Perlman, cu-rator, Mrs. John D. Rockefeller III collection;

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4- Detail of fig. 19 (opposite page)

Martin Peterson, curator of American art,San Diego Museum of Art; Robert D.Schwarz; and Anne Hyland, assistant vicepresident, Sotheby's.

At the National Gallery, Tarn Curryedited, Chris Vogel designed, and FrancesSmyth oversaw the production of the cata-logue with, respectively, impeccable care,flawless taste, and wise judgment. The exhi-bition was installed by Gaillard Ravenel,Mark Leithauser, Gordon Anson, BarbaraKeyes, and Gloria Randolph of the depart-ment of design and installation. It was, ofcourse, done perfectly. Ira Bartfield andBarbara Bernard, in the department ofphotographic services, obtained and organ-ized the many photographs that the exhib-ition required. In the department of exhib-ition programs, Sarah Tanguy and DodgeThompson arranged and tracked the myr-iad details of loans, and Mary Suzor, theregistrar, saw to it, as always, that the loansarrived safely and on time. Thomas McGilland Ted Dalziel were ingeniously helpfulin locating library resources. Exhibitionfunding was arranged by Elizabeth Weil andKaren Ward in the department of corporate

relations. In the department of Americanart, Rosemary O'Reilly handled the endlessdetails of the exhibition and the cataloguewith calm efficiency, and Michael Godfreydid the painstaking work of cleansing thetexts and documents of errors.

At the Pennsylvania Academy of the FineArts, Robert Harmon, assistant registrar,oversaw the many details involved in bring-ing the exhibition to Philadelphia. JamesVoirol coordinated the Academy's grant re-quests. Inez Wolins, curator of education,prepared the Museum's public programs,and Elaine Lomenzo, director of marketing,organized local promotional efforts with en-ergy and flair. In the office of the directorof the Museum, Carolyne Hollenwegerbrought her usual level-headedness to bearon the entire project. Atkin-Voith Associ-ates provided a skillful and sensitive designfor the installation, and Tim Gilfillian, chiefpreparator, and his staff installed the exhibi-tion with expertise and collégial spirit.

NC,Jr.

LB

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5. Raphaelle Peale, Still Life with Apples, Sherry, andTea Cake, 1822. Collection of Mr. and Mrs. PaulMellon, Upperville, Virginia

Raphaelle Peale in PhiladelphiaLINDA BANTEL

HY WOULD A PHILADELPHIA ARTIST AT THEturn of the eighteenth century devote him-self almost exclusively to still-life painting?There was, after all, little financial incen-tive. With few exceptions, since the earliestcolonial settlements in the seventeenth cen-tury, commissioned portraits were the main-stay of artists working in America. YetRaphaelle Peale, the eldest son of CharlesWillson Peale, doggedly and tragically pur-sued this subject in his professional paint-ing, with no precursors and little financialremuneration. Had he lived in England orEurope, where academic dogma elevatedhistory painting to the top of the hierarchyof subjects and relegated still-life paintingto the bottom, he would surely have beenscorned and his work rarely shown. But inAmerica he exhibited frequently at thePennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, re-ceived encouragement from his family, andwon some critical notice.1 Nevertheless, hewas generally overlooked and underpatron-ized and was soon forgotten. Only withinthe last quarter century have scholars begunto examine his work and reevaluate hisplace in the history of American art andstill-life painting.

Raphaelle Peale did not keep ajournai,nor did he write letters obsessively, as his fa-

ther and his brother Rembrandt did. Only afew documents from Raphaelle survive, andthey are of little help in understanding thedeeper motivations and conflicts of thistroubled artist. One must therefore rely onletters and other materials written by hisfamily to reconstruct his personal and artis-tic biography.

It is commonly understood that the his-tory of still-life painting in America is insep-arably linked to the history of Philadelphiaand to the patriarch of the Peale clan,Charles Willson Peale. With the Enlighten-ment, Philadelphia experienced the popu-larization of science. The city had beenactive in world science since the mid-eighteenth century when Benjamin Frank-lin achieved international recognition withhis discovery of electricity, identification ofthe electric spark and lightning, and inven-tion of the lightning rod. In that era ofprofessional generalists, Philadelphians ex-celled in engineering, agriculture, econom-ics, electricity, medicine, and most of allbotany. Indeed Philadelphia led the new na-tion in the study of botany, with a long listof contributions to that field. John Bartram,a talented protégé of the great linguist, clas-sicist, and scientist James Logan, distin-guished himself in botanical science. His

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6. John Lewis Krimmel, Fourth of July in CentreSquare, 1812. Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academyof the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, Academy PurchaseFund

"Observations on the Inhabitants, Climate,Soil, etc. . .. [based on his] travels fromPennsylvania to Lake Ontario" was calledthe first scientific exploration by an Ameri-can.2 Through Logan, Bartram was intro-duced to the English naturalists and toLinnaeus, the Swedish botanist whose classi-fication system is considered the founda-tion of modern botanical nomenclature.Bartram's son William carried on his fa-ther's work, becoming a respected botanistin his own right and, perhaps as a necessityor by-product, a creditable painter of floraand fauna. Philadelphia, also the center ofpublishing in America, provided a flourish-

ing market for artists who could accuratelyrender the latest discoveries in the naturalworld.

Then as today, Philadelphia was a cul-tured city that nevertheless managed to re-tain a feeling of the country and of nature(fig. 6). William Penn had envisioned a"green country town," and Philadelphia wasgeographically well located to fulfill thatideal. It had a varied but moderate climate,protected from extremes of weather by theAppalachian Mountains. The building lotswere large, and it was not uncommon forthe wealthier residents to plant gardens andorchards behind their houses (fig. 7).

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One might even find barns or stables there,with chickens, geese, or the occasional cow.And many middle-class citizens eventuallywere able to build more spacious homeswithin an hour of the city. Modeled on theEnglish country house, these residenceswere also working farms, well stocked withanimals and usually incorporating largeflower gardens, greenhouses, and fishponds. This tradition still defines the envi-rons of Philadelphia today. The city's annualspring flower show is one of the largest andmost notable of its kind.

This was Raphaelle Peale's milieu. Hisdecision to pursue a career in still-life paint-

ing was plausible because art patronage andexhibition possibilities existed in the city.Philadelphia was the focus not only of cul-tural and scientific activity in the newly cre-ated United States but also of politics. By1794 it had been chosen the interim capitalof the Republic, and with so many politicalleaders in residence, it offered ample op-portunities for accomplished portrait paint-ers. Indeed the demand was great enough toaccommodate an influx of European artistsas well. With a general taste for paintingsthus established, it was also possible to at-tract at least a meager audience for stilllifes. The same year, 1794, Charles Willson

7. William Birch, An Unfinished House, in ChestnutStreet Philadelphia, 1800. Courtesy of thePennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts,Philadelphia, John S. Phillips Collection

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8. Raphaelle Peale, Peaches and Unripe Grapes, 1815.Kathryn and Robert Steinberg (opposite page]

Peale founded an institution to educate am-ateur and professional American artists andto sponsor exhibitions of their work. Hehoped that this organization, called the Col-umbianum, would contribute to the culturallife of the city and the nation (Peale was alsoaware that the city fathers wanted to makePhiladelphia as attractive as possible so thatit would remain the nation's capital, for ob-vious political and financial reasons). Inspite of Peale's leadership, however, the Col-umbianum faltered and dissolved after onlyone exhibition in 1795, principally due todisagreement among the artists over goals.

It was with the diverse Columbianum ex-hibition that Raphaelle Peale made his artis-tic debut, showing five portraits and sevenstill lifes, including A Bill and A Deception.For Charles Willson Peale, the exhibitionprovided the opportunity to promote notonly Philadelphia but his sons as well. As ashowcase work for the Columbianum, andperhaps on the prompting of his sons, heexhibited one of the most famous early de-ceptions in American art, The Staircase Group(see fig. 25), a life-size double portrait oftwenty-one-year-old Raphaelle and hisbrother Titian. Raphaelle is shown ascend-ing a stair, holding a palette in one handand a maulstick in the other, while Titianpeers around the corner from a few stepsabove. The "deception," or illusion, wascompleted by placing the painting in a doorframe and adding a real step at the bottom.It was not until 1812, seven years after thefounding of the Pennsylvania Academy ofthe Fine Arts, that Raphaelle again exhib-ited still lifes and attracted attention. In areview of the Academy's second annual exhi-bition in The Port Folio, George Murray par-ticularly mentioned Raphaelle Peale'spaintings, noting that whereas the color in

general "is by far too cold," a picture ofbread and cheese "is certainly not inferiorto many works of the Flemish School."3

A predilection for art and nature was im-bued in all of Charles Willson Peale's prog-eny. The children were taught the rudi-ments of painting and were inculcated withtheir father's scientific and philosophic en-thusiasms as well. After 1786 when CharlesWillson opened his Philadelphia museum,the children grew up literally sharing theirhome with exhibits of animals, plants, andminerals. The commingling of nature andart was the essence of Peale's philosophy:eventually "nature and art" became themotto of the museum. Portraits of key fig-ures in America's recent history—the Revo-lution and the founding of the nation—were hung above displays of birds, snakes,fish, panthers, opossums, insects, or otherspecimens acquired through gift or pur-chase from either the Americas or Europe(see fig. 20). The exhibits were arrangedaccording to the most up-to-date classifica-tion system. An anonymous writer remi-nisced in Paulson's American Daily Advisor of17July 1828, "He had so contrived everythingin his Museum with an eye to economy inspace, that there appeared to be a place foreverything and everything in its place, deco-rated and enlivened by appropriate minia-ture scenery of wood and wild, blended andintermingled with insect, bird and beast, allseemingly alive, but preserving at the sametime, the stillness and silence of death."4

The influence of the museum andCharles Willson Peale on Raphaelle wasconsiderable. In his youth Raphaelle trav-eled with his father on painting trips and as-sisted him in the museum by gathering andpreserving specimens and arranging habi-tats. He painted the background scenes for

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g. Raphaelle Peale, Fox Grapes and Peaches, 1815.Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of the FineArts, Philadelphia

the habitats with leaves, foliage, or insects,reproducing the typical environment inwhich the animals dwelled.

Such practical experiences may accountin part for the relatively large number ofstill lifes Raphaelle submitted to the Colum-bianum, particularly curious since at thetime he was advertising himself as a portraitand miniature painter. These were clearlythe professions Charles Willson sought forhis son, not that of an "amateur" still-lifepainter. In 1794 Raphaelle had formed a

partnership in painting with his brotherRembrandt. At about the same time,Charles Willson Peale announced in thePhiladelphia press that he was giving up hissuccessful business of portrait painting andrecommending his sons Raphaelle andRembrandt as his successors.5 This gesturewas typical of Peale's generosity and sup-port: eight years earlier he had turned overhis miniature business to his youngerbrother James. Raphaelle, however, mayhave been trying to define a personal artis-tic identity, one better suited to his tempera-ment and talents. For his part, James Pealesupported Raphaelle's career in still-lifepainting by not exhibiting his own still lifesin competition until after Raphaelle'sdeath.

By 1795 Raphaelle surely realized that hewas being upstaged by Rembrandt in thefield of portraiture. In that year CharlesWillson, who recognized early on that Rem-brandt would be the artistic success in thefamily, made great efforts to secure for thefavored son the highly desirable opportu-nity to paint a portrait of George Washing-ton. He was convinced that Rembrandt'sfuture would be secured by the fame andfortune such a distinguished commissionwould bring in terms of future patronageand income from replicas. Raphaelle, alongwith his uncle James and brother Titian,joined Rembrandt and Charles Willson fora second sitting with Washington. ButRaphaelle sat on the sidelines, executing awatercolor profile on paper, not a major oil.Raphaelle persevered in painting portraitsthroughout his short life, as any strugglingartist had to do to make a living during thisera, but perhaps through lack of aptitude orapplication, he was unable to sustain him-self. As Charles Willson Peale observed,

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lo, James Peale, Still Life No, 2,1821. Courtesy of thePennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts,Philadelphia, Henry D. Gilpin Fund

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Raphaelle's portraits may have lacked the"dignity and pleasing effects" demanded byfashionable sitters.6 In this light, it is notsurprising that when the Pennsylvania Acad-emy organized its major exhibition of Pealeportraits in 1923, only Charles Willson,James, and Rembrandt were included.

During the rest of the decade Raphaelleseems to have been floundering, searchingfor direction. He went on a painting tripwith Rembrandt to South Carolina, and af-ter returning to Philadelphia in 1796, beganto work again with his father at the museumand develop patent ideas. Charles Willsonhad hoped their patented fireplace, employ-ing a damper device with a sliding shutterto conserve heat, would provide his son with

some form of stable income. It did not. Thefollowing year Raphaelle was in Baltimorewith Rembrandt to establish a museummodeled after their father's Philadelphiamuseum. There, against his father's wishes,Raphaelle married Martha (Patty) McGlath-ery. Their life together was fraught with anx-iety and tension, and Raphaelle would oftendisappear for months, only occasionallycommunicating with the family at home.His failure to provide a dependable incomewas surely the source of much distress, asPatty struggled to support their brood.7

Raphaelle and Rembrandt seem to havehad a falling out by 1800. The Baltimoreventure was closed and their painting part-nership dissolved so that each could pursue

12. Raphaelle Peale, Cheese and Three Crackers, 1813.Mrs. Frank S. Schwarz

11. Detail of fig. 69 (opposite page)

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13. Raphaelle Peale, Still Life with Watermelon, 1822.Museum of Fine Arts, Springfield, Massachusetts,The James Philip Gray Collection (opposite page)

14. Raphaelle Peale, Fruit and Silver Bowl, 1814.Private collection

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his own independent career. Rembrandt, ina somewhat bitter and self-aggrandizing ad-vertisement, dropped his surname in orderto avoid further confusion between himselfand his uncle, brother, or father.8 Raphaelle,on the other hand, highlighted his fullname in announcing his new status andthought the best way to gain patrons was tooffer discount services:

A NAME!RAPHAELLE PEALE

To make himself eminent, will paintMINIATURES, for a short time, at TenDollars each—he engages to finish hispictures equally as well for this, as hisformer price, and invariably produces

ASTONISHING LIKENESSES.9

Success continued to elude Raphaelle atthe turn of the century, even as the financialburdens of a growing family escalated.Whereas Rembrandt was able to further hiscareer and education by going to Englandand France on business for the Peale mu-seum, Raphaelle never left the country; hisart education depended exclusively on hisfather's or his uncle's instruction and whatother art he might have seen in Philadel-phia.10 His career was static. He was gettingno commissions. And he was becoming adrain on his father's resources, emotionallyand financially. Finally in 1802 his father wasable to secure from his good friend JohnIsaac Hawkins, an English inventor, the ex-clusive rights for Raphaelle to use his phys-iognotrace, an instrument based on aFrench invention of 1786, to produce silhou-ettes. Hawkins agreed to allow Raphaelle touse the invention in plantations and smallertowns in Virginia, and with paper cutouts invogue at the time, Raphaelle was able to cutthousands of profiles in the first summer,clearing over $1,600. He had hoped for a

similar success in Boston, but by the time hearrived there several months later, the fadhad waned and he again found himself with-out income. By 1809 Raphaelle's efforts tosupport his family (he now had six children)were further compromised by his alcohol-ism and gout. His wife threatened to di-vorce him. That summer he was committedto Pennsylvania Hospital for "delirium" andreleased as "cured" two weeks later.

The Pennsylvania Academy of the FineArts was established in 1805 (fig. 15) andsoon became the preeminent institution inthe country for both educating Americanartists and displaying their work. Rem-brandt and Charles Willson Peale were in-strumental in the Academy's founding, butRaphaelle was uninvolved, and in light ofhis peripatetic life-style and lack of self-discipline he was understandably nevermade an academician. When annual exhibi-tions were instituted in 1811, Raphaelle didrespond, first with miniatures, then princi-pally with still lifes or deceptions and onlyoccasionally a miniature or portrait. Al-though his works sold poorly, they were crit-ically well received, judging by a reviewer'scomments in 1813 in The Port Folio:

This [Fruit Piece] is a most exquisite production ofart, and we sincerely congratulate the artist onthe effects produced on the public mind by view-ing his valuable pictures in the present exhibi-tion. Before our annual exhibition this artist wasbut little known. The last year he exhibited twopictures of still life, that deservedly drew the pub-lic attention, and were highly appreciated by thebest judges. We are extremely grateful to find thathe has directed his talents to a branch of the artsin which he appears to be so well fitted to excel.. . . Raphael Peale has demonstrated talents sotranscendant in subjects of still life, that withproper attention and encouragement, he will, inour opinion, rival the first artists, ancient or mod-

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ern, in that department of painting. . . . we haveseen fourteen annual exhibitions of the RoyalAcademy, and one of the Incorporated Society ofArtists, in London; and we are bold as well asproud to say, that there were in no one of thesecelebrated exhibitions, so great a number of pic-tures on this particular branch of the arts as thosenow exhibited by Raphael Peale.11

Although Raphaelle exhibited still lifesat the Columbianum in 1795, none havebeen discovered that predate 1813, the sec-ond year he submitted still lifes to the Penn-sylvania Academy exhibitions. With theexception of 1820 and 1821 (when he was veryill), his paintings were exhibited there everyyear following 1811 until his death.12 Since

Raphaelle was unsuccessful in securing por-trait commissions, this opportunity to ex-hibit work done independently of a patronmust have encouraged his return to still life.Two other personal factors probably con-tributed to this choice. With both legs oftenseverely swollen by gout, Raphaelle was notalways able to undertake the travel neces-sary to complete portrait commissions. Hisexcessive drinking must also have made himunreliable. Still-life painting was a moresettled and solitary pursuit.

Subject matter for still lifes may alsohave become more abundant around 1810,for in February of that year Charles WillsonPeale, at the age of sixty-nine, purchased a

15. Benjamin Tanner after J. J. Barralet,Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts [first building],1809. Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of theFine Arts, Philadelphia, John S. Phillips Collection

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i6. Raphaelle Peale, Still Life with Celery and Wine,1816. Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute Museumof Art

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country estate six miles from Philadelphia,just outside of German town. Peale lived onthese 104.5 acres f°r eleven years, his chil-dren and grandchildren frequently visitinghim. He named the farm Belfield, after theestate of the painter John Hesselius, his firstteacher. Fruits and vegetables were plenti-ful—rhubarb, apples, raspberries, straw-berries, and currants (which were used tomake some of the best wine in the region).Rubens Peale created a botanical gardenthere, adding herbs and flowers. Pigs andpoultry were slaughtered for food. Eventu-

ally a fish pond was built and stocked withcatfish from the Schuylkill.

From 1813 to 1821 Raphaelle Peale trav-eled back and forth between the south andPhiladelphia. His wife was forced to take inboarders to make ends meet. His father,steeped in strict academic theory, was con-cerned about Raphaelle's preference forstill-life painting yet recognized his talentand supported him as best he could, buyinghis paintings or giving him money outright.He tried to promote Raphaelle's workabroad and in September of 1815 sent sev-

17. Raphaelle Peale, Apples and Fox Grapes, 1815.Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of the FineArts, Philadelphia

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eral still lifes to his old teacher in London,Benjamin West, noting that Raphaelle"seem[ed] to possess considerable talent forsuch paintings."13 Nothing ever came of this.In 1817, just as in 1795, he painted a portraitof Raphaelle "in the character of an artist"before a still-life painting (see fig. 23), asthough to endorse Raphaelle's professionand build up his self-esteem.14 But CharlesWillson was still torn. While praisingRaphaelle's still lifes, he continued to ad-monish his errant son to be less profligate:

. . . if you applied [yourself] as you ought to do,you would be the first painter in America. .. .Your pictures of still-life are acknowledged to be,even by the Painters here, far exceeding all otherworks of that kind—and you have often heard mesay that I thought with such talents of exact immi-tation your portraits ought also to be moreexcellent— My dear Raph. then why will you ne-glect yourself—? Why not govern every unrulyPassion? why not act the man, and with a firm de-termination act according to your best judge-ment? Wealth, honors and happiness would thenbe your lot!15

Charles Willson clearly wanted success andhappiness for his son, and he knew thatRaphaelle could not support himself bypainting still lifes. Demand did not exist,and prices were low. Whereas Rembrandtcould charge $100 for a portrait, Raphaellewould take $15 for a still life if he could getit. It was not uncommon for Raphaelle to ex-change a painting for services such as car-pentry or brick-laying.16

Raphaelle Peale died at the age of fifty-one, a young man by the standards of a fam-ily in which his father and his brothersRembrandt and Rubens all lived into theireighties. His wit and sense of humor musthave sustained him in the face of chronic ill-ness and continual professional and per-sonal disappointments, especially his

inability to establish a lucrative professionindependent of his father and attract an au-dience for his still lifes. Yet, ironically, it isthis overindulged, firstborn son who, of allthe Peale children, we now view as the sig-nificant, independent painter. Parallelingthe beliefs of his father and the ordering heknew from his experience as a youth in thePeale museum, Raphaelle assumed the roleof architect of nature in his still lifes, by im-posing a balance, progression, relationship,symmetry, and design that conformed tohis—and his family's—vision of naturalharmony.

18. Detail of fig. 50

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Notes1. See Texts and Documents, documents 12,16, and 19.2. Theodore Thayer, "Town into City: 1746-1765," inPhiladelphia: A 300-Year History, ed. Russell F. Weigley(New York and London, 1982), 81.3. See documents.4. Quoted in Charles Coleman Sellers, Charles WillsonPeale (New York, 1969), 263.5. Raphaelle and Rembrandt Peale distributed atrade card in 1794 advertising their alliance. ThePapers of Charles Willson Peale and His Family, ed. LillianB. Miller (Millwood, N.Y., 1980, microfiche edition),series V-A/14. See also Claypoole's American Daily Adver-tiser, 24 April 1794, quoted in Sellers 1969, 262.6. See document 20.7. See documents 24, 41, and 48.8. Sellers 1969, 468.9. The Philadelphia Gazette, n September 1800, quotedin Sellers 1969, 291.10. It is possible that Raphaelle resented Rembrandt'stravel to Europe. See document 13, in which CharlesWillson Peale seems to be responding to Rembrandt'sintuition or suspicion that the other Peale children,especially Raphaelle, may have felt slighted.n. See document 16.12. See the Checklist of Contemporary Exhibitions.Since Raphaelle was often not in Philadelphia duringmany of these years, and was out of touch with hisfamily if not deathly ill, it seems likely that CharlesWillson Peale or other members of the Peale family,many of whom bought Raphaelle's work in order tosupport him, submitted his paintings to the Academyexhibitions. This may account in part for the varietyof ways in which his profession was listed in exhibi-tion records.13. See document 20.14. See documents 25 and 26.15. See document 27.16. See document 45.

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ig. Raphaelle Peale, Still Life with Wine Glass, 1818.Detroit Institute of Arts, Founders SocietyPurchase, Laura H. Murphy Fund

Democratic IllusionsNICOLAI CIKOVSKY, JR.

HIS IS AN ESSAY—VERY MUCH AN ESSAY,

teeming with supposition and suggestion—about what it meant to paint still life, andwhat still life might have meant, in Americaabout 1800. Its central premise is thatRaphaelle Peale's still lifes are not only pre-cious, exquisitely delicate objects, rare andbeautiful as they undoubtedly are, butpaintings engaged with the artistic as well asthe social, political, and economic concernsof their time. Theirs was not an ordinarytime, and still life was not an ordinary sub-ject. What in those circumstances allowed,or impelled, Raphaelle Peale to paint stilllifes when (as we must remind ourselves to-day) still life was universally regarded as alowly subject beneath serious artistic atten-tion? What historical, and not solely arthistorical, conditions encouraged hisundertaking? What theoretical and ideolog-ical resources sustained and directed it?What public conditions did it address andwhat private needs did it satisfy? If ques-tions like these seem to offend the aestheticpurity or to overwhelm the humble charmof Raphaelle Peale's still lifes with excessiveresponsibilities of meaning and purpose,we should remember that still life, withlandscape and genre, was part of that greatphalanx of subjects by which, beginning

about 1800, the claims and ambitions ofmodern painting were carried out.

Raphaelle Peale was born in Annapolis,Maryland, on 17 February 1774, the eldestsurviving son of Charles Willson Peale andhis first wife, Rachel Brewer Peale. CharlesWillson Peale, born in Maryland thirty-threeyears earlier, was a protean figure who"wished to play every part in life's drama"(as the first historian of American art, Wil-liam Dunlap, put it with just a touch ofamusement), and who said of himself, "likea child of Nature unrestrained, I havestrayed a thousand ways, as the impulseled."1 Raphaelle was so called, Dunlap said,from his father's "whim" of "naming his nu-merous family after illustrious charactersof by-gone ages, particularly painters. Adangerous and sometimes ludicrous ex-periment. Raphael, Angelica Kauffman,Rembrandt, Rubens, and Titian, and manyother great folks, were all his children."2

Charles Willson Peale was a man ofmany interests and boundless curiosity,which he indulged with indefatigable en-ergy to the end of his long and vigorous life(he died in 1827 at the age of eighty-six, out-living Raphaelle by two years). Dunlap sum-marized his "trades, employments, andprofessions" this way: "He was a saddler;

Si

t

20. Charles Willson Peale, The Artist in His Museum, 1822. Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of theFine Arts, Philadelphia, Gift of Mrs. Sarah Harrison (The Joseph Harrison, Jr., Collection)

harness-maker; clock and watch-maker;silver-smith; painter in oil, crayons, andminiature; modeler in clay, wax, and plais-ter: he sawed his own ivory for his minia-tures, moulded the glasses, and made theshagreen cases; he was a soldier; a legislator;a lecturer; a preserver of animals. . . "3 Butthat does not quite do him justice. As an art-ist Charles Willson Peale was the best por-trait painter in America, particularly duringthe twenty-odd years between John Single-ton Copley's departure for Europe in 1774and Gilbert Stuart's return to America in1793. He remained a painter of significant ifmore sporadic accomplishment virtuallyuntil his death. Much more than merely a"preserver of animals," he founded in Phila-delphia America's first systematically andscientifically arranged museum of art andnatural history. The large self-portrait thatPeale painted in 1822 five years before hisdeath, The Artist in His Museum (fig. 20), is avisual inventory of his interests and achieve-ments, displayed with characteristically im-modest self-esteem.

Charles Willson Peale had an enormousinfluence on his children, but the most sig-nificant and, to judge from its emotional,psychological, and possibly physical results,most damaging on his eldest, Raphaelle.Much of Raphaelle's professional life—thenature of his undertaking and the patternof his enterprise—was decisively shaped byhis father's influence. In his teens Raphaellebegan working in the museum, traveling toGeorgia and South America to collect speci-mens, and becoming an accomplished taxi-dermist in a method developed by his father(Raphaelle was probably correct in attribut-ing his later illnesses to the arsenic and mer-cury it used as a preservative).4 By the age oftwenty Raphaelle, like his father, was a pro-

32 C I K O V S K Y

fessional painter of portraits. He alsoshared, sometimes as a collaborator, hisfather's range of scientific and mechanicalinterests, writing papers on stoves andfireplaces, carriage wheels, and lightningrods, patenting a process for preservingships' bottoms and pilings from marineworms, and publishing a theory of theuniverse.

Raphaelle was pampered as a child,5 buthe did not have a tranquil life. Like every-one born in the last quarter of the eigh-teenth century, he lived in uncertain andtumultuous times of war and revolution,profound social and political change, rap-idly shifting values and changing tastes.Given the name of the greatest artist ofmodern times, Raphaelle was freighted byhis father's "whim" with an impossible stan-dard of perfection. His marriage was un-happy and contracted against his father'swishes. He was irresponsible as a parent andchronically unsuccessful as an artist, unableby his efforts either to support his own fam-ily or to please his father—while necessityobliged him to receive his support. By histhirties his hands and legs were crippled bygout. He was so seriously ill from eitherchemical poisoning or alcoholism that in1809 he was committed for "delirium." It wasfrom their effects that he died in 1825 at theage of fifty-one.

It has been estimated that RaphaellePeale painted as many as one hundred andfifty still lifes, of which only about fifty havesurvived.6 Even if these estimates are gener-ous, as they probably are, that is not a hugeproduction for an artistic career of morethan thirty years, especially given themodest size of his paintings. To be sure,Raphaelle Peale was not exclusively a still-life painter; he was also a portrait painter, a

miniaturist, and a cutter of silhouettes. Andin the fashion of other Peales, he had manyinterests and undertakings outside of art. Inview of his professional distractions, his do-mestic disarray, his physical disability, hisdissipation, and his emotional disturbanceand sometimes suicidal despondency,7 how-ever, it is remarkable not that RaphaellePeale painted so comparatively few still lifesbut that he painted as many as he did. It iseven more remarkable that his still lifesare paintings of such beauty, so perfectedin their form and so untroubled in theirsubject.

Raphaelle was professionally and per-sonally a disappointment to his father.8 Yetof all the Peales, he was the truest and thegreatest artist. He had the finest artistic sen-sibility and intelligence, and despite his lackof self-confidence and ambition,9 he was ar-tistically the most daring. In the end his arthad the most lasting influence as well.

What is most remarkable, however, is nothow much or how little Raphaelle Pealepainted but the kind of paintings he choseto make. In his professional debut (in theColumbianum exhibition of 1795) he al-ready betrayed his artistic inclination. Helisted himself in the exhibition catalogue as"portrait painter at the museum," but onlyfive of the thirteen works he exhibited wereportraits; the other eight were still lifes.Of the approximately one hundred worksRaphaelle Peale exhibited at the Pennsyl-vania Academy during his lifetime, fewerthan fifteen were portraits or miniatures.

We do not know why—with what pur-pose and by what policy—Raphaelle Pealepainted still lifes. Perhaps he found themuteness of still-life objects more agreeablethan vain and complaining human sitters.Perhaps he found that the control he could

33 C I K O V S K Y

exert in still life, more than in any othersubject—the responsibility he alone had forits selection and arrangement and the orderhe could achieve by it—provided some psy-chological compensation for the instabilityand disorderliness of his real life. Perhapshe simply found painting still lifes a consol-ing diversion. He cannot have painted stilllifes just for private diversion or psycholog-ical compensation, however. It was a pur-poseful, publicly significant undertaking,for it was by still life more than by portraitsor any other subject that Peale representedhimself, at times copiously, in professionalexhibitions during his lifetime.

Raphaelle Peale knew, as did every seri-ous artist at the turn of the century, thatpainting still lifes professionally rather thanas an amateur pastime went against thegrain of received artistic belief. It ignoredor deliberately flaunted the low regard inwhich still life was almost universally held.Still life was assigned the lowest place in theacademic classification of subject matterfirst promulgated in the seventeenth cen-tury and still binding, at least upon con-ventional artistic thought, well into thenineteenth. Its "low and confined" subject10

lacked the human interest, moral force, andintellectual substance that, according to thisordering of subject matter, was contained inthe most superior way in the depiction ofheroic historical events on the models ofclassical antiquity.

At issue in this classification was the in-significance and inarticulateness of still-lifesubjects—the muteness and commonness ofvegetables and fruits, fish and flesh, glassesand dishes, bowls and pots. Equally at issue,however, was the style of still-life painting,for still-life style was inseparable from itssubject matter. In discourses delivered to

the students of the English Royal Academyin the late eighteenth century, Sir JoshuaReynolds linked still-life subject and style:the "highest ambition" of the still-lifepainter, he said, "is to give a minute represen-tation [emphasis added] of every part ofthose low objects which he sets beforehim. . . "n The painter Benjamin RobertHaydon made the same connection almostforty years later: "To hear terms that wouldbe applicable to the highest beauties of Artapplied to a tame, insipid, smooth, flat,mindless imitation of carrots—Good God,is this the end of Art, is this the use ofPainting?"12

Still life was inferior not just because ofthe low objects that it depicted but becauseof the kind and degree of imitation, of de-ceptive illusion, implicit in their depiction.In the theoretical literature that guided ar-tistic thought and practice about 1800 noth-ing was censured as severely as imitationthat faithfully copied particular objects—"the mere imitation of individual ordinarynature," as James Barry put it scornfully—and the kind of artist that pleased by the de-ceptiveness of his painted illusions—Barry's"mere sordid mechanic, divested of intellec-tual capacity," or John Opie's "petty kind ofimitative, monkey-talent."13

To paint still life and to purposely prac-tice deceptive imitation was therefore to dis-regard, and even openly to defy, the weightof orthodox artistic belief. It is not far-fetched to think that Raphaelle Peale didjust that. His father before him had donethe same. Charles Willson Peale pursued apolicy so deliberately different from estab-lished artistic belief, one so specially fla-vored and so dynastic in its influence uponhis family (his brother James, his sons Rem-brandt and particularly Raphaelle), that one

34 C I K O V S K Y

21. James Peale, Fruit in a Basket, 1820-1825.Eric M. Wunsch

35 C I K O V S K Y

22. Charles Willson Peale, The Peale Family, c. 1771-1773 and 1808. The New-York Historical Society,New York, Bryan Collection

36 C I K O V S K Y

might almost call it Pealism. It was in his fa-ther's example, and more readily there thanin any other place, that Raphaelle wouldhave found precedents and permission forthe subject of still life, and more especiallyfor his still-life style.

In about 1772, shortly after he returnedfrom three years of study in London withthe American-born artist Benjamin West—that is, at the commencement of his profes-sional life—Charles Willson Peale painted agroup portrait of his family that includedthe artist himself, his two brothers, two sis-ters, wife and two children, mother, and thechildren's nurse (fig. 22).14 Although its sub-ject was private, it was not a private paint-ing; on the contrary, it was executed on apublic scale (on the order of five by sevenfeet), and during the artist's life it hung inthe public space of his painting room as aspecimen of his ability and as an exemplumof his ideal of artistic and domestic felicity.Prominently and almost centrally placed inthis exemplary image is a still life of fruit ona plate. Fruit is a conventional symbol offertility and fecundity, and the still lifetherefore pertains directly to the painting'sdomestic meaning.15 But to locate still lifewith such prominence in a painting that sys-tematically represents the principal medi-ums of art (painting, drawing, and sculp-ture) and its principal subjects (allegory,history, and portraiture) was to allow stilllife an uncustomary status in the hierarchyof art. Perhaps Peale gave it that positionbecause, if the twisted peel can be read as apun on the artist's name and the still life,consequently, as the painting's signaturemotif,16 it had for the artist himself somespecial appeal.

No still lifes by Charles Willson Pealesurvive, unless the still life in the back-

23. Charles Willson Peale, Portrait of RaphaellePeale, c. 1817. Private collection

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24. Charles Willson Peale, William Smith and His Grandson, 1788. The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts,The Robert G. Cabell III and Maude Morgan Cabell Foundation and the Glasgow Fund

ground of his portrait of Raphaelle (fig. 23)is a replica of one of his own compositionsinstead of one by the sitter, as is usual by theconventions of this type of portrait.17 We doknow that he painted, or thought of paint-ing, still lifes. He remarked in letters to hisdaughter Angelica that in 1808 he "contem-plated" painting "some pieces of decep-tions of still life" for the museum and in 1815he "painted a piece of still life, a basket ofapples & pears on a round stand."18

Whether or not he actually painted purestill lifes, the still-life elements in his por-traits are never perfunctory but consistentlyexecuted with care, conspicuousness, andfrequency that suggest an affection for thesubject that he did not more openly indulge(see figs. 22, 24, and 57). Charles Willson'sinterest in still life licensed RaphaellePeale to paint still life more tolerantly thancontemporary artistic practice or theory al-lowed.19 More important, his example alsoafforded Raphaelle a clear directive of style.

In most respects Charles Willson Pealewas a creature of his time, a man who in vir-tually every aspect of his being and act ofhis life—in his moral principles, religiousbelief, faith in reason, and devotion toscience—embodied the principles of En-lightenment thought. Yet no other artist ofhis generation as willfully disobeyed its rul-ing artistic beliefs. This was not a matter ofignorance or provincial isolation. As a pupilof Benjamin West, the one living artist whomost completely translated theoretical prin-ciples into practice, Peale knew perfectlywell what those beliefs were and what theyrequired of an artist of high calling. But in1772, a few years after his return and aboutthe time he painted The Peale Family, Pealewrote his friend and patron John BealeBordley to this effect:

38 C I K O V S K Y

What little I do is by mear immitation of what isbefore me A good painter of either portraitor History, must be well acquainted with the Gree-sian and Roman statues to be able to draw themat pleasure by memory, and to account for everybeauty, must know the original cause of beauty—in all he sees—these are some of the requisites ofa good painter, these are more than I shall everhave time or opportunity to know, but as I have avariety of Characters to paint I must as Ram-brandt did make these my An ticks and improvemyself as well as I can while I am provideing formy support.20

Here, at the beginning of his career, Pealedissented boldly from artistic authority. Au-thority held as one of its principal canonsthat knowledge of the sculpture of antiquity"shortened the road," as Reynolds put it, toa perception of "perfect form."21 Peale, how-ever, followed the example of Rembrandt inthe "immitation" of more ordinary models.In doing so, he took as his artistic paradigmthe chief example of artistic error. If an art-ist "takes individual nature just as he findsit," Reynolds said, "he is like Rembrandt," oras James Barry expressed it more pointedly,"a mere vulgar and uninteresting Dutchcopyist."22 But Peale perversely saw nothingwrong in copying ("mear immitation") orin finding his subjects in individual nature.He confided to Bordley a year or two earlier,"nature is the best Picture to Coppy, and Ido not regrett the loss of the Anticks... "23

About a decade later he proclaimed hisregard for imitation emblematically, as apublicly avowed artistic principle. In theelaborate scheme of historical and allegori-cal subjects that Peale made as illuminatedtransparencies for the public celebration ofthe arrival of George Washington in Phila-delphia in 1781 there were figurations of thearts. Painting was described this way: "Paint-

ing has a pallet and pencils in one hand,and the other supporting a picture; shehas a golden chain hanging from her neck,with a medal, on which is [inscribed]IMITATION. .. ,"24 For Peale imitation wasquite literally painting's defining attribute.

Imitation meant several things and tookseveral forms for Charles Willson Peale. Itmeant representing the "characters" he hadbefore him instead of modeling them on"Greesian and Roman statues." It meant aprecise and finished style ("Nature is veryperfect, and a Juditious Painter cannotfinish too high," he noted in his copy ofPilkington's Dictionary of Painters^). But inits highest form it meant an illusion so con-vincingly complete that it was capable of de-ceiving the eye.

Peale pursued deceptive illusionism indifferent ways. In 1785 he held an exhibitionof moving pictures inspired by the Eidophu-sikon ("image of nature") that Philip Jamesde Loutherbourg staged at the Drury LaneTheater in London in the early 17808. Byusing moving pictures, colored light, andsound, Peale depicted—"with changeable ef-fects, imitating nature in various move-ments" as he advertised it26—such transientconditions and effects as dawn and night-fall, a rain storm with thunder and lightningand rainbow, fire, and rushing and fallingwater. A couple of years later a visitor toPeale's museum described another form ofillusionism that he experienced there withstartling effect: a waxwork imitation ofPeale himself "so perfectly a like" that it ap-peared to him to be "absolutely alive" and in-distinguishable from the original.27

In a more orthodox medium than mov-ing pictures or waxwork, Charles WillsonPeale made painted illusions that enactedhis conviction that "illusive likeness [was

39 C I K O V S K Y

25. Charles Willson Peale,The Staircase Group, 1795.Philadelphia Museum ofArt, The George W. ElkinsCollection

the] perfection of art."28 The most impor-tant and most convincing of these was TheStaircase Group of 1795 (fig. 25). It depicts thefull-size figures of his sons Raphaelle, climb-ing a flight of curving stairs and lookingback into the room he has just left, andTitian, peering back at the viewer aroundthe door frame. To make the illusion morecompelling, Peale extended the paintedspace into literal space by setting the canvasinto an actual door frame and adding a realstep at the bottom.

The Staircase Group was first exhibited inthe one and only exhibition of the Colum-bianum, or American Academy of Painting,Sculpture, Architecture, and Engraving,which opened 22 May 1795. Largely the crea-tion of Charles Willson Peale, the Colum-bianum was the first serious attempt inAmerica to establish an academy of artbased on prototypes like the English RoyalAcademy, but with a distinctly Americancharacter, as its name declared. Its 1795 exhi-bition was the first public art exhibition inAmerica, and The Staircase Group waspainted specifically for that occasion. Itserved several purposes. One was to showthat Peale, having devoted himself for manyyears to natural history, had not lost his ar-tistic skill, his "remarkable faculty of depict-ing visible objects faithfully on canvas," asit was put apropos of The Staircase GroupéAnother was to launch the artistic career ofhis son, the twenty-one-year-old Raphaelle,who was represented bodily in The StaircaseGroup and by the second largest number ofpaintings in the exhibition. Its higher, lessself-interested purpose was to be a demon-stration of the power and purpose of paint-ing, in the first exhibition of the first Amer-ican academy of art, for the benefit of theacademy's clientele of students, professional

artists, discerning amateurs, and prospec-tive patrons.

Peale may have avowed his conceptionof painting in such an ambitious and un-ambiguous way not only to offer an aca-demic demonstration of his theory of paint-ing but to give that theory the force ofargument as well, in the public forum ofthe Columbianum exhibition for which hisStaircase Group was expressly made. Thetheory of artistic imitation promulgated inThe Staircase Group was, as he knew, diametri-cally opposed to the theory of imitation thatruled eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century artistic thought. Sir Joshua Rey-nolds gave the standard view of the matterwith unusual eloquence:

There are excellencies in the art of paint ing be-yond what is commonly called the imitation ofnature. . . . A mere copier of nature can neverproduce any thing great; can never raise and en-large the conceptions, or warm the heart of thespectator.

The wish of the genuine painter must bemore extensive: instead of endeavouring toamuse mankind with the minute neatness of hisimitations, he must endeavour to improve themby the grandeur of his ideas; instead of seekingpraise, by deceiving the superficial sense of thespectator, he must strive for fame, by captivatingthe imagination.

The principle now laid down, that the perfec-tion of this art does not consist in mere imitation,is far from being new or singular. It is, indeed,supported by the general opinion of the enlight-ened part of mankind. The poets, orators, andrhetoricians of antiquity, are continually enforc-ing this position; that all the arts receive theirperfection from an ideal beauty, superior to whatis to be found in individual nature.30

Against this theory of intellectual or con-ceptual imitation—the imitation, that is,of an ideal and general beauty formed inthe mind of the artist and addressed in

turn to the ideas and imagination of thespectator—Peale argued by the fittingly vi-sual example of The Staircase Group for anart of perception that convincingly de-scribed individual things and appealeddirectly to the perception of the beholderby the persuasiveness of their description.

The Staircase Group represented CharlesWillson Peale's dissension from artistic or-thodoxy in another way. "Intellectual dig-nity," Reynolds said, "ennobles the painter'sart [and] lays the line between him and themere mechanic."31 The distinction betweenmanual and intellectual effort lay strategi-cally at the heart of painting's claim "to thename of a Liberal Art. ..," for as Reynoldsand many others believed, "the value andrank of every art is in proportion to themental labour employed in it, or the mentalpleasure produced by it. As this principle isobserved or neglected, our profession be-comes either a liberal art, or a mechanicaltrade."32 All paintings, of course, are made"mechanically," that is, by actual manualwork. But it was crucial to the argument forthe nobility and liberality of painting thatthe stress be placed not on the sordid fact ofits mechanical execution but on the enno-bling "mental labour" and "intellectual dig-nity" of its conception. This was arguedverbally in theory. It was also argued visu-ally. Reynolds only once depicted himself inthe act of painting, preferring instead torepresent himself in academic, that is, intel-lectual, dress (fig. 26). And in John Trum-bull's early self-portrait the palette andbrushes that rest, untouched by the artist,on William Hogarth's Analysis of Beauty sym-bolize Trumbull's belief in the dependenceof practice on theory (fig. 27). CharlesWillson Peale's view of the matter was verydifferent. In The Staircase Group the chief

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26. Sir Joshua Reynolds, Self Portrait, c. 1780. TheRoyal Academy of Arts (left]

27. John Trumbull, Self Portrait, 1777. Museum ofFine Arts, Boston, Bequest of George Nixon Black(right)

figure (Raphaelle Peale), equipped withpalette, brushes, and maulstick, is undis-guisedly a practicing ("mechanical") artist.In other artist portraits by Peale, as in hislater portrait of Raphaelle (fig. 23) and hisown great self-portrait (fig. 20, in whichthere is also an illusionistic disregard forthe boundary separating real and pictorialspace), the stress again is on practice.

In Charles Willson Peale's professional

life, as summarized in his self-portrait,art and science were mixed.33 Painting,zoology, and paleontology were allrepresented in his museum, seen in thepainting's distance, and his scientific (taxi-dermie) instruments and painting tools aregiven equal symbolic weight in its fore-ground. But perhaps the relationship be-tween art and science in Peale's enterprise isto be found not only in the fact that Peale

42 C I K O V S K Y

practiced both in something like equal mea-sure, or that both occasionally intersectedin such projects as the backgrounds that hepainted for the habitat groups of the zoolog-ical specimens in the museum. It may alsobe that modern scientific method was thetruest model of Peale's (modern) artisticmethod. The major disciplines of modernscience—astronomy, physics, mechanics,chemistry, geology, geography, biology—hadbeen wrested from textual (theoretical) au-thority descended from antiquity by direct,inductive knowledge and empirical observa-tion. Peale's artistic discipline was similarlygrounded, not, as he put it, in the authorityof "Greesian and Roman statues," but onthe "variety of Characters" he knew fromhis own immediate experience. PerhapsPeale dissented from classical art theory be-cause it, like premodern science, dependedlargely on authority based in antiquity; andbecause it could not accommodate empiri-cal observation and disdained exact descrip-tion. Peale's disengagement from rulingtheory—from what such theory held to betrue, and even from formal theory itself—was, in other words, very like the disengage-ment from authority that was crucial in thedevelopment of modern scientific method,just as his own artistic method shared in itsessential premise the empiricism of modernscience.

Peale said of his artistic method, "whatlittle I do is by mear immitation of whatis before me," as if he practiced the exactdescription of experience instead ofsomething better. But just as empiricalobservation and the exact description of itsresults were fundamental procedures ofmodern scientific method (particularly inthe natural sciences, which most interestedPeale), so too they were part of modern ar-

tistic method. What the most openly revi-sionary and innovatory—that is to say, mostmodern—critiques of classical theory, suchas those by William Blake and WilliamHazlitt, condemned in the strongest lan-guage was its devaluation of imitation. Theyfocused on Reynolds' Discourses—"consid-ered as a text-book on the subject of art,"Hazlitt said in i8i434—and in particular, onReynolds' theory of imitation. Reynolds be-lieved that art should imitate general na-ture, "the idea of that central [ideal] form. . . from which every deviation is defor-mity."35 About 1808, in his annotations to theDiscourses, Blake wrote without mincingwords, "To Generalize is to be an Idiot. ToParticularize is the Alone Distinction ofMerit. General Knowledges are thoseKnowledges that Idiots possess."36 Hazlittalso took issue with what he considered Rey-nolds' belief "that the whole of art consistsin not imitating individual nature." ForHazlitt, "The concrete, not the abstract, isthe object of painting," because "it is notvery conceivable how, without the power ofcopying nature as it is, there should be thepower of copying it as it ought to be."37 ThatReynolds' notion of General Nature todayseems as chimerical and unworkably theo-retical (Hazlitt called it "metaphysical") as itseemed to Blake and Hazlitt at the begin-ning of the nineteenth century is a measureof how much their belief in the representa-tion of the particular and concrete came toshape modern artistic thought.

It was Charles Willson Peale's method,too, and the chief artistic legacy to hischildren.

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THE ONLY NOTICE TAKEN OF RAPHAELLE

Peale in the first history of American art,William Dunlap's History of the Rise andProgress of the Arts of Design in the UnitedStates, published in 1834, was a short com-ment by his brother Rembrandt: "Raphaelwas a painter of portraits in oil and minia-ture, but excelled more in compositions ofstill life. He may perhaps be considered thefirst in point of time who adopted thisbranch of painting in America. .. ,"38 De-

spite its brevity, it makes the very consid-erable claim that Raphaelle Peale wasAmerica's first still-life painter. As far as wecan tell, that was true; Raphaelle Peale wasthe first professionally committed still-lifepainter in America. What is more, as Rem-brandt could not see in the 18308, Raphaellewas not an isolated phenomenon but the fa-ther of a long tradition of still-life paintingin America. It was from him, though it is notcertain by exactly what genealogical path,

29. Raphaelle Peale, Still Life with Dried Fish[A Herring], 1815. The Historical Society ofPennsylvania

28. Detail of fig. 37 (opposite page)

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30. William Michael Harnett, The Banker's Table, 1877. The Metropolitan Museumof Art, Elihu Root, Jr., Gift, 1956 (top)

31. John F. Peto, Cake, Lemon, Strawberries, and Glass, 1890. Collection of Mr. andMrs. Paul Mellon, Upperville, Virginia (bottom)

that such later nineteenth-century Ameri-can still-life painters as William MichaelHarnett and John E Peto (figs. 30, 31) surelydescended.39 What made this remarkable in-novation possible? What precedents of ex-ample or inheritance inspired it? Whatconception of purpose guided it? What his-torical conditions made it opportune?

One method—the ordinary art historicalmethod—of explaining Raphaelle Peale'saccomplishment would be to attempt to lo-cate its sources. Unfortunately, it is not pos-sible to do that with any precision, becausewe do not know what Raphaelle Peale saw ofother art. Still-life paintings could be seenin Philadelphia, of course. Many wereshown in the exhibitions of the Pennsylva-nia Academy of the Fine Arts beginning in1811 when Raphaelle Peale was a regular ex-hibitor, and judging from their titles andartists, some could have been germane instyle and subject to Peale's still lifes. Thefruit still lifes by the Dutch painters deHeem and Kalf would have been; so wouldthe still lifes by the Spanish painter JuanSánchez Cotán shown in the 1818 Academyexhibition (fig. 32),40 and the Fruit shown in1811 that was said to be by Caravaggio butwas more likely of a type at one time oftenattributed to him (fig. 33, for example).Whatever Peale might have seen at the Acad-emy, however, it could not have been sem-inally formative. The completely practicedcompositional refinement and illusionisticsophistication of his own still lifes paintedat the time of these exhibitions indicates anestablished, wholly confident maturity thatno experiences of other art could by thenseriously affect.

There are nevertheless echoes of otherart in Raphaelle Peale's. The still lifes he ex-hibited in Academy exhibitions were invari-

46 C I K O V S K Y

ably compared to Dutch and Flemish stilllifes.41 Netherlandish still lifes were, if onlybecause of their abundance, by far the mostavailable, authoritative, indeed virtually in-escapable instructional example for a still-life painter. Even without knowing what inparticular Raphaelle Peale could have seenof Netherlandish still life, it was surelywithin that tradition, probably at some timein the 17908, that he found the stylisticmodels that influenced him (perhapsthrough the agency of his father, who in-voked Rembrandt as his own artistic exem-plar42). Apart from whatever influence ithad on his style, Dutch still life would alsohave held an aptness of meaning for anAmerican painter like Raphaelle Peale—working at a time of high national con-sciousness and democratic feeling—becauseof the political and social pertinence of itsassociations with republican governmentand middle-class culture.

If the syntactics, the formal order, ofPeale's still lifes was in some manner shapedby the influence of things he saw, like Dutchstill lifes, their grammar, the deeper theoret-ical rules of their artistic language and theprinciples of their artistic purpose, had amore direct source in the work of his father,Charles Willson Peale. There, more than inany outside influence, Raphaelle Pealefound ratification in practice and in prin-ciple for still-life painting and for illusionis-tic imitation. The subject of still life and itsmatching style, therefore, were both forRaphaelle Peale more hereditary thanacquired.

Illusionism was to some extent the inher-itance of all of Charles Willson Peale's artis-tic progeny: it was the essential element inRembrandt's "port-hole" portraits ofGeorge Washington, with their painted illu-

32. Juan Sánchez Cotán, Quince, Cabbage, Melon, and Cucumber, c. 1602. San DiegoMuseum of Art, Purchased for the Museum by the Misses Anne R. and AmyPutnam, 1945 (top)

33. Follower of Caravaggio, Still Life, 1573-1610. National Gallery of Art,Washington, Samuel H. Kress Collection (bottom)

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34- Rembrandt Peale, George Washington, PatriaePater, c. 1824. Courtesy of the PennsylvaniaAcademy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, Bequest ofMrs. Sarah Harrison (The Joseph Harrison, Jr.,Collection)

35. Margaretta Angelica Peale, Catalogue ofthe Peale Museum, 1813. James Ogelsby PealeCollection (from American Art Journal 18,no. 2 [1986]: 9)

sions of internal masonry frames (fig. 34).43

But Raphaelle Peale was almost literally im-plicated in illusionism as the chief actor inone of the most ambitious trompe l'oeil de-ceptions, his father's Staircase Group (fig. 25),and the belief that illusionism constitutedthe highest form of painting pervaded all ofRaphaelle's own work. In the 1812 Academyexhibition he showed a Catalogue for the Useof the Room. A Deception, which probably re-sembled his cousin Margaretta AngelicaPeale's Catalogue of the Peale Museum (fig. 35).His Still Life—A Catalogue and Papers Filed,painted in 1813, was exhibited at the Acad-emy a number of times. And his only surviv-ing deception, Venus Rising from the Sea—ADeception, was exhibited at the Academy in1822 and probably corresponds to the paint-ing long known as After the Bath (fig. 37).44

(Venus Rising from the Sea, in which an en-graving of Venus after a painting by JamesBarry is covered by a cloth, may also indi-cate what the 1795 Covered Painting lookedlike.45) In fact, Raphaelle Peale's work com-prises the full spectrum of imitation, fromphysiognotrace silhouettes made by me-chanically tracing the sitter's features (re-enacting by mechanical means the myth ofthe mimetic origin of art [fig. 36]) to three-dimensional waxwork figures.

Raphaelle Peale's still lifes are over-whelmingly food still lifes (rather thanflowers or dead animals), and they depictsuch things as temptingly opened water-melons, berries, peeled fruit, raisins, cakes,glasses of wine, or crumbled cheese. Likemost still lifes, they have sensuous appeal.They are not, however, about actual eating,or the sheer, unabashed enjoyment of foodand drink; on that plane their allure is verymuch less than Dutch still lifes that depictthe remnants of meals already consumed,for example, or freshly opened oysters,

36. Joseph Wright of Derby, The Corinthian Maid,1783-1784. National Gallery of Art, Washington,Paul Mellon Collection

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37- Raphaelle Peale, Venus Rising from the Sea—A Deception [After the Bath], 1822? The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri(Nelson Fund)

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38. Willem Claesz. Heda, Still Life, 1656. TheMuseum of Fine Arts, Houston, Gift of Mr. andMrs. Raymond H. Goodrich

sliced hams, and cut pies, that, sometimeswith almost erotic seductiveness, await to beeaten (fig. 38). Raphaelle Peale's still lifes—in the impeccably careful, sensitively bal-anced, and measured placement of theirobjects and the geometric purity of theirform—are almost more metaphysical thanphysical. In that respect they have some-thing of the stringency and austerity ofseventeenth-century Spanish still lifes suchas those particularly by Zurbarán, van derHamen, and Sánchez Cotán, two of which(see fig. 32) we know were exhibited at thePennsylvania Academy in 1818.

A refined abstract or formal sensibilityis unquestionably at work in RaphaellePeale's still lifes. That makes them especiallyattractive to twentieth-century viewers. It

may also have something to do with an es-sential property of still life as it was under-stood in the seventeenth century. At thattime the Dutch word stilleven, from whichthe English word derives, apparently meantnot only "still life" but "still model," that is,a fixed arrangement of objects made for theartificial purposes of art.46 In other words,an inherently formal attitude toward thesubject was present in the original meaningof still life, one in which the value of the ob-jects depicted lay in their function asmodels—in their visual properties of shape,color, and texture—as much as it did intheir appeal as things—their sensuousnessor edibility. Raphaelle Peale's attentivenessto formal arrangement, therefore, is to someextent historically intrinsic to modern stilllife and not the result wholly of his innateaesthetic sensibility. In this sense, Rem-brandt Peale's observation that Raphaelleexcelled in "compositions [emphasis added]of still lifes" perhaps receives more exactmeaning.

Still life is in many ways a private sub-ject. Still lifes depict ordinary objects of per-sonal use and private occasions like meals;they were made for an artist's own pleasureand diversion more often than were publicsubjects such as portraits, landscape, or his-tory; and they were intended most often,too, for private rather than public places.Raphaelle Peale's still lifes were in all ofthese respects thoroughly private: he obvi-ously found more gratification in still lifesthan in any other subject; his paintings areall scaled to domestic space; and objectsthat recur in them—decanters and wineglasses, cream pitcher, handled pot (figs. 2,39, 40, 41, and 53)—were clearly, by the veryfact of their recurrence, parts of his or hisfamily's domestic life.

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39- Raphael le Peale, Still Life with Strawberries andOstrich Egg Cup, 1814. Private collection

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4O. Raphaelle Peale, Lemons and Sugar, c. 1822.Courtesy of the Reading Public Museum and ArtGallery

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4l. Raphaelle Peale, Still Life with Wild Strawberries,1822. The Art Institute of Chicago, Lent byjameeand Marshall Field

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42. Raphaelle Peale, Still Life with Raisin Cake, 1813.Private collection

That said, Raphaelle Peale's still lifeswere not private paintings made only forhis own use and pleasure. He painted themfor public exhibition, and he sold andtraded them when he could. More impor-tant, as difficult as it might be to believe itof paintings of such delicacy and reticenceor of an artist of such apparently modestambition, they seem to have addressed theartistic issues of their time more intelli-gently, subtly, and—certainly in terms oftheir quality—more successfully than didthe work of any of his contemporaries.

The most vexing issue that every seriousAmerican artist faced in the fifty years sur-rounding the turn of the eighteenth centurywas, generally speaking, nationality. Few his-torical precedents gave guidance to what

kind of art it was possible for, or incumbentupon, an American artist to make in the cir-cumstances of republican government anddemocratic society. What subjects were mostappropriate? What audience should artaddress, and by what language or on whatplane of style ought that address to bemade? What class or form of patronageshould support it? As the persistent disap-pointment of American artists in this pe-riod attests, there were few easy answers tothe questions posed by American national-ity and the social and economic conse-quences of political democracy. The majorartists of the early republic (those, at anyrate, who were not content to paint por-traits)—John Trumbull, John Vanderlyn,Washington Allston, and Samuel F. B.

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Morse—were all thwarted in their artisticambitions and embittered by failure to anextent that is singular to this period.

They tried in various ways to adjust.Trumbull and Vanderlyn painted nationalsubjects: Trumbull's revolutionary war seriesand Declaration of Independence, Vanderlyn'sDeath of Jane McCrea, and the Niagaras thatthey both did. Trumbull, Vanderlyn, andMorse painted purposely popular pictures:Trumbull's projected panorama of Niagara,Vanderlyn's panorama of Versailles (fig. 49),Morse's Old House of Representatives and Gal-lery of the Louvre (figs. 47, 48). And they all

tried their hands at landscape, a subjectnewly invested, as they rightly sensed, withboth national and popular meaning. Yetdeeply implanted in their collective artisticunderstanding were ideas about nobility ofsubject matter, ideality of style, and expec-tations of patronage fundamentally incom-patible with, if not actually hostile to, thepolitical, social, and economic order of amiddle-class, democratic republic. As late as1835 Morse could write, "The truth is, theFine Arts are addressed not to the greatmass of the community, but to the majorityof the well educated and refined in Soci-

43. Raphaelle Peale, Still Life with Peach, c. 1816. SanDiego Museum of Art, Purchased through fundsprovided by the Earle W. Grant Acquisition Fund

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ety."47 Theirs was an aristocratically orderedprogram of belief transmitted by a theoryof art formulated and promulgated in theseventeenth and eighteenth centuries by theroyal academies of France and England.Raphaelle Peale's understanding, on theother hand, the mentality and artistic policyhe inherited from the political radicalism,social egalitarianism, and artistic revision-ism of his father, was very different. And itwas above all the nature of that ideologicalinheritance, not any artistic source, thatseems to have influenced and inspiredRaphaelle's enterprise as a still-life painter.

Choosing to paint still life around 1800with the seriousness and sense of calling—the degree of professional consciousnessand standard of painterly aptitude—thatRaphaelle Peale quite evidently brought tothe subject had the quality and effect of arevolutionary act. It was a deliberate, rela-tively sudden, radical inversion of artisticorder in which a subject long relegated tothe bottom of the artistic scale was raised toits top. It was part also of a larger revolu-tionary process by which other once lowlysubjects like landscape and genre (depic-tions of ordinary life) were similarly raisedto higher station, and part of the even moreprofound and pervasive remaking of politi-cal, social, economic, and intellectual orderthat was the central condition of RaphaellePeale's age. His egalitarian revaluation ofstill life belonged to the shift in hierarchiesthat can also be measured in such paintingsas his brother Rembrandt's Rubens Peale witha Geranium of 1801 or Ralph Earl's DanielBoardman of 1789 (see figs. 56, 59). In them,the human figure, which had for centuriesbeen regarded without question as the ob-ject of highest artistic value, is displacedfrom the center of pictorial attention it had

so long commanded and is compelled toshare it on an equal footing with still lifeand landscape.

To speak of this artistic change as revolu-tionary is, of course, to speak figuratively.But the change was revolutionary in certainreal social and political senses, too. The ar-tistic reclassification that gave new signifi-cance to subjects like landscape, genre, andstill life was a function (and not merely a re-flection) of the social reclassification thatthe revolutionarily transformative events ofthe late eighteenth century set in motion.These subjects were available to the experi-ence of new aesthetically enfranchised so-cial classes in ways that "noble" subjectsbased on ancient history were not (as thoseartists who persisted in producing them dis-covered). Derived from ordinary, direct, andshared experience rather than from privi-leged and educated experience, each ofthese subjects was democratically acces-sible—popular—in a way that historical sub-ject matter was not and, on the whole, didnot attempt to be.

In certain respects Raphaelle Peale's stilllifes are the clearest case among these newsubjects of what seems to be purposeful so-cial and political relevance. The very factthat professional still-life painting in Amer-ica had its beginning in Raphaelle Peale'swork about 1790, as though it were a deliber-ated invention possible only in that histori-cal moment, suggests a conscious responseto its special social and political circum-stances. Certainly the everyday common-ness of still-life subjects and the depiction instill life of simple and humble things ("anycommon objects grouped together," asCharles Willson Peale put it48) had an in-trinsic, socially classifiable diction. But thesocial and political address of Raphaelle

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Peale's still lifes was clearest of all, and mostdeliberately pursued, in their language ofstyle.

Imitative illusion was the visual languageof Raphaelle Peale's still lifes. Its extremeform was the trompe l'oeil illusionism of hisdeceptions (fig. 37), but all of his still lifes so-licited consent to the reality of their illu-sions, the believability of their paintedimitations of reflected and refracted light,texture and tactility, volume and substance.Raphaelle Peale surely derived a great dealof satisfaction from the technical achieve-ment of successful illusion; a number of hisstill-life arrangements seem clearly to havebeen made to maximize the opportunitiesfor illusionistic effect (figs. 2,14, 39, 44, 45,

46). But he also surely knew that the pub-lic appeal of still life rested very largelyupon the convincing accomplishment ofillusion.

The English painter Benjamin RobertHaydon, passionately devoted to high art,was deeply distressed by the power of illu-sionistic painting to command the kind ofwidespread admiration that he believedonly history painting deserved. He confidedto his diary in 1808 (on the eve, it is worthnoting, of the period when Raphaelle Pealeproduced and exhibited still lifes most pro-lifically), "With the People of England, alltheir ambition and all their delight, and alltheir ideas of art go not beyond [the] imme-diate object of their senses; the exact copy

44. Raphaelle Peale, Blackberries, c. 1813. Privatecollection

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45- Raphaelle Peale, Strawberries and Cream, 1818.Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon,Upperville, Virginia

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46. Raphael le Peale, Fruit Piece with Peaches Coveredby a Handkerchief [Covered Peaches], c. 1819. Privatecollection

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47. Samuel F. B. Morse, The Old House of Representatives, 1822. The Corcoran Gallery of Art,Museum Purchase, Gallery Fund, 1911 (top)

48. Samuel F. B. Morse, Gallery of the Louvre, 1831-1833. Courtesy of the Daniel J. Terra Collection,Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago (bottom)

of a pound of butter or china cup—." Whattroubled Haydon most acutely was that illu-sionism appealed to those who should knowbetter: "People . . . see only the individuallikeness to the thing and there their delightends and there their notions of art are con-fined . . . uneducated People might beforgiven—but Noblemen, the ministers ofthe Country, the government of England,. . . instead of being ambitious of havingtheir Souls elevated, and their minds ex-panded .. . [utter] exclamations of ravish-ment and rapture, at a smutty crock, or abrass candlestick."49

The social classification of illusionism(and in the bargain still-life subject matterlike crocks and candlesticks) is here unmis-takable: illusionism appeals, as Haydon putit, to "uneducated people," people, that is,of inferior social class. Haydon was far fromalone in this understanding. Reynolds, forexample, speaking as candidly as hadHaydon, said, "When the arts were in theirinfancy, the power of merely drawing thelikeness of any object, was considered asone of its greatest efforts. The commonpeople, ignorant of the principles of art,talk the same language, even to this day."50

More often this prejudice was conveyed bythe terms "servile" and "mechanical" bywhich illusionistic imitation was usually de-scribed—thus Haydon's "Mere mechanicdeception"51—for these were terms of socialvalue, ones that still bore in their usagemeanings traceable to the belief that art,like any other manual work, was to be as-signed to a laboring class of slaves, servants,and mechanics.52 Lower forms of painting,Reynolds said, were a "mechanical trade,"an association that survived in America wellinto the nineteenth century. "The painterwho copies such things [as brass kettles

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and dead game]," wrote a reviewer of the1831 Boston Athenaeum exhibition cata-logue, is only "somewhat more refined thanthe tinker or cook who handles theoriginals... "53

By about the time of Raphaelle Peale'sdeath in 1825 ̂ e social stigmatization ofillusionism was losing force both as a doc-trine of criticism and as a prejudice ofpractice. Reynolds admonished the studentsof the Royal Academy in the late eighteenthcentury that a serious artist "will disdain thehumbler walks of painting, which howeverprofitable, can never assure him a perma-nent reputation. He will leave the meanerartist servilely to suppose that those are thebest pictures, which are most likely to de-ceive the spectator."54 In America in theearly nineteenth century, however, seriousartists began to suppose precisely that. Twoof Morse's most ambitious public paintingprojects, for example, The Old House of Repre-sentatives (fig. 47) and Gallery of the Louvre(fig. 48), staked their success largely onovert illusionism—the contrived effects oflight in one, the replicated paintings in theother—even though Morse believed that"deception or accurate likeness of objects"held a subordinate artistic station.55 In 1808John Trumbull planned a panorama ofNiagara that was never carried out, while in1814 John Vanderlyn began a panorama ofthe gardens of Versailles that he finally ex-hibited in New York in 1819 (fig. 49). In-vented in the 17908, panoramas were largepaintings on the walls of circular roomsthat, by wholly filling the beholder's field ofvision, produced illusions of the most con-vincingly complete reality. They werefrankly made for a popular audience, andtheir popular success depended in largemeasure on deceptive imitation. The writer

of a biographical memoir of Vanderlyn de-scribed their popular character very pre-cisely: "panoramic exhibitions possess somuch of the magic deceptions of the art,as irresistibly to captivate all classes ofspectators, which gives them a decided ad-vantage over every other description of pic-tures; for no study or cultivated taste isrequired fully to appreciate the merits ofsuch representations."56

49. John Vanderlyn, The Palace and Garden ofVersailles, panorama, 1816-1819. The MetropolitanMuseum of Art, Gift of the Senate HouseAssociation, Kingston, New York, 1952

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This passage on panoramas parallels inits strategy of explanation the nearly con-temporary discussion of the still lifes in thesecond National Academy of Design exhibi-tion in 1827:

The peculiar merit of this class of pictures con-sists in the exactness of the imitation. A single glanceproves their success in this excellence; it is onethat is always so striking, that most persons thinkit to be the great end and most difficult attain-ment of painting. . . . The department we are con-sidering, although it ranks thus low in the scale ofworks of art, has always been popular, and for thevery obvious reason, that its chief merit is in te l l i -gible to all.57

Just as the "exactness of the imitation" ofstill lifes made them "intelligible to all,"panoramas were available to "all classes ofspectators" because "no study or cultivatedtaste" was needed to appreciate them.

During roughly the first quarter of thenineteenth century it is almost as if both aconsensual understanding of the natureand function of popular style and, underthe pressure of democratized social andpolitical reality, a policy of its upward re-valuation were being formed, however pro-visionally and pragmatically. The compactclarity of the discussion of still-life style andits social meaning in the review of the Na-tional Academy of Design exhibition is asymptom of this revaluation. Although thereview's low ranking of still life is entirelyconventional, what is not, in this first seri-ous consideration of the subject in Ameri-can criticism, is its identification (withsomething close to the precision of a theo-retical formulation) of still life with imita-tion, and imitation with popular (demo-cratic) intelligibility. Another comment onVanderlyn's panorama, although it speaksof subject matter rather than style, describes

this revaluation and its social justificationmore exactly:

Although it was not to have been expected thatMr. Vanderlyn would have left the higher depart-ment of historical painting, in which he is so emi-nent, to devote his time to the more humble,though more profitable, pursuit of painting citiesand landscapes—yet, in a new country, taste mustbe graduated according to the scale of intellectand education, and where only the scientific con-noisseur would admire his [history paintings]Marius and Ariadne, hundreds will flock to hispanorama to visit Paris, Rome and Naples. This isto "catch the manners living as they rise," aridwith them catch the means to promote a taste forthe fine arts.58

Here, in 1818, the readjustment from highsubjects to humble popular ones is de-scribed not as an opportunistic descent ordegenerative decline (as Reynolds mighthave described it) but as a matter of posi-tively desirable democratic socioculturalpolicy.59

Some such policy, as we have been argu-ing, guided Raphaelle Peale's artistic pur-pose as a still-life painter. What necessarilyalso concerned him was not only the popu-lar intelligibility of his paintings but theiractual popularity, not only how or by whomthey might be understood but who mightbuy them. "It is no doubt extremely gratify-ing to the painter to have his works viewedand praised by the public," the artist andcritic George Murray said in addressing thisissue in his notice of the fourth annual exhi-bition of the Pennsylvania Academy in 1814."He cannot, however, live by praise alone;the sale of a single picture would be of moresolid advantage to him than empty eulo-giums on a thousand." Human vanity as-sured that portraits would always findencouragement. But what of subjects ofmore general public interest, "historical,

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landscape, marine, and flower painting[that is, still life]," as Murray enumeratedthem, which "are universally pleasing toall"? In a middling, democratic society likeAmerica's in which there were no popes or

princes and great wealth was rare, who hadthe means or the disinterested responsibil-ity to encourage that sort—RaphaellePeale's sort—of painting? There was oneprototypical example of democratic patron-

50. Raphaelle Peale, Still Life with Cake, 1818. Lentby The Metropolitan Museum of Art, MariaDeWitt Jesup Fund, 1959

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5l. Raphaelle Peale, Still Life with Watermelon, 1822.Berry-Hill Galleries, New York

age and republican connoisseurship: "TheDutch and Flemish schools, for faithful rep-resentations of nature, have never been ex-celled. Who were here the connoisseurs?Who the patrons of the artists?—Merchantsand other wealthy citizens—men of plainand simple manners, possessing taste with-out affectation."60 The "plain and simple"

members of the middle class, the wealthybourgeoisie that admired "faithful repre-sentations of nature," could be America'spatrons as they had been Holland's. Just as"the pictures of Dutch and Flemish artistswere generally of a small size and well calcu-lated to ornament rooms," so too, the sug-gestion is, American artists should similarly

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tailor their products for middle-class,domestic consumption. As if by design,Raphaelle Peale's art was suited in subject,size, and style to bourgeois patronage. It wasin fact exactly that kind of patron—likeRobert and William Gilmor of Baltimore,Charles Graff of Philadelphia, James Fuller-ton of Boston, and John Ashe Alston ofSouth Carolina—who bought RaphaellePeale's still lifes, and to whose taste and un-derstanding their "faithful representationsof nature" were directed.61

Raphaelle Peale had some of the mostdistinguished patrons of his time.02 Never-theless, he seemed to sense that a system ofpatronage in which the artist dependedupon the beneficence of wealthy and culti-vated individuals—although it was the sys-tem that every program for the improve-ment of public taste, and everyone seriouslyconcerned with the encouragement of thefine arts in America, attempted to develop—was fundamentally conventional andconservative.

We know of the existence of RaphaellePeale's still lifes only through those occa-sions when he exhibited them; if he paintedstill lifes at other times, no visible or writtentrace of them remains. It can be argued, ofcourse, that exhibitions were simply win-dows through which segments of a continu-ous but otherwise unknown developmenthappened to be visible. It is also possible,however, as William Gerdts has argued, thatwe have not lost almost twenty years ofRaphaelle Peale's work in still life but thathe painted still lifes only at those timeswhen they could be exhibited—at the Col-umbianum in 1795 and the PennsylvaniaAcademy beginning in i8i2.63 The reviewerof the third annual Pennsylvania Academyexhibition (probably George Murray) sug-

gested just that when he said of RaphaellePeale, "Before our annual exhibitions thisartist was but little known."64 It is probablynot a coincidence that Peale's most prolificproduction of still lifes occurred only whenpublic exhibitions became routinely part ofprofessional artistic life in Philadelphiawith the establishment of annual Academyexhibitions in the second decade of thenineteenth century.

Raphaelle Peale seems to have had a per-ception, different from calculations of op-portunism, that the exhibition system waspeculiarly well suited to still life and othermodern subjects like it, painted essentiallyon speculation. By making still lifes chieflyfor exhibitions rather than on commissionfrom individual patrons, Raphaelle Pealewould anticipate what later in the centurybecame the essential economic conditionof artistic production and distribution,and the chief mechanism of patronage. Ofcourse, he tried to sell or trade his paintingsin whatever way and by whatever system hecould. As modest and moderately ambitiousas Raphaelle Peale seems by all accounts tohave been in person, he had a quite surpris-ing sense of commercial competitivenessand an aptitude for aggressive advertising—both verbal and typographical—that sug-gests a keen sense of the operations of themarketplace, as in figure 52, or the follow-ing from The Philadelphia Gazette (n Sep-tember 1800):

A NAME!RAPHAELLE PEALE

To make himself eminent, will paintMINIATURES, for a short time, at TenDollars Each—he engages to finish hispictures equally as well for this, as hisformer price, and invariably produces

ASTONISHING LIKENESSES.65

52. Advertisement, Poulson'sAmerican Daily Advertiser,10 October 1801

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53- Raphaelle Peale, Still Life with Liqueur and Fruit,c. 1814. Eleanor Searle Whitney McCollum,Houston, Texas

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Exhibitions were a method of appealingdirectly to the public for commercial pur-poses. But in the sense of seeking a newhearing and a reversal of judgment, the ap-peal of public exhibitions was more legalthan commercial. In Raphaelle Peale's case,the judgment to be appealed was the long-standing artistic ranking of the subject andstyle of still life. The point would be de-cided not by Reynolds' "enlightened part ofmankind" or Morse's "well educated and re-fined in Society," but by the new tribunal ofpopular opinion that the public exhibitionmade possible. If its appellate function wasindeed a factor in Raphaelle Peale's choiceof the public exhibition to present his stilllifes, he anticipated what would become bythe i86os and 18705 the practice of moreconsciously and aggressively advancedartists—Courbet, Manet, the impressionists—who used the exhibition to appeal thejudgments of the artistic establishment.

Today still lifes can seem to be comfort-ingly irrelevant—serene experiences ofpure beauty and perfect order in an aesthet-ically discordant and emotionally harshworld (fig. 54). That is what we have ad-mired in the pristine classicism ofRaphaelle Peale's still lifes, and duringPeale's own trying time and troubled life hemust have found a similar comfort in themaking and contemplation of these stilllifes. But Raphaelle Peale was close enoughto the origins of modern still life in the sev-enteenth century to know that the relation-ship of still life to real life was far fromirrelevant. Palomino Velasco's account ofVelasquez reminds us how close, in termsboth of optical and sociological descriptive-ness, that relationship once was: "He took torepresenting, with the most singular fancyand notable genius, beasts, birds, fishes,

fish-markets and tippling-houses, with a per-fect imitation of nature,. .. differences ofmeats and drinks, fruits of every sort andkind; all manner of furniture, household-goods, or any other necessaries which poorbeggarly people, and others in low life,make use of; with so much strength of ex-pression, and such colouring, that it seemedto be nature itself."66 It reminds us, too, ofhow much of that relationship survived inRaphaelle Peale's endeavor as a still-lifepainter.

ro

54. Cover drawing by Sempe, © 1988, The NewYorker Magazine, Inc.

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TlT

1. William Dunlap, History of the Rise and Progress of theArts of Design in the United States, 2 vols. (New York,1834), 1:138; and Charles Willson Peale to Edmund Jen-nings, Philadelphia, 28 December 1800, in The SelectedPapers of Charles Willson Peale and His Family, ed. LillianB. Miller, 2 vols. (New Haven, 1988), 2:295.2. Dunlap 1834, 1:140.3. Dunlap 1834, 1:140-141.4. See document 54, under Texts and Documents.5. See document i.6. William H. Gerdts, essay on A Covered Painting inRobert Devlin Schwarz, A Gallery Collects Peales (Phila-delphia, 1987), 20.7. Charles Willson Peale mentions Raphaelle'sthought of suicide in a letter to Raphaelle Peale,Belfield, 26 June 1818. See document 31.8. Charles Willson Peak's letters are filled with praisefor Rembrandt, and although his father would not ad-mit it, Raphaelle was understandably resentful of hisfavoritism. See document 13.9. Raphaelle's insecurities were compounded, hisfather believed, by damagingly impolitic behavior.See document 4.10. The phrase is Sir Joshua Reynolds', applied byhim to what was almost as bad as still life, the "lowand vulgar" characters of Hogarth. See his Discourseson Art, ed. Robert R. Wark (San Marino, Calif.,

11. Reynolds 1959, 52.12. The Diary of Benjamin Robert Haydon, ed. WillardBissell Pope, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), 1:7.13. James Barry and John Opie, in Lectures on Paintingby the Royal Academicians, ed. Ralph N. Wornum (Lon-don, 1848), 93, 97, 248. Coethe expressed the same be-lief more gently: "If a naturally gifted artist . . . turnsto subjects in nature and copies her forms and col-ours exactly and conscientiously, truly and diligently,and always beginning and ending in front of her, thatartist will always be worthwhile, for it follows abso-lutely that his works will be assured, powerful andrich in variety. . . . Such subjects must be easily pro-cured, studied at leisure, and copied calmly; the mindthat occupies itself with such work must be quiet, self-contained and satisfied with moderate enjoyments.This sort of imitation will hence be practised by quiet,honest, limited artists on so-called still-lives. But thatdoes not preclude a high degree of perfection. But

more often than not the artist finds this way of work-ing too timid and inadequate.. .." See Goethe's "Sim-ple Imitation of Nature, Manner, Style," Der TeutscheMerkur, February 1789, in Goethe on Art, ed. John Gage(Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1980), 21.14. Peale said he painted the family portrait in 1773,but it was more plausibly done a year or two earlier;according to its inscription, it was not finished until1809, when, among other changes, the dog was added.See Charles Coleman Sellers, Portraits and Miniaturesby Charles Willson Peale, Transactions of the AmericanPhilosophical Society, vol. 42, pt. i (Philadelphia,1952), 157-158.15. Whether the knife that projects over the table'sedge has some phallic significance one cannot confi-dently say, for it was a commonplace illusionistic toposin still-life painting. Peale was capable of that sort ofallusion, however, as at least one painting stronglysuggests—a painting, what is more, with a prominentstill-life component. In the double portrait of Ben-jamin and Eleanor Laming of 1788 (see fig. 57) the ex-pandable telescope directed by Mr. Laming atMrs. Laming's lap, in which she holds two pieces offruit, is, particularly given Mr. Laming's more lustfulthan merely affectionate gaze, something more thanan image of "conjugal felicity"—or at any rate, a spe-cial condition of it. See Sellers 1952,119-120.16. Peale's family portrait is signed and inscribed inthe more usual manner at right center.17. The portrait was painted at Charles WillsonPeale's country home, Belfield. See documents 25and 26. The possibility that the still life hanging onthe wall behind Raphaelle reproduces one of CharlesWillson Peale's is enhanced by its resemblance to thestill life in The Peale Family (fig. 22), to which it is closerthan to any generally accepted still lifes by Raphaelle.A few months after he painted Raphaelle's portraitwith a still life in the background, Charles WillsonPeale exhibited a Still Life—Apples, &c. at the Pennsyl-vania Academy of the Eine Arts. Its title describes thestill life in the portrait, and it was the only time he ex-hibited a still life. See Sellers 1952,167; and William H.Gerdts, Painters of the Humble Truth; Masterpieces ofAmerican Still Life (Columbia, Mo., 1981), 48. But tracesof what seems to be the beginning of a similarly con-structed portrait with a similar still life in the back-ground can be seen beneath Raphaelle Peale's Venus

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1951), 51.

Rising From the Sea (fig. 37), which, unless Raphaellepainted over one of his father's unfinished canvases,complicates the question of whether it is the father'sor the son's still lifes that are represented in thesecases. See Dorinda Evans, "Raphaelle Peale's VenusRising From the Sea: Further Support for a Change inInterpretation," American Art Journal 14 (1982): 72.18. Charles Willson Peale to Angelica Peale Robinson,Philadelphia, 16 June 1808, in Selected Papers 2:1,087;and Belfield, 22 November 1815, in The Collected Papersof Charles Willson Peale and His Family, ed. Lillian B.Miller (Millwood, N.Y., 1980, microfiche edition),series II-A/5Q.19. Nevertheless, Charles Willson Peale had reserva-tions about still life. He repeatedly urged Raphaelleto apply the powers of imitation he displayed in hisstill lifes to the more lucrative field of portraiture,which he believed was inherently more difficult thanand hence superior to still life: "It is not like thepainting of still life; the painting of objects that haveno motion, which any person of tolerable genius withsome application may acquire." See Peale's "Autobiog-raphy" (typescript by Horace Wells Sellers, AmericanPhilosophical Society), 337.20. Charles Willson Peale to John Beale Bordley, Phil-adelphia, November 1772, in Selected Papers 1:127.Peale's source for Rembrandt's practice was the articleon Rembrandt in Matthew Pilkington, The Gentleman'sand Connoisseur's Dictionary of Painters (London, 1770):"It appears as if he had more solid delight in contem-plating his own repository of old draperies, armor,weapons, and turbans, which he jocularly called hisantiques, than he ever felt from surveying the worksof the Grecian artists, or the compositions ofRaphael." That this was not a method generally to beencouraged is suggested by the article on painting inthe first American edition of the Encyclopedia Brit-tanica (Philadelphia, 1798), which warned that apainter needs more than "what Rembrandt used tocall his antiques, being nothing more than coats ofmail, turbans . . . and all manner of old householdtrumpery. . . ." See Brandon Brame Fortune, "Portraitsof Virtue and Genius: Pantheons of Worthies andPublic Portraiture in the Early American Republic,1780-1820" (Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina,Chapel Hill, 1987), 180.21. Reynolds 1959, 45.

22. Reynolds 1959,103; Barry in Wornum 1848,100.23. Charles Willson Peale to John Beale Bordley,Annapolis, 1770-1771, in Selected Papers 1:86.24. Notice published in the Pennsylvania Packet,4 December 1781, in Selected Papers 1:366.25. Collected Papers, series II-E/i.26. Pennsylvania Packet, 19 May 1785, in Selected Papers1:431.27. Manasseh Cutler, journal of a trip to New Yorkand Philadelphia, 13 July 1787, in Selected Papers 1:483.Cutler was a Congregational minister in IpswichHamlet, Massachusetts.28. Charles Willson Peale, "Autobiography," 338.Phoebe Lloyd locates Peale's belief in eye-fooling illu-sionism in Palomino Velasco, Account of the Lives andWorks of the Most Eminent Spanish Painters, Sculptors andArchitects (London, 1739), a copy of which "the [Peale]family owned and cherished." See "A Death in theFamily," Philadelphia Museum of Art Bulletin 78 (spring1982): 8,13 n. 16.29. In Sellers 1952,167.30. Reynolds 1959, 41-42.31. Reynolds 1959, 43.32. Reynolds 1959, 50, 57.33. For Peale's scientific undertakings, see BrookeHindle, "Charles Willson Peale's Science and Technol-ogy," in Edgar P. Richardson, et al., Charles WillsonPeale and His World (New York, 1982), 106-169.34. "Introduction to an Account of Sir Joshua Rey-nolds's Discourses: I," in The Complete Works of WilliamHazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols. (London, 1933), 18:62.35. Reynolds 1959, 73, 45.36. Blake: Complete Writings, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (Lon-don, 1972), 451.37. "Introduction to an Account of Sir Joshua Rey-nolds's Discourses. Ill: On the Imitation of Nature,"and "Mr. West's Picture of Christ Rejected," in Hazlitt1933,18:70, 78, 31.38. Dunlap 1834, 2:51.39. See Alfred V. Frankenstein, After the Hunt: WilliamHarnett and Other American Still Life Painters 7870-1900,rev. ed. (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1969), 31-33.40. See William B.Jordan, Spanish Still Life in theGolden Age (Fort Worth, 1985), 58-60.41. See documents 12,16,19.42. For Netherlandish influence in general, seeH. Nichols B. Clark, "A Taste for the Netherlands: The

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Impact of Seventeenth-Century Dutch and FlemishGenre Painting on American Art 1800-1860," AmericanArt Journal 14 (spring 1982): 24, 32-33. For Dutch inf lu-ence on Raphaelle Peale, see John I. H. Baur, "ThePeales and the Development of American Still Life,"Art Quarterly 3 (winter 1940): 82-84. See also Roger B.Stein, "Charles Willson Peale's Fxpressive Design:The Artist in His Museum," Prospects 6 (1981): 168-170.43. The oval internal frame was not RembrandtPeale's invention but a common device inseventeenth- and eighteenth-century painted and en-graved portraits. Deceptive illusionism is seldom asextensive and explicit as here, however.44. For a discussion of problems in the dating andreplicas of Venus Rising from the Sea, see Evans 1982,63-72.45. It may possibly have resembled Fruit Piece withPeaches Covered by a Handler chief [Covered Peaches](fig. 46). See Gerdts 1987, 21. Raphaelle Peale's plansbriefly included another form of deception, wax-work, which his father said "will far exceed in naturalappearance any that has been shown in this City [Phil-adelphia] heretofore." See document 5.46. Charles Sterling, Still Life Painting from Antiquityto the Present Day (New York, 1959), 43; Titia vanLeeuwen, "Still-life Painting in the Netherlands: His-torical Facts and Facets," Still-Life in the Age of Rem-brandt [exh. cat., Auckland City Art Gallery] (Auck-land, 1982), 39.47. Samuel F. B. Morse, Lectures on the Affinity of Paint-ing with the Other Fine Arts, ed. Nicolai Cikovsky,Jr.(Columbia, Mo., 1983), 28-29 n. 63.48. Document 34.49. Haydon 1960,1:5.50. Reynolds 1959, 96. He also said, "the Vulgar willalways be pleased with what is natural, in the con-fined and misunderstood sense of the word" (p. 89).51. Haydon 1960, 1:7.52. John Barrell, The Political Theory of Painting fromReynolds to Hazlitt (New Haven, 1986), introduction, 13.The social valuation of imitation had the authority ofPlato, who believed that as painting imitated mere ap-pearances, not truth, it was unworthy of a free citizen.53. Review, "Exhibition of Pictures at the AthenaeumGallery. Remarks upon the Athenaeum Gallery ofPaintings for 1831," The North American Review 33 (Octo-ber 1831): 512.

54. Reynolds 1959, 50.55. Morse 1983,109.56. Dunlap 1834, 2:39.57. D. Fanshaw, "Review. The Exhibition of the Na-tional Academy of Design," The United States Reviewand Literary Gazette 2 (July 1827): 258.58. The National Advocate (21 April 1818), in John W.McCoubrey, American Art ijoo-iydo: Sources and Docu-ments (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1965), 43-44. AlsoWilliam T. Oedel, "John Vanderlyn: French Neoclassi-cism and the Search for an American Art" (Ph.D. diss.,University of Delaware, 1981), 432. The quotation isfrom Pope's An Essay on Man:

Eye Nature's walks, shoot folly as it flies,And catch the manners l iving as they rise.Laugh where we must, be candid where we can;But vindicate the ways of God to man.Say first, of God above or man below,What can be reason but from what we know?

59. By the late nineteenth century still life continuedto be considered a popular but a low subject. "Thereare many who stop and look with delight at Mr. W. M.Harnett's The Social Club," the critic of the Neiv YorkTimes wrote in a review of the 1879 National Academyof Design exhibition. It "attracted the attention that isalways given to curiosities, to works in which the skil lof the human hand is ostentatiously displayed work-ing in deceptive imitation of Nature." It was, however,a low form of art to which "few artists of merit haveever condescended to apply their skill." But when an-other of Harnett's paintings was seen in a more popu-lar setting, I. N. Reed's drugstore in Toledo, Ohio, awriter said the artist made the subject "so perfect—solike the real—that in looking upon it you are likely toforget that it is a picture. . . . The higher tr iumph ofartistic genius is in approaching the actual—in theperfect reproduction of the subject presented." SeeFrankenstein 1969, 7, 50.60. George Murray, "Notice of the Fourth Annual Ex-hibition in the Academy of the Fine Arts," The PortFolio 3, ser. 3 (June 1814): 568-569.61. Nearly half of Robert Gilmor's collection con-sisted of Netherlandish paintings. Clark 1982, 26.Raphaelle's Still Life with Oranges, fig. i is inscribed:"Painted for the Collection of John A Alston Esq.1 /The Patron of living American Artists." Blackberries("A branch of red and black blackberries, lying across

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a saucer"), fig. 44 and Peaches and Unripe Grapes ("Bas-ket of yellow peaches with a bunch of unripe grapes.An extraordinary imitation"), fig. 8, were bothowned by Charles Graff, and sold in the 1856 execu-tor's sale in Philadelphia. Graff also owned threeother still lifes by Raphaelle Peale: one described as"China basket of oranges, glass of wine, a cake, bunchof raisins. Frame with the engraved head of a boy";another described as "Orange, apples, prunes, al-monds and filberts"; and a third, "China basket ofpeaches, bunch of blue grapes on the table on the left,and four peaches on the table on the right." None ofthese are now known.62. Gerdts 1987, 20-21.63. Gerdts 1981, 50-51.64. See document 16.65. See Charles Coleman Sellers, Charles Willson Peale,vol. 2, Later Life (Philadelphia, 1947), 123.66. Palomino 1739, 50. For Palomino and the Peales,see n. 28 above.

55. Detail of fig. 8

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Raphaelle, Rembrandt, and RubensJOHN WILMERDING

HE TRADITIONAL HIERARCHY OF SUBJECTS INEuropean painting ranked mythology, reli-gion, and history as highest in importance,followed by portraiture and landscape, withstill life occupying the lowest line of signifi-cance. Although early America inheritedthis tradition, by the time it had declared itspolitical independence at the end of theeighteenth century, it was also ready to as-sert a new artistic vision for itself. Arguably,part of this cultural originality was the ele-vation of still-life painting to a place ofprime importance both as a major form ofexpression for painters and as an index ofnational self-definition. Almost by exclusivespontaneous generation the Peale familyperfected the first great body of Americanstill-life subjects in the decades just beforeand after 1800. Expressing a new sense ofAmerican practicality and informality, thefounding father of this remarkable clan,Charles Willson Peale (1741-1827), had cre-ated inventive syntheses of the former sub-ject categories. His various family portraitswere not just likenesses of individuals butfusions of biography and autobiography.The famous double portrait of his two sonsRaphaelle and Titian pausing at the bottomof a staircase (fig. 25) is at once an obviousfigure painting and as much a human-scale

still life in its formal order and illusionism.For his part, Raphaelle, the eldest son,crafted within a career of attractive but or-dinary portraits a supreme group of severaldozen still-life compositions. Perhaps hiswork as a miniaturist had turned his handand eye to condensations and clarities.Whatever the impulse, his tabletop arrange-ments, though relatively conventional in thetradition of northern European baroqueprecedents, managed to evoke and embodythe fresh American aspirations for orderand union.1 Peale's second son, Rembrandt,in turn created one great masterwork forhimself and for all American art when hepainted the unusual, even startling, portraitof Rubens Peale with a Geranium (fig. 56).

This singular work would be an unsur-passed achievement for Rembrandt and hasremained one of the most original imagesin the history of American art. Though itshares with Raphaelle's pictures a love ofbalance, coherence, and clear finish, itposes an inventiveness all its own. Attempt-ing to understand that originality for itstime may help to explain why it has re-mained so compelling for us ever since inits articulation of an American sensibility.2

To begin with, what is depicted? In ourvery description of the subject, and our no-

56. Rembrandt Peale, Rubens Peale with a Geranium,1801. National Gallery of Art, Patrons' PermanentFund (opposite page)

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America's Young Masters

tation of its author and date, there is a con-fluence of associations and timing thatspeaks to the Peale family's aspirations. Thepainting is of course first of all a portrait,but one equally of an individual and of aflowering plant. The sitter was Rubens Peale(1784-1865), Charles Willson's fourth son,and he was seventeen at the time of thepainting in 1801. He poses beside what hasoften been called the first geraniumbrought to America. That it probably wasnot absolutely the first such imported speci-man has been subsumed by the continuingwishful speculation. The artist was Rubens'older brother, Rembrandt (1778-1860), him-self only twenty-three and born on GeorgeWashington's birthday in the middle of theRevolution. As is well known, CharlesWillson Peale and his first wife named theirchildren after famous old master artists; theoffspring of his second marriage were giventhe names of illustrious scientists like Lin-naeus and Franklin. By such gestures andacts the elder Peale's life would continuallyassert a panoramic ambition for achieve-ments as much in the arts as in the sciences.Certainly the two fields were aligned in oneson's tribute to another, seated before himas both would-be artist and scientist. Thusby names and dates alone, this work is par-tially about beginnings—of young lives, anew nation, an American artistic tradition,a new century. It is a multiple record of new-ness and originality, a statement of belief ingrowth, promise, and regeneration, whetherin sense of family or of nature.

Surely with this painting RembrandtPeale began his own artistic maturity. Hehad been born in Bucks County, Pennsylva-nia, while his father was away serving inWashington's army. After the Revolution,Charles Willson Peale's professional prac-

tice accelerated, as he continued to paintportraits of prominent Americans, pursuedhis scientific enterprises, and realized ambi-tious plans for art exhibitions, an academy,and a museum. In this atmosphere youngRembrandt began to draw at the age ofeight, produced his first self-portrait at thir-teen, and undertook professional work atsixteen.3 The elder Peale was familiar withthe old master tradition, having studiedwith Benjamin West in London. But unlikeWest and John Singleton Copley, who hadfelt it imperative to conclude their artisticsuccesses abroad, Peale returned to Phila-delphia with a personal mission of makingcontemporary history paintings in America.

Peale's Philadelphia was itself an enlight-ened environment, for it was foremost Ben-jamin Franklin's city, but in the last decadeof the eighteenth century it also hosted Ben-jamin Latrobe and William Strickland in ar-chitecture, view painters like Francis Guyand William Groombridge, the landscapistsWilliam and Thomas Birch, and the preemi-nent portraitists of the Federal period, Gil-bert Stuart and Thomas Sully. During thissame decade the city served as the first seatof the new American government, focusedon the central embodiment of national pa-ternity in George Washington. Civilizedequally in politics and the arts, Philadelphiawas in the forefront of defining the nationintellectually and culturally.4 The Constitu-tion was signed there in 1787, followed by ayear of intensive debate over national gov-ernance in The Federalist Papers. In Latrobe'sand Strickland's hands American architec-ture took on a powerful new classicism. Theformer built his first two major banks inPhiladelphia in the 17908, as well as his pre-cocious Greek revival Centre Square Water-works to meet the city's growing population

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needs. In addition, fine cabinetmakers andsilversmiths were producing high-styledecorative arts under prospering localpatronage.5

By the time Rembrandt Peale was twenty,Philadelphia was home to a number of in-fluential painters. The Birches had arrivedfrom England in 1794, Adolph-Ulric Wert-muller and Gilbert Stuart came the nextyear, while the English portraitist and his-tory painter Robert Edge Pine had beensettled for a number of years. Peale's fatherCharles Willson reached a high point in hisown professional activities: in 1794 heopened his first art academy and the nextyear held his first public art exhibition, theColumbianum, followed in 1796 by theopening of his museum of "natural curiosi-ties." His major artistic achievement was hispainting of The Staircase Group in 1795 (fig.25). a visual tour-de-force that depicted hissons Raphaelle and Titian and provided anindelible and immediate family precedentwhen Rembrandt chose to paint his otherbrother Rubens. Also in 1795 father and sonshared another artistic project: the paintingof Washington's portrait. Stuart had alreadypainted his first famous likeness earlier thatspring, which possibly prodded the aspiringRembrandt to undertake his own version.With recent training in life drawing, studyof classical casts, and the completion of afew youthful portraits, he nervously readiedhimself for this first great professional chal-lenge. To proceed confidently, he urged hisfather to join him with a matching canvasand easel, which "had the effect to calm mynerves, and I enjoyed the desired counte-nance whilst in familiar conversation withmy father."6 The result was a Washingtonportrait (Historical Society of Pennsylvania)of great sympathy and immediacy, rich and

descriptive in its textures, direct and une-quivocal in its realism, setting a mark of un-derstanding and ability that forecast thenear magical sensitivity of Rubens Peale witha Geranium six years later.

In such circumstances Rembrandt pre-pared to invent and execute his new paint-ing. Historians of this period have correctlyargued that artists felt a certain ambiva-lence about pure portraiture. On the onehand, Stuart and Sully exemplified the"rage for portraits" in Federal Philadelphia;on the other hand, Peale was one who feltthe calling somehow inadequate, especiallyas he saw artists like Allston, Vanderlyn,Trumbull, and Morse attempt with mixedsuccess to meet the shifting tastes of time.7

Peale aspired to his own form of historypainting, as evident in his eventually mak-ing ten copies of his 1795 Washington por-trait and, after 1824, some seventy-nineversions of the so-called Patriae Pater or"port-hole" portrait of the president. Thesehe intended to be "the standard NationalLikeness" of Washington, certainly embodi-ments of a grand nationalist iconography.8

Arguably, Peale's best early portraits wereeither those of preeminent national figureslike Washington and Jefferson or of familymembers, foremost being his father andbrother.9 All of these captured a combina-tion of realism, grace, and psychological im-mediacy, elements that would be perfectlydistilled in the 1801 image of Rubens occu-pying the left half of that canvas.

And what of its right side? The geraniumplant is of course a still life in artistic con-vention and an exemplum of botanical sci-ence. As a subject of concentrated attention,still life was already very much establishedin the artistic lexicon of the elder Pealepainters. A still-life composition—a plate of

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57- Charles Will son Peale, Benjamin and EleanorRidgely Laming, 1788. National Gallery of Art,Washington, Gift of Morris Schapiro

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peaches with a knife and playful "peel" offruit skin—literally occupied the center ofCharles Willson's first major canvas, hislarge group portrait of The P&ale Family,c. 1770-1773 and 1808 (fig. 22). Fruit andflowers together were significant emblemsof domestic fruition and felicity in hisdouble portrait of Benjamin and EleanorRidgely Laming (fig. 57). Not only is thecouple at ease in the landscape setting butthe central details of flowers at the wife'sbosom, ripe peaches in one of her hands,

clover in the other, convey a sense of or-ganic harmony joining Man with Nature.Charles Willson also taught his youngerbrother James the rudiments of painting,and by the 17908 this second Peale was an ac-complished painter of portraits, miniatures,and still lifes. Stimulated both by his brotherand by his nephew Raphaelle, James pro-duced some of the family's most sensuousand elegant fruit arrangements, which cul-minated in his Fruit Still Life with Chinese Ex-port Basket (fig. 58).

58. James Peale, Fruit Still Life with Chinese ExportBasket, 1824. Jeanne Rowe Mathison Family inMemory of Robert Vincent Mathison

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Even more, the treatment of ripe fruitand fresh flowers by the Peales presentedthe still life as a microcosm of nature, withspecimens drawn from the common gardenand from scientific investigation. In part,Rembrandt's depiction of his brother is atribute to Rubens' early interest in botany.As a boy, the latter had studied botany aswell as mineralogy, and he had assisted hisfather in the selection and installation ofspecimens in the Peale museum. The twobrothers worked together for a number ofyears in their father's scientific excavationsand museum projects.10 Both sitter andpainter were immersed in the shared uni-verse of nature and art. Rubens' interest inexotic plants and rare seeds apparentlyarose as a counter to the frustrations he feltpursuing art with imperfect eyesight. Asa boy he was active in cultivating exoticseedlings for his father, and he had earlysuccess in growing tomatoes and the gera-nium. Thomas Jefferson in particular haddifficulty raising the latter but was capti-vated by its color and presumed medicinalproperties.11

Almost at the same time Rembrandt waspainting Rubens' portrait, Jefferson enteredthe White House, where he proudly dis-played this bright and unusual plant in theEast Room: "Around the walls were maps,globes, charts, books, &c. In the window re-cesses were stands for the flowers and plantswhich it was his delight to attend andamong his roses and geraniums was sus-pended the cage of his favorite mocking-bird."12 But in addition to the president'snoted interest in this specimen and hiswider concern with nature's cosmos, therewas a more immediate and influential tradi-tion of botanical and natural science in thePeales' native Philadelphia. Alexander

Wilson, author of American Ornithology, was afellow naturalist and a colleague of CharlesWillson Peale's. (The artist also knewCharles-Alexandre Lesueur, the Frenchartist-naturalist who came to the UnitedStates in 1816.) Wilson worked for a time inPeale's museum and had a school on landowned by William Bartram (1739-1823), oneof the foremost naturalists of the day.Bartram was born near Philadelphia, theson of John Bartram, America's first greatbotanist. The son traveled and sketched ex-tensively, having been trained as a youngman by his father, for whom he collectedand drew specimens during their journeysthrough the southeastern colonies in themid-i77os. Peale and William Bartram werecertainly familiar with the beautiful and ex-acting bird sketches by Mark Catesby, whoseNatural History of Carolina, Florida, and the Ba-hama Islands had been published in 1754.Bartram kept a journal on his travels andmade dozens of watercolors and drawingsfrom life (now in the British Museum),which were described by his sponsor, Dr.John Fothergill, as "elegant performances."Two of his early watercolors of birds werepublished in George Edwards' Gleanings fromNatural History (London, 1758), and anotherlarge group of drawings illustrated Ben-jamin Smith Barton's Elements of Botany in1803.13 Peale honored his friend by includ-ing him in his panoramic group painting,The Exhumation of the Mastodon, 1806-1808(The Peale Museum, Baltimore), and by asensitive portrait in 1808 (Independence Na-tional Historical Park Collection, Philadel-phia) showing Bartram with a sprig of whitejasmine in his lapel.

In 1798 Jefferson, then president of theAmerican Philosophical Society, appointedCharles Willson Peale to a committee

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charged with collecting information aboutthe country's natural and archeological an-tiquities. This led to the society's partialsponsorship of Peale's 1801 excavations inupstate New York. Not long after, as presi-dent of the United States, Jefferson also ini-tiated the ambitious Lewis and ClarkExpedition to explore and chart the westerninterior of the American continent. In asense these were national ventures deter-mined to claim an ancient natural historyfor the new nation. Certainly, all these scien-tific activities linked to Philadelphia and tothe Peales provided fertile ground foryoung Rembrandt's conception.

Other biographical events in the yearsjust preceding his painting of Rubens' por-trait may have made Rembrandt furtherconscious of family generation and regener-ation. His younger brother Titian died in1798 at the age of eighteen, but the next yeara new half brother was born and given thesame name, and Rembrandt's own firstchild Rosalba was born. A year later a sec-ond daughter Angelica followed. We canonly imagine that such family growth andchange would provide at least one layer ofmeaning in the tender depiction of a youthand his flowering plant. Simultaneously thefamily was joined in the adventure of na-ture's history at work: in the summer of 1801Rembrandt accompanied his father up theHudson River to the site of the mastodonexcavations, sketching the landscape enroute. The elder Peale later recalled that"my son and Doctor Woodhouse was aston-ished with the sublimity of the Sciene, wewere called to Dinner, and although thehunger pressed yet the attraction of theView of the mountains were more forcible.The storm increased, it rained very hard,and thundered—Rembrandt exclaimed the

scene was awfully grand he wished to beable [to] paint the affect and staid as long aswas prudent."14

In fact, Rembrandt had painted at leasttwo strong portraits in 1797 of sitters posedagainst a landscape background, his Balti-more cousin Anne Odle Marbury and WilliamRaborg. A little over a decade later he was in-spired by Jefferson's Notes on Virginia topaint a view of Harper's Ferry.15 Thus, na-ture in full or in detail was very much in hismind as he turned to the geranium portrait.Of course, there were existing artistic con-ventions in both European and early Ameri-can painting for sitters posed with ancillarystill-life details or placed beside a landscapeview. John Singleton Copley's mature Amer-ican portraits most readily come to mind.Aside from those depicting flowered pat-terns on dresses, curtains, and rugs, or oth-ers of women with flowers in their hair orpinned to their bosom, there are more thana dozen well-known female portraitspainted by Copley during the 17608 andearly 17708 containing prominent still-life el-ements. Sitters variously hold bouquets orbaskets of mixed flowers, branches of cher-ries or lilies, bunches of grapes, fruit in thefolds of their dresses, flowers picked from anearby bush, a vase of roses, or a glass with amixed spray.16 Perhaps most relevant to thePeale legacy are examples like Mrs. EzekielGoldthwait, 1770-1771 (Museum of Fine Arts,Boston), who reaches out to rest her handon a bowl of ripe peaches and apples; andMrs. Moses Gill, c. 1773 (Rhode Island Schoolof Design Museum, Providence), who standsbeside a pot of tall lilies.17

In addition, there is the curious but im-probable precedent of Copley's Englishportrait of Mrs. Clark Gay ton, 1779 (DetroitInstitute of Art), which must be the first

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American depiction of a sitter posing be-fore a potted geranium. As the provenanceindicates that the canvas descended in thefamily of the original English owner and didnot come to the United States until a sale inthe early twentieth century,18 it is doubtfulthat Peale knew this image firsthand. Thesubject confirms the interest in this uncom-mon plant in England as well as Americaduring the last quarter of the eighteenthcentury. A French artist, Henri-Horace Ro-land de la Porte, also painted a striking stilllife of a flowering plant in a terra-cotta pot,Unejusticia (The National Swedish Art Mu-seums), about the same time, again suggest-ing a similar vision of increasing scientificrealism in this age of Enlightenment.

When we look again at Rubens Peale witha Geranium (fig. 56), it is clear that RembrandtPeale has transcended Copley's conventionsin at least two ways: in the utter directnessand informality of pose and in the fluid,textured rendering of details. This freshnessof presentation in both conception andtechnique was the perfect reflection of ayouthful artist with a bold vision. At thesame time, a new sense of immediacy andunpretentiousness was beginning to appearin American painting after the Revolution,as artists sought to adapt European styles tothe young republic's democratic character,its celebration of the individual and thelandscape. Indicative of this emerging sensi-bility is Ralph Earl's full-length portrait ofDaniel Boardman, painted in 1789 (fig. 59).Now the figure not only poses comfortablybefore an expansive New England pano-rama, he literally stands to one side with thelandscape fully occupying its own half ofthe portrait. Although the stance and theview derive from eighteenth-century En-glish compositions, the relaxed air of the

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subject and the conscious prominence ofAmerican nature establish the very formulafor the iconography and design of Peale'sportrait just over a decade later. Peale was togo one slight but decisive step further: hisemblem of nature not only occupies anequal half of his canvas, the potted gera-nium actually stands forward of the figurein a narrow plane just in front of Rubens'torso. Yet the two parts of the portrait arenaturally intertwined as some of the upperleaves and stems start to reach across Ru-bens' head, while his hands and eyeglassesrest comfortably near or on the clay pot.

This casual pose and gesture of handssensitively linked to the sitter's work againcall to mind some of Copley's more observ-ant and clever depictions. For example, PaulRevere, 1768-1770 (Museum of Fine Arts, Bos-ton), visually balances the rounded form ofthe silversmith's head with that of the tea-pot below; moreover, each hand echoes theother, as one serves as prop under Revere'schin while the other cradles the silver pot.19

The artist links intelligence with action bysuch subtle contrasts, at once describingand interpreting his subject's professionalcreativity. Rubens Peale, by holding his spec-tacles in one hand and the rim of the pot inthe other, connects for us his acts of seeingand doing.

A more immediate influence probablyexisted in the work of Gilbert Stuart, whohad just settled in Philadelphia in the for-mative years of Rembrandt Peale's life. Atthe height of his powers, Stuart had com-pleted one of his masterworks in Mrs. Rich-ard Yates (fig. 60) only a year before his ar-rival in 1795. Here was a lightness of touchand texture, musical harmonies of tone, anda delicacy of line and accent that would in-form his best portraits of Washington and

60. Gilbert Stuart, Mrs. Richard Yates, 1793-1794. National Gallery of Art, Washington,Andrew W. Mellon Collection

59. Ralph Earl, Daniel Boardman, 1789. National Gallery of Art, Washington,Gift of Mrs. W. Murray Crane (opposite page)

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other individuals at this time. What particu-larly enlivens the three-quarter pose, alongwith the glance that we feel has just momen-tarily turned from concentration on work,are Mrs. Yates' two hands caught lifted inthe action of sewing. Stuart's sense of themomentary and the personal helps to makehis sitter more accessible, an attitude thatcarries over to the Peale work. But Stuart'sinfluence was also to be felt in transformingRembrandt's early delicate and linear styleinto a more painterly and fluid one.20 Theresult was an image of his younger brotherthat at once suggests shyness, modesty, andpride: presenting his remarkable success incultivating his plant and ready to take hisfather's mastodon bones on tour to Europe.The painting thus memorializes both ac-complishment and expectation.

Closer inspection of some of its detailssuggests an even more idiosyncratic touch:the wilting leaves of the plant and the pres-ence of two pairs of spectacles, for example(figs. 61-63). ^n fact> each gives further in-sight into Rubens Peale's life and work. Thelong-standing myth that Rubens' geraniumwas the first imported to America, a claimthat variously appears in some early listingsof the pictures, goes back to his daughterMary Jane Peale's will in 1883, which re-ferred to "The Portrait of Father with the Ge-ranium, the first brought to this country,and painted on account of the plant whichshows that it was in the studio being a littlewithered."21 Several subsequent exhibitioncatalogues repeated this assumption, one in1923 quoting an old typed label on the re-verse of the canvas to the effect that this was"said to have been the first specimenbrought to America."22 But recent historiansnow believe that geranium seeds were im-ported and cultivated prior to Rubens' ef-fort in 1801. By this time there was a crazefor the plant in England and Europe. Jeffer-son's example was introduced from SouthAfrica, and one index of the plant's popu-larity in America was the publication in1806 of the American Gardener's Calendar withinstructions for raising geraniumseedlings.23

Doubtless Rubens' scarlet flower wasamong the first to blossom from seed, andby all accounts he cared passionately andworried much about his specimens. The ge-ranium that Rembrandt depicted here hasbut a couple of new blooms, and the wiltingleaves hint of the struggle to bring the plantto flower (fig. 62). When the brothers de-parted for England the year after the paint-ing's completion, Rubens feared that no onewould care properly for his beloved rari-

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ties.24 Surely one of the most eloquent de-tails recorded by Rembrandt is that of hisbrother's right hand reaching across to reston the lip of the geranium pot. It is a dualgesture, as Rubens both checks the moisturein the soil and claims possession of his crea-tion. In contrast to the bright new flowersabove, the middle leaves sag, a lower onehas started to decay, and a dead one hasfallen off at the lower right. This intimatecycle both illustrates and symbolizes na-ture's process of regeneration. It is also aprocess with human involvement, for as Ru-bens' two fingers lightly touch the soil (fig.63), there is above the echoing gesture ofthe two bare stems arching over to the topof his head (fig. 61). Although contained inthe pot, the growing plant in its dirt repre-sents a piece of the larger landscape and awider natural world.

If Rubens' dedication to his project boreflower, it was as a result of his overcominghandicaps of health and particularly of eye-sight, which had inhibited his ability to pur-sue the family profession of painting. In

61. Detail of fig. 56 (opposite page)

62. Detail of fig. 56 (above)

63. Detail of fig. 56 (below)

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older age he wrote about his childhoodfrailties in the third person, with occasionalhyperbole:

It is said he was so small when 3 or 4 days old, thathe was put into a silver mug £ the lid shut downover him. . . . I was very delicate in health and ourfamily physician Dr. Hutchins required that Ishould be kept out of the sun as much as possible.. . . I made little progress at school for my sightwas so imperfect. . . . One day . . . I went into thegarden and took the watering pot and watered myflowers which I was forbidden to do, and afterthat time I gradually increased in strength andhealth.25

Poor eyesight also plagued his brother Rem-brandt, who wrote about their respective af-flictions in his own "Reminiscences" in

Perhaps there is no recollection ofT the events ofmy life of greater value, than my experience in re-gard to the preservation of sight, which can beduly appreciated by no class of human beings,more than by artists. That I, in my 79th year, amnow able to paint all day and read half the night,is owing to the care I have taken of my eyes, afterhaving greatly injured them. . . .

I was forty years of age, before I began the use ofspectacles. Finding that I was obliged to hold thenewspaper close to the lamp, I was induced to getglasses of forty inches focus. I painted with them,and in a l i t t le time by judiciously, but not con-stantly, wearing them, could see with them atall distances. After a few years, it was necessaryto employ a shorter focus — thirty-six inches,for reading at night, and occasionally in theday. Another lapse of time demanded a thirdpair of glasses — twenty-four inches. All these Icarried in my pocket, and never minded thetrouble of changing them, according to varyingcircumstances.26

No wonder two pairs of glasses shouldappear as critical details (figs. 61 and 63) inthe portrait of his brother, who evidentlyhad even greater trouble seeing. By Rem-brandt's account, Rubens:

was so near-sighted, that I have seen him drawing. . . looking sometimes with his left eye, and thenturning to look with his right eye, the end of hisnose was blackened with his greasy charcoal. Hewas slow in his progress at school. . . . At ten yearsof age he only knew two letters, o and z, never hav-ing distinctly seen any others. . . . No concaveglasses afforded him relief; but at Mr. M'Allister's,the optician, my father being in consultation onhis case, there lay on the counter several pairs ofspectacles.. . . Taking up one of these and puttingit on, he exclaimed in wild ecstasy, that he couldsee across the street. . . . In London in 1802, he waspresent at a lecture on optics, by ProfessorWalker, who declared he had never known an-other instance of a short-sighted person requiringstrong magnifying glasses.27

In fact, what Rembrandt described in1856 as "short-sighted" vision is what weknow today as classic farsightedness, inwhich images come into focus behind theretina of the eye, making distant objectsmuch easier to see than those close up. Thetrue nature of this condition of hyperopiawas not fully elucidated until several yearslater.28 Before that time other early nine-teenth-century accounts confirm Rubens'poor eyesight and the efforts to correct it. In1802 John Isaac Hawkins, a scientific associ-ate of Charles Willson Peale's, gave the Pealemuseum his physiognotrace, a device fortracing small silhouette profiles (once againmarrying artistic and scientific functions). Itwas then that he learned about the artist'sson, whom he later recalled:

I knew twenty-five years ago a very extraordinaryexception to the use of concave glasses for nearsighted eyes, in a young man in Philadelphia; hetried concaves without any benefit, but accidentlytaking up a pair of strong magnifiers, he foundthat he could see well through them, and contin-ued the use of strong magnifiers with great ad-vantage.

I now allude to Mr. Rubens Peale... ,29

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1856:

Yet another family reminiscence tells ofRubens as a boy coming upon a "burningglass" in the upper rooms of his father's mu-seum, headquartered in Philosophical Hall.Accidently discovering its capacity for im-proving his sight, he rushed to tell his fatherbut, disoriented, tripped on the stairs andfell into the older man's arms. This incidentin 1796 led Charles Willson to order correc-tive lenses for his son. Five years later Ru-bens would pose comfortably in them forthis portrait, though at first he evidently suf-fered the taunts of school friends and sim-ply remarked that "since I find them useful,I do not regard anything they may say aboutmy use of spectacles."30

Rembrandt's reference to their father'sconsultation with John McAllister aboutmaking spectacles brings up an active corre-spondence between these men and betweenMcAllister and Thomas Jefferson as well. Ina letter of 1806 the optician wrote to thepresident regarding the details of a pair ofspectacles he had ordered; in passing henoted, "I have done a number of spects withnear & distance focus in each eye. I fittedtwo pair lately for Mssr. Jas. and CharlesPeale for painting miniatures that answerextremely well." He went on to say that care-ful calculations could make possible limit-ing the number of glasses to various seeingdistances: "By knowing this I may suit yourneeds with 2 or 3 pairs of glasses than other-wise by a great many."31 Used sequentially oreven in combination, such pairs providedthe benefits of today's bifocals and trifocals.

Bifocals were known originally as aninvention of Benjamin Franklin sometimebefore 1784. In France at the time, he isbelieved to have corresponded with Jeffer-son on the subject. During the 17908 Wil-liam Richardson, a Philadelphia hardware

merchant, was already supplying importedspectacles to Washington and Jefferson. In1799 he sold the business to McAllister, whocontinued to do business with Jefferson.McAllister's first shipment of new glassesreached Philadelphia in early 1800, and al-most certainly the ones shown with RubensPeale in his portrait the next year are fromthat group.32

What now requires some examination ishow the two pairs of glasses in the paintingrelate to one another. An absolute answer isnot easy, because the sitter's daughter, MaryJane Peale, in her last will and testament un-ambiguously stated that the portrait "was atfirst painted without the spectacles and af-terwards put on."33 Speculating further onthis record, a recent biographer has arguedthat "he was originally painted holding hisspectacles but it was later decided that hewould look more like himself with them on.When the second pair was added, the firstwas never deleted."34 Here it may be arguedthat a familial recollection late in life of anevent that occurred over three-quarter's of acentury before was devoted but faulty.

First of all, there is no physical or con-ceptual evidence to support such an altera-tion. Conservation study of the surface andx-ray examination of the passage give nohint of measurable pentimenti, localchanges in paint thickness, or any rework-ing of the key area. Nor does a later addi-tion of the upper eyeglasses make any senseimaginatively. To the contrary, these spec-tacles seem so integral and central to the en-tire effect and meaning of the painting thatthey must have been part of the intentionand composition from the start. For an indi-vidual so dependent on spectacles for thevery act of his scientific vision, and here soabsorbed in distant thought, yet immedi-

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ately alert, it is inconceivable that Rubens'portrait could show him without his wear-ing glasses. Removed, his eyes would read asuninteresting shadowy recesses, and thecheeks below as soft, bland surfaces. Theface is too critical to the design and wouldnot have compelling visual character other-wise. As a positive argument, we can onlymarvel at the harmony of ovals these glassesmake, echoing the eyes just above and theirbalanced shadows below, with the largeroval curves of the head itself, the white shirtcollar, and even the foreshortened rim ofthe clay pot. In a final conceit that couldhardly have been an afterthought, theglasses delicately curve across the eyes be-hind, with the highlights on the rims coin-ciding exactly with the pinpoint reflectionsin the pupils. With the eye surfaces so di-vided they pun on the very idea of bifocalvision.

Assuming both pairs of glasses were in-deed intentional, let us then considerwhether these were meant to be identical orinterchangeable. As McAllister's correspon-dence with Jefferson and Charles WillsonPeale indicates, it was commonplace for theoptician to prescribe several lenses of differ-ent powers for varying levels of focus. Ru-bens Peale unquestionably needed somemagnification for his scientific scrutiny ofspecimens at hand and another type of lensfor intermediate and distant vision. Withhis plant close by and the world before him,two pairs of glasses would have been natu-ral. This does not necessarily argue that thespectacles in his hand were used on occa-sion to replace those he is wearing. Somecareful observers have noticed the very finehorizontal line intersecting the right-handlens closest to Rubens' thumb and fore-finger (fig. 63). This has led to the suggestion

that this pair might be an actual example oftrue bifocal glasses. In fact, this is mostprobably another of the artist's visual puns,for the left lens does not bear a comparabledivision line, and what we are seeing is theframe support (that extends from the spec-tacles back over the ear) folded up behindthe lens.35

One other aspect of this lower pair ofglasses is intriguing: the ovals are decidedlylarger and the bridge wider than in the setRubens is wearing. The two frames areclearly different, most obviously in thebridge configuration, again suggesting thatRembrandt did not begin by painting hisbrother with a generic pair and then, dissat-isfied, decide to place the same pair on hisface. Recent scientific thinking has offeredthe most logical explanation: "Perhaps thereason for the wider bridge was so that thespectacles could be worn further down thenose, for reading or close work purposes,while at the same time wearing the 'dis-tance' glasses (thus providing a 'two-focal'system)."36 Optometry aside, this intricateimagery serves to reinforce on a deeperlevel the links between hands and eyes, be-tween observation and intelligence. Thatwe have concentrated so much attentionon this critical element of the portrait pro-foundly reinforces the thesis that the workis about such abstractions as seeing and vi-sion, perception and art itself.

Up to this point Jefferson's name hasbeen invoked often enough to indicate hispervasive importance as an intellectualpresence at times directly linked to thePeales' world, and as a shaper of the part ofAmerican culture pictured in this one fo-cused image. He grew geraniums both at theWhite House in Washington and at Monti-cello, and he cared about their nourishment

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by the human hand, seeing an affinity be-tween the organic life of man and nature:"If plants have sensibility, as the analogy oftheir organization with ours seems to indi-cate. . . ,"37 At Monticello his greenhouse waslocated on the south piazza, where his gera-niums and other most delicate specimensmight receive the best daylight and warmth.Significantly, this room was also adjacent tohis cabinet and library, integrating his en-tire world of learning, much as man andplant stand in balance next to one anotherin Peale's painting.

Jefferson had already made, in the wordsof one historian, "natural history the queenof sciences," when he wrote his one compre-hensive book, Notes on the State of Virginia, in1785/*8 Itself an original creation in Ameri-can literature at this time, it sought to sum-marize the universe of facts concerningJefferson's native soil in a matter-of-fact lan-guage. His chapters were in effect inquiriesinto Virginia's boundaries, rivers, moun-tains, birds, animals, and minerals. A sec-tion of "Query VI" was devoted to theprincipal vegetables, which Jefferson logi-cally subdivided in several ways. He drewdistinctions among trees, plants, and fruits,between imported versus native plants, andbetween gardens versus orchards. Typicallyhe pursued accuracy over pedantry:

A complete catalogue of trees, plants, fruits, &c.is probably not desired. I will sketch out thosewhich will principally attract notice, as beingi. Medicinal, 2. Esculent, 3. Ornamental, or 4. Use-ful for fabrication; adding the Linnaean to thepopular names, as the latter might not preciselyconvey precise information to a foreigner. I shallconfine myself too to native plants.39

In this context the geranium both as imageand as specimen was but one notable itemin the varied inventory of meats, vegetables,

fruits, flowers, plants, and berries depictedin the Peale family's still-life paintings.

Jefferson further contributed to anAmerican vision of newness identified withnature and geography in many of his othergreat pronouncements, for example: "TheCreator has made the earth for the living,not the dead," an assertion of the sover-eignty of the present and the future.40 Mostprominently, he announced the politicalequivalents in the Declaration of Indepen-dence: "It is the right of the people . . . to in-stitute new government"; and ten years laterin the Bill for Religious Freedom, 1786, hedrafted for Virginia, the country's first state-ments of separation between church andstate and freedom of thought.41 Throughoutthis period, of course, he was designing andbuilding in phases his house at Monticello,a fresh and creative statement in Americanarchitecture, full of practicality, ingenuity,idealism, and humanity. But Jefferson'ssense of America as a revolutionary experi-ment had an even closer chronological paral-lel to Peale's portrait in his first inauguraladdress as president, 4 March 1801. The elec-tion the year before was not only the first ofthe new century, it was the first between twoorganized political parties after the na-tional union under George Washington. Inthe following year as young Rubens was pos-ing for his brother, Jefferson stood to pro-claim "a rising nation, spread over a wideand fruitful land. . . . "42 What he said thenled two years later to the Louisiana Pur-chase and, immediately after, to the Lewisand Clark Expedition into the northwestwilderness, in which America's grandestideas of continent and destiny were chargedinto action. Such imagery and attitudeswould dominate American life for morethan the next quarter century, echoing pas-

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sionately in the expressions of ThomasCole, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and DanielWebster, who could assert in 1825, "Ameri-can glory begins at the dawn."43

Jefferson's powerful documents stimu-lated an entire generation to envision theinterchangeable ideas of freedom and new-ness. Following the signing of the Constitu-tion in Philadelphia on 17 September 1787,Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, andJohn Jay publicly deliberated in a sequenceof eighty-five lengthy essays, known as TheFederalist Papers, the meaning and imple-mentation of the republic's originating doc-uments. Between October 1787 and May 1788they discussed the separation and inter-dependence of powers, the balancing offorces within the structure of government,and above all the desire for unity and stabil-ity in order "to form a more perfect Union."Repeatedly the authors turned to a phrase-ology of invention and originality, as Ham-ilton in no. i: "You are called upon todeliberate on a new Constitution"; or no. 14:"the form of government recommended foryour adoption is a novelty in the politicalworld." In the same paper Hamilton wenton to conclude: "They accomplished a revo-lution which has no parallel in the annals ofhuman society. They reared the fabrics ofgovernments which have no model on theface of the globe. They formed the design ofa great Confederacy.... "44 Subsequently,Madison paid a deserved tribute to Jeffer-son and his role: "The plan, like everythingfrom the same pen, marks a turn of think-ing, original, comprehensive, andaccurate."45

In addition to these political figures, twoother intellects of the period are worth cit-ing for their concurrent contributions tothis new American age: Benjamin Franklin

and Noah Webster. The former held a spe-cial place of reverence in Philadelphia as apersonification of the Enlightenment, whoharmonized (not least because of his inge-nious bifocals) farsightedness and clear-sightedness. He exemplified the self-madeindividual, prudent yet inventive, thrifty yetrevolutionary, plain yet forceful. Althoughhe died in 1790, a decade before RembrandtPeale undertook his portrait, Franklin's lifeand achievements immediately begot a pow-erful mythology. Actually, his life became atwo-fold accomplishment, the one he livedand the one he recorded. It is the latter, TheAutobiography of Benjamin Franklin, first pub-lished in part in 1791 and 1793 and reprintednearly complete in 1818, that made a contri-bution to American culture and historyas original as Jefferson's Notes, Hamilton'sFederalist Papers, or Rembrandt Peale's por-trait of Rubens Peale with a Geranium.

Although autobiography as a form ofliterature already existed in Europe andelsewhere, what historians have seen inFranklin's work as being uniquely Americanand fresh is its unpretentiousness. He usedcolloquial expressions, clear images, and aninformal manner, which speaks to us with adirectness comparable to Peale's painting.Like Jefferson, he believed in the glory ofthe living, active present. As a friend ofFranklin's wrote in 1783, he was "connectedwith the detail of the manners and situationof a rising people."46 While Jefferson andPeale might turn to the example of naturefor their metaphors of growth and promise,all shared an outlook in common. WoodrowWilson wrote of Franklin in an introductionto a 1901 edition of the Autobiography: "Sucha career bespeaks a country in which allthings are making and to be made.... [theautobiography] is letters in business garb,

WILMERDING

literature with its apron on ... setting freethe processes of growth."47

For all of Franklin's stature in Philadel-phia as a diplomat, inventor, and writer, wemay readily come back to the subject of Ru-bens Peale with a Geranium, for Franklin alsoexemplified that city's reputation as Ameri-ca's horticultural capital. Along with thePeales, Wilson, and the Bartrams, Franklinwas equally honored as a natural scientist.In fact, Philadelphia could claim several in-dividuals who as professional or amateurnaturalists identified or cultivated rare newspecies of flowering plants, among them theFranklinia, a shrub with showy whiteflowers; the wisteria bush named after theanatomist Caspar Wistar; and the poinsettiaplant discovered in Mexico by America'sfirst ambassador to that country, Joel R.Poinsett.48 Proudly the young Rubens Pealecould take his place in this lineage, for hehad himself been the first to introduce thetomato plant to his native city and was nowready to take credit for his early successin growing his scarlet geranium to fullmaturity.

In the broadest sense, what we have beentalking about thus far are the definitionsand rhetoric of American character andwill. Fittingly enough, the young republicwas able to summon up not just a languageof independence and new governance,along with original literary and pictorialforms of self-expression, but also a new lan-guage itself. Taking on this task at the verysame time was the New Englander NoahWebster (1758-1843), who was descendedfrom colonial governors of Connecticut andMassachusetts. After graduating from Yalein 1778, he tutored in law with OliverEllsworth and was admitted to practice inConnecticut a few years later. The law had

stimulated him to think about the preci-sion of meanings and definitions, the logicand process of explication. He soon beganteaching and wrote his first primer on spell-ing. In 1783 he published A Grammatical Insti-tute of the English Language, Comprising anEasy, Concise, and Systematic Method of Educa-tion, Designed for the Use of English Schools inAmerica. This appeared in repeated latereditions and was followed in 1806 by AnAmerican Dictionary of the English Language,whose stated purpose was "organizing andclarifying the language."49 Like other as-pects of American culture, design, and cus-toms, these titles imply the nation's gesturesin acknowledging its inheritance while de-claring its separation. Although Americansstill speak English, Webster began theprocess of claiming new spellings, pronun-ciations, meanings, and even new words. Hewas at one with his age in wanting to nur-ture young seedlings in an American soil.

That optimistic vision in large part heldthe national imagination through the coun-try's first century, even with the interruptingcrisis of civil strife and self-questioning inthe i86os. By the centennial of 1876 a colo-nial revival in architectural and designstyles was underway, and the cult of Ameri-can youth was never more possessing, as citi-zens celebrated their origins and the courseof destiny. Mark Twain's novels and WinslowHomer's paintings conspicuously placedyouth in the center of the American land-scape. In particular, the latter's Breezing Up,A Fair Wind, 1876 (National Gallery of Art),set a group of boys beside an old man inthe catboat's cockpit, a reminder of his-tory's passage, but also a dream in maturityof renewable freshness.

Another picture completed that sameyear in Peale's native Philadelphia was Baby

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64. Thomas Eakins, Baby at Play, 1876. NationalGallery of Art, Washington, John Hay WhitneyCollection

at Play by Thomas Eakins (fig. 64). SincePeale's day, that city had remained a centerof American scientific studies. Mindful ofthe upcoming centennial, Eakins beganwork on his monumental composition ofThe Gross Clinic, 1875 (The Jefferson MedicalCollege of Thomas Jefferson University,Philadelphia), a tribute to modern Philadel-

phia medicine and the foremost surgeon ofthe day, Dr. Samuel Gross. At the same timeEakins also conceived a pictorial homage toPhiladelphia's first important sculptor, Wil-liam Rush Carving His Allegorical Figure of theSchuylkill River, 1876-1877 (Philadelphia Mu-seum of Art). Baby at Play was a portrait ofEakins' niece Ella, the first child of his sister,

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at play in the family's back courtyard. Likethe dramatic clinic picture of the precedingyear, this focused on a central figure en-gaged in connecting the concentration ofmind with the action of the hand. But in-stead of depicting the fulfillment of ex-perience, this showed the beginnings oflearning.50 Aside from its personal mean-ings for Eakins, could it also have been acompanion salute to another early Phila-delphia artist? Among its most noteworthydetails is a large potted plant on the groundto the right. Although vague and withoutflowers, its bare stems and large leavescould well characterize a geranium. Havingacknowledged the history of local medicineand sculpture, Eakins could have equally in-tended here a private recognition of hiscity's first family of painters and explicitlyRubens Peale's geranium plant, for Eakinssimilarly cared about the creative role of theartist and about the joining of art and sci-ence. Whether tribute or tradition, it cer-tainly recalls Rembrandt Peale's earliermeditation on human intellect and per-severence. P.embrandt's fraternal portrait ofRubens Pzale with a Geranium is testimony asmuch to their father's "Great School of Na-ture" as to Jefferson's "rising nation, spreadover a wide and fruitful land."

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Notes1. For a discussion of Raphaelle Peale's still-life paint-ing as an exemplum of American ideas and culture inthe Federal period, see my "The American Object:Still-Life Paintings," in An American Perspective: Nine-teenth-Century Art from the Collection of Jo Ann & JulianGanz, Jr. [exh. cat., National Gallery of Art] (Washing-ton, B.C., 1981), 85-111; and "Important InformationInside: The Idea of Still-Life Painting in Nineteenth-Century America," in Important Information Inside: TheArt of John R Peto and the Idea of Still-Life Painting inNineteenth-Century America [exh. cat., National Galleryof Art] (Washington, D.C., 1983), 36-55.2. In 1986 one historian took note that "this portraitof Rubens Peale with a Geranium, 1801, has recently beenacquired at auction by the National Gallery of Art inWashington, D.C., from the collection of Mrs. NormanWoolworth. The fact that it brought the record pricefor an American painting signals the growing interestin Rembrandt Peale's too long neglected art." CarolEaton Hevner, "Rembrandt Peale's Life in Art," ThePennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography no, no. i(January 1986): 3. Rather, it may be argued, that whilefresh attention to Peale is part of a larger reexamina-tion of historical American art, the record price re-flected more the long recognized importance of thispicture alone and the belief that it, quite apart fromPeale's career, somehow held the power of a profoundnational icon.3. Biographical information from Carol Faton Hev-ner and Lillian B. Miller, Rembrandt Peale, 1778-1860,A Life in the Arts [exh. cat., The Historical Society ofPennsylvania] (Philadelphia, 1985).4. For a summary of the artistic state of Philadelphiaat this time, see Beatrice B. Garvan, Federal Philadel-phia, 1785-1825, The Athens of the Western World [exh.cat., Philadelphia Museum of Art] (Philadelphia,1987)-5. See Garvan 1987, 38-41.6. Quoted in Hevner and Miller 1985, 32.7. See Hevner and Miller 1985, 18-20.8. Hevner and Miller 1985, 66-67.9. See, for example, Thomas Jefferson, 1805 (New-YorkHistorical Society); Charles Willson Peale, 1812 (Histori-cal Society of Pennsylvania); and Rubens Peale, 1834(Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford). Hevner and Miller1985, 22, 33, 55, 77.10. Hevner and Miller 1985, 76.

n. See the entry on this painting in The Eye of ThomasJefferson [exh. cat., National Gallery of Art] (Washing-ton, B.C., 1976), 346, no. 600.12. Margaret Bayard Smith, First Forty Years of Washing-ton Society, quoted in Eye of Jefferson, 346.13. Biographical information from George C. Groceand B avid H. Wallace, The New-York Historical Society'sDictionary of Artists in America, 1564-1860 (New Haven,1957), 34-35; and Edgar P. Richardson, et al., CharlesWillson Peale and his World (New York, 1982), 110-111,124-126,193.14. Quoted in Hevner and Miller 1985, 92.15. See Hevner and Miller 1985, 37-39, 92.16. See Jules Bavid Prown,John Singleton Copley, 2 vols.(Cambridge, Mass., 1966), i: nos. 96,119,122,128, 161,165,170,186,188, 256, 258, 259, 310, 327.17. Prown 1966, i: nos. 273 and 327.18. See Prown 1966, 2: no. 384.19. See Prown 1966,1:74-75, for a discussion of thispainting.20. See Hevner and Miller 1985, 21-22.21. Maryjane Peale's last will and testament, Peale-Sellers Papers, American Philosophical Society, Phila-delphia.22. Exhibition of Portraits by Charles Willson Peale andJames Peale and Rembrandt Peale [exh. cat., The Pennsyl-vania Academy of the Fine Arts] (Philadephia, 1923),75. See also, Pennsylvania Painters [exh. cat., The Penn-sylvania State University] (Pittsburgh, 1955), no. n;American Art from American Collections [exh. cat., TheMetropolitan Museum of Art] (New York, 1963), 76;and Stuart B. Feld, "Loan Collection," The Metropoli-tan Museum of Art Bulletin (April 1965), 283.23. See Carol Eaton Hevner, "Rubens Peale with a gera-nium by Rembrandt Peale," Art at Auction: The Year atSotheby's, 1985-86 (New York, 1986), 114-117; Carol EatonHevner, "Rembrandt Peale's portraits of his brotherRubens," The Magazine Antiques 130, no. 5 (November1986): 1,010-1,013; and Edwin M. Betts, et al., Thomas Jef-ferson's Flower Garden at Monticello, rev. ed. (Charlottes-ville, Va., 1986), 72-73.24. For his efforts to improve farming methods aswell as his horticultural expertise, Rubens was electeda member of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Phil-adelphia in 1813.25. "Memorandum of Rubens Peale," Peale-Sellers Pa-pers, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia,

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1-4; quoted in Hevner, "Rembrandt Peale's portraits,"1,011.26. Rembrandt Peale, "Reminiscences," The Crayon(3 June 1856), 163-164.27. Rembrandt Peale 1856,164-165.28. Letter from Charles E. Letocha, M.D. (24 February1986), in the curatorial records, National Gallery ofArt, Washington.29. John R. Levene, Clinical Refraction and Visual Sci-ence (London, 1977), 171.30. Charles Coleman Sellers, quoted in Levene 1977,171-172.31. John McAllister to Thomas Jefferson, Philadel-phia, 14 November 1806, in the Library of Congress;transcript courtesy of Charles E. Letocha, M.D., in cu-ratorial records, National Gallery of Art.32. Information from Charles E. Letocha, M.D., in let-ters to the National Gallery, 4 February 1986, 24 Feb-ruary 1986, and 7 March 1986; in curatorial records,National Gallery of Art.33. Mary Jane Peale, last will, 1883.34. Hevner, "Rubens Peale" 116.35. See Levene 1977,172.36. Levene 1977,172.37. Quoted in Belts 1986, 72-73. See also Peter Hatch,The Gardens of Monticello (Charlottesville, Va., n.d.), n.38. R.W.B. Lewis, The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy,and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago, 1955), 15.39. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia,1785, in The Portable Thomas Jefferson, ed. Merrill D.Peterson (New York, 1975), 68.40. Quoted in Lewis 1955,15.41. See The Portable Thomas Jefferson, xx, 235.42. Quoted in The Portable Thomas Jefferson, 290; seealso xxx-xxxii.43. Quoted in Lewis 1955, 5.44. Alexander Hamilton, et al., The Federalist Papers,New American Library ed. (New York, 1961), 33,104.45. Federalist Papers, 313.46. Benjamin Vaughn to Franklin, 31 January 1783,quoted in the introduction to The Autobiography of Ben-jamin Franklin, ed. Leonard W. Labaree, et al. (New Ha-ven, 1964), 6.47. Woodrow Wilson, introduction to The Autobiogra-phy of Benjamin Franklin (New York, 1901), vi-x.48. Acknowledgment for this information toD. Dodge Thompson, National Gallery of Art.

49. See Alice DeLana and Cynthia Reik, eds., On Com-mon Ground: A Selection of Hartford Writers (Hartford,Conn., 1975), 23.50. See Jules David Prown, "Thomas Eakins' Baby atPlay" in vol. 18, Studies in the History of Art, NationalGallery of Art (Washington, D.C., 1985), 121-127. The ul-timate footnote is that its number coincidentally cor-responds to the author's age, a final focus on what ispast and what is possible.

65. Detail of fig. 56

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Raphaelle Peale: Texts and DocumentsCOMPILED BY NICOLAI CIKOVSKY, JR.

oST OF WHAT WE KNOW OF RAPHAELLE

Peale's life is the view of it, incomplete andfiltered as it may be, provided by family doc-uments, chiefly letters of his father, CharlesWillson Peale. They are a revealing anddeeply affecting record of physical andmental suffering; of irresponsibility, dissolu-tion, and lack of ambition; of artistic disap-pointment and emotional despondency; ofdomestic disarray. They also reveal incessantparental scrutiny and moralizing advice, aswell as touching familial care and genuineconcern. There were moments of promise,diligence (with perseverance, one of his fa-ther's favorite virtues), and high criticalpraise, but Raphaelle Peale's life was on thewhole a tragically troubled one. It wasbravely endured, however, and redeemed byan artistic achievement that none of thosewho commented on it, often condescend-ingly, could equal.

This selection strives not for complete-ness—a number of texts and documentshave been omitted, and most have beenedited down—but for as continuous a rec-ord of Raphaelle Peale's life as it is possibleto reconstruct from its fragmentary literaryremains.

All but one of the original documentsquoted here are the property of the Ameri-

can Philosophical Society Library, Philadel-phia. The exception is document 24, ownedby the Archives of American Art, Smithson-ian Institution. These institutions, withthe Smithsonian's Peale Family Papers (aproject of the National Portrait Gallery) andthe publisher, Yale University Press, havegenerously consented to the publication ofthe documents herein. References to pub-lished documents are given in notesfollowing.

i. Charles Willson Peale, Autobiography

. . . Peggy Durgan . . . not only attended to allthe domestic concerns but also was a nurseto all of his children.* She petted and, assome would say, spoiled them. We will citeone instance of her affection, but we willnot say that it was a very judicious measure.Raphaelle, the eldest boy, in a whim wouldnot eat bakers bread. The father, dislikingsuch whims in his children, ordered all thebread used in the family to be had at abakers in the neighborhood, in the idea thatif the boy could not get home made bread,

* Peggy Durgan is the person standing at the right ofThe Peale Family (fig. 22).

66. Raphaelle Peale, Still Life: Wine, Cakes, and Nuts,1819. The Henry E. Huntington Library and ArtGallery (opposite page)

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that in the end he would eat bakers bread.But it was found out that Peggy Durgan con-stantly supplied the pettish boy with cakeswhich she secretly baked, saying she couldnot let the dear little fellow want bread.

2. Charles Willson Peale to Rembrandtand Rubens Peale, Philadelphia,11 September 1803

He [Raphaelle] is much improved in manyrespects, and I am happy in the prospect ofhis making a good use of his talents he isnot defficient in brotherly love, and fromyour hints of his laziness, I expect he willnot be so neglegent of writing to you afterhe becomes settled again.

3. Charles Willson Peale to Raphaelle Peale,Philadelphia, 10 May 1806

Dear Raphaelle, your letter [presumablyfrom Georgia] of the 25 & 26 received today,it is a joyful intelligence to us all, to hearyou had recovered your intellects, is what wedid not expect so soon, although Doctr

Wistar* told me, it was no uncommon case,when great evacuations [bleedings] hadbeen made, for such persons to be insanefor a short time that they generally recov-ered in a week or two— Rubens would havebeen on this passage to Charleston [SouthCarolina] on tomorrow had not your letterthurse fortunately relieved us. ... let not pe-cuniary matters keep you from your familyany longer, you will find greater encourage-ment in your profession than heretofore,

and I will be glad to give you all the aid Ican to overcome all your difficulties—I wishI could use a language strong enough to in-force your speedy return, but I can only saythat it is the most ardent wish of my heart.Patty's letter which you sent me paints heranxiety for your return—and when I has-tened to inform her of your recovery shewas almost frantic with joy, your sweet chil-dren were insensible of your situation &could not know the cause of our joy, whichappeared cries of grief rather than that ofgood tidings, she will after this severe tryallabour to make our circle what they oughtto be.

4. Charles Willson Peale to Angelica PealeRobinson, Philadelphia, 17 June 1806

[Describing Raphaelle in Georgia] . . . as hishead was the seat of his disorder he becameinsane and was for a short period so badthat he was obleged to be watched, and hiswhimsies humoured to keep him from rav-ing. . . . he comforts himself that it [his ill-ness] has given him a lesson of vast im-portance to his future happiness, for hesays heretofore his passions governed himbut that for the time to come he'l commandthem so that good may come from someevil.

Those who know him well know thatgoodness of his heart, but he always dis-dained courting favors from any one andtherefore he often suffered injuries whichhe did not really merit, yet he disdained todo himself justice, by explanations of hismotives of conduct.

* Dr. Caspar Wistar, Peale's family physician, andpresident of the American Philosophical Society.

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5. Charles Willson Peale to John Isaac Hawkins,Philadelphia, 28 March 1807

. . . having found it necessary to give my sonRaphaelle a lift through some of his difficul-ties, which an unfortunate trip to Georgiahad brought on him—has obleged me to bemore of an economist than my inclination[is] enclined to be. I expect he will succeedin a plan which he has long had in view; anexhibition of Wax Work. His figures will farexceed in natural appearance any that hasbeen shown in this City heretofore.

6. Charles Willson Peale to Raphaelle Peale,Philadelphia, i July 1807

. . . I also gave her [Raphaelle's wife Patty]some hints how necessary to make homeagreable to induce those we are connectedwith to stay with each other. She said we arevery happy when he dont drink, and yet shesaid you could not do without it for if youpassed one day a tremour came on & youwas miserable untill you had it & she wascompelled to advise you to take a little, myanswer was, that it was wrong for any one todrink any thing but water, that most of themisery of the humain species was caused bya shameful habit of taking what distroyedthe mind as well as the Body.

7. Charles Willson Peale to Rembrandt Peale[in Paris], Philadelphia, 3 July 1808

Raphaelle is about to make a tryal in oil Col-ours, he has painted the White-head Eaglefor the Ladies to work from it colours for theUnited States, and his pensiling of the headis really fine. I think he will find more plea-

sure in painting in Oil than in Water Col-ours, and if he will apply with tolerabledeligence it must succeed, he does not wanttalents, but only industry to make consider-able excellence in Portrait Painting.

8. Charles Willson Peale to Rembrandt Peale[in Paris], Philadelphia,n, 18 September 1808

.. . your Brother Raphaelle is continuallydrawing on me for Cash, for the low pricehe gets & withall not constantly employedrenders my aid necessary— His heart is notungrateful, and even if I distress myself, andthereby prevent him from running into ex-cess's and despondancy, it will comfortme—It must give you pleasure to know, thathe has been more reasonable in his conductof late than when you left us, and he seemsimproved also in his painting. I hope I shallbe able to give you a still better account ofhim [in] my next letters.

9. Charles Willson Peale to Rubens Peale,Philadelphia, 18 October 1809

Raphaelle continues still to improve, he willcertainly be the best Painter in Miniature inthis City in a short time, if he is not so al-ready. I have wanted him to raise his price,for he has an abundance to do. but he saysno because all his customers are not fromthis City but straingers, and he cannot keepany of their Portraits for Exhibition. I amfearful that his too close application will in-jure his health, however at present his looksis much improved.

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io. Charles Willson Peale to Rubens Peale,Philadelphia, 24, 25 October 1809

Raphaelle has more confidence in his artthan he ever had, he is painting an excellentlikeness of himself and made good begin-ning of my portrait, it will do him credit if Ican find time to set for the finishing.

11. Charles Willson Peale to Rembrandt Peale,Persevere [Belfield], 8,10 July 1810

Raphaelle shews at intervals great talents,yet whether from his situation he becomesdisspirited or some other cause, he neglectshimself— he was with me a few days so littlewhile past, he recovered quickly from somecomplaints, and I enjoyed his company withmuch satisfaction.

68. Raphaelle Peale, Still Life with Grapes and Dish,1814. Private collection

67. Detail of fig. 2 (opposite page)

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12. George Murray, "Review of the SecondAnnual Exhibition [of the PennsylvaniaAcademy of the Fine Arts]," The PortFolio 8 (July 1812)

Nos. 186,194, are portraits by Raphael Peale.These pictures have considerable expres-sion and character, but the colouring is byfar too cold. No. n, a bread and cheese pic-ture, by the same artist is a masterly produc-tion, and is certainly not inferior to manyworks of the Flemish School.

13. Charles Willson Peale to Rembrandt Peale,Belfield, 27 July 1812

I don't know that any of my Children thinkthat I have done too much for you by theemployment I gave you in france,*Raphaelle might, when in deranged statehave said something like it. I never heardhim say so. if it was the case, it was my plea-sure, which none of my Children have anyright to controll what is done for the Mu-seum is for the equal advantage of youall. .. .

P.S. Raphaelle was with us yesterday, helooks well, and feels the importance of hischange, he is payg off his debts, takes plea-sure in painting, and improves in the art.

* Rembrandt Peale made two trips to France, one in1808, the other in 1809-1810.

14. Charles Willson Peale to Angelica PealeRobinson, Belfield, 3,10 January 1813

Your brother Raphaelle continues to de-serve much Credit for his persevering in-

dustry as well as very high admiration ofConnoisseurs for this great excellence inthe fine arts, when I was last in the City hewas finishing a Portrait of a Gentleman whohad sat to some of the first artists withoutsuccess, and Raphaelles work gave perfectsatisfaction to every one that had seen it.

15. Charles Willson Peale to (Nathaniel?)Ramsay, Belfield, 13 March 1813

Raphaelle has been unfortunate in somethings—and neglectful of himself, he pos-sesses a good heart and is blest with geniusand many good qualities—is now very in-dustrious and gives high satisfaction in hisart—he has done some pieces of still-lifeequal if not superior to any thing I haveseen! I hope and pray that he may continueto conduct himself in future as well as hehas done for a considerable time past.

16. George Murray, "Review of the ThirdAnnual Exhibition of the ColumbianSociety of Artists and PennsylvaniaAcademy of Fine Arts," The Port Folion.s. 2 (August 1813)

16. Fruit Piece.—Raphael Peale. This is amost exquisite production of art, and wesincerely congratulate the artist on the ef-fects produced on the public mind by view-ing his valuable pictures in the presentexhibition. Before our annual exhibitionsthis artist was but little known. The last yearhe exhibited two pictures of still life, thatdeservedly drew the public attention, andwere highly appreciated by the best judges.We are extremely gratified to find that hehas directed his talents to a branch of the

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arts in which he appears to be so well fittedto excel. We recollect to have seen in the fa-mous collection of the duke of Orleans (thatwas brought to London and there exhibitedin 1790) two small pictures of flowers andfruit by Van Os, that were there sold for onethousand guineas. Raphael Peale has dem-onstrated talents so transcendant in subjectsof still life, that with proper attention andencouragement, he will, in our opinion, ri-val the first artists, ancient or modern, inthat department of painting... . We haveseen fourteen annual exhibitions of theRoyal Academy, and one of the Incorpo-rated Society of Artists, in London; and weare bold as well as proud to say, that therewere in no one of these celebrated exhibi-tions, so great a number of pictures on thisparticular branch of the arts as those nowexhibited by Raphael Peale. . . .

36. Fruit.—Raphael Peale. We have al-ready spoken generally of the works of thisartist, as pictures of uncommon merit: someof them, however, are not without defects.The individual objects in this picture arerepresented with great truth. There appearshowever a deficiency in perspective; it hastoo much the appearance of what painterscall a birds-eye view. We recommend particu-larly to the attention of this artist the neces-sity of foreshortening, and to make his back-grounds more subservient to the principalobjects, and also to make such arrangementin the grouping as will best comport withthe harmony of the whole; and to endeavoras much as possible in the formation of hisgroups, to make the natural colours of theobjects represented assist in the general dis-tribution of light and shade.

17. Rubens Peale to Angelica Peale Robinson,Philadelphia, 6 November 1813

Raphaelle has had a severe attack of thegout in both legs which confined him to hisbed for a week past but is up about thehouse now with crutches.

18. Charles Willson Peale to Benjamin FranklinPeale and Titian Ramsay Peale, Belfield,15, 27, 29 March 1814

I have the Pleasure to inform you that yourBrother Raphaelle is doing very well, itis a joyfull and happy change in him. Hecomes with Patty and the children to see us[ ] and Patty says that no man can pos-sibly behave better than he does. He lookswell and what is much better he works wellHe still progresses to improve in his art,His composition in Still Life is better, andin his Portrait painting gives considerablesatisfaction.

19. George Murray, "Review of the FourthAnnual Exhibition of the ColumbianSociety of Artists and the PennsylvaniaAcademy," The Port Folio 3, series 3(July 1814)

No. 75. Peaches and Grapes—Raphael Peale.This artist has again furnished the presentexhibition with a great variety of very excel-lent pictures, consisting chiefly of fruitpieces, &c. We admire exceedingly the cor-rect manner in which he represents each in-dividual object, and if he displayed morejudgment in the arrangement and grouping ofhis pictures, they would rival the best pro-ductions of the Flemish or Dutch School.

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69. Raphaelle Peale, Still Life with Cake, 1822. TheBrooklyn Museum, Museum Collection Fund

2O. Charles Willson Peale to Benjamin West,Belfield, 11 September 1815

Raphaelle seems to possess considerable tal-ents for such paintings [still lifes]. He paintsin portraits the striking likeness, but doesnot give them that dignity and pleasing ef-fects which is absolutely necessary to ensurea great demand for the labours of his Pensil.

21. Charles Willson Peale to Rembrandt Peale,Belfield, 9 October 1815

Your Brother Raphaelle is in great dangerfrom an attack of the Gout in his stomack,he had been too closely employed for sometime in painting Miniatures, and took no ex-ercise. Perhaps indulging too much his ap-petite at the same time with Pickles &cwhich every prudent man ought to banishfrom his table as being neither good for theold or the young— stimulous condimentsare ever ruinous to the Stomach—simplefood makes good blood, good spirits, goodhealth.. .. Raphaelle is still in the same dan-gerous state that the Physicians have verylittle hopes of his life. I could not go downyesterday having the hurry of painting somePortraits of a Carrolina family who are to goin the next Packet to Charlestown— I havesince Raphaelles illness painted in themorning and gone down in the afternoon &returned before Breakfast time, as soon as Ihave finished this letter will go—but I nowgo with less hopes than ever that he will livelong, he has been last night more delirious& dozed but little the whole night, if heshould have any change for the better I willadd it in a postscript, yet I cannot believe hecan survive many days— he eats nothing,has no passage, and violent pain almostcontinually— a Mortification will shortlytake place—

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22. Rubens Peale to Linnaeus Peale,Philadelphia, 18 October 1815

Dear Brother.I suppose you must be very anxious to knowhow your brother Raphaelle is. As I prom-ised you, if he had got much worse youshould have heard of it

Raphaelle continued much as you sawhim, till Thursday night, and friday he be-gan to improve, but has the gout in his feetand right hand very bad, but yesterday it be-gan to shift very much, varying from hishead to his lungs &c. which is generally thecase when he is on the recovery. He wasmore than 5 days without having any stool.

23. Andrew Summers* to Linnaeus Peale,Philadelphia, 19 October 1815

Raphaele is doing bravely, and I am inhopes of his getting perfectly well beforelong.

* Andrew Summers married Sybilla Miriam Peale,daughter of Charles Willson Peale and his secondwife, Elizabeth De Peyster, in 1815.

24. Raphaelle Peale to Charles Graff,Philadelphia, 6 September 1816

My old and inveterate enemy, the Gout, hascommenced a most violent attack on me,two months previous, to its regular time—and most unfortunately on the day that Iwas to Commence still life in the mostbeautifull productions of Fruit. I thereforefear that the Season will pass without pro-ducing a single Picture, I meant to have de-voted all my time, Principally, to Painting offine Peaches [fig. 70] & instead of whole Wa-

ter Melons, merely single Slices on which Icould bestow a finish that would have madethem valuable—. if the disease was only con-fined to my feet I still would have somehope of doing something, But unfortu-nately my left hand is in a most dreadfullsituation, & my Right Getting so bad as tobe scarcely able to hold my Pen—[in] thissituation it is necessary to dispose of thePicture the fruit of which you so much ad-mired, any alterations you may desire in thePicture on my recovery I will Exicute with agreat deal of Pleasure, my fixt price was &

70. Raphaelle Peale, Still Life with Peach, c. 1816. SanDiego Museum of Art, Purchased through fundsprovided by the Earle W. Grant Acquisition Fund

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71. Detail of fig. 23

would have been, but for this unfortunateattack, 40 dollars— therefore Sir if you feeldisposed to Serve me I make a tender of thisPicture to you for 30 Ds.

My Father & my Brother seperately ontheir own accounts have from the beginningof my Labours in this line engaged to takeall the Pictures I can Paint, But I knowwell.—the enormous & continued expenceof the Gas lights, for want of experience andin consiquence of the Museum being closedso frequently to repair—likewise the ex-pences that my Father is at in building & Es-tablishing several of his son[s] in a manufac-tory of Cotton spinning, induces me ratherto offer to you

with respect your humble Serv'Raphaelle Peale

25. Charles Willson Peale to Raphaelle Peale,Belfield, 17 February 1817

Dear RaphaelleYou have long wished me to paint a Portraitof you. I have now worked myself out ofwork at the farm, and I have good canvasjust prepared and dont wish to go into theCity before a change of weather becausesleeping out of a bed accustomed to, I amnot so comfortable, especially without yourmother to cover me up and she is not will-ing to leave the family at this time. There-fore I beg of you to wrap yourself in anabundance of clothing and come either inthe sleigh or in my Chaise and Jacob willdrive,* so that you will not be liable to takecold. I send him on purpose to bring you tothe farm.

HJacob Gerhart, who worked at Belfield.

26. Charles Willson Peale to Rubens Peale,Belfield, 17 February 1817

Dear RubensHearing that Raphaelle is not doing any-thing I have thought it advisable to send Ja-cob down for the purpose of bringing himup, and I have written to him that I have gotout of work and wish at this time to complywith a request that he some time past he ex-pressed that I would paint a portrait of him,that it might be a lesson to help him in hiscolouring— I wish you to take the trouble tourge him to come either in the Sleigh or inthe Chaize.. . .

27. Charles Willson Peale to Raphaelle Peale,Belfield, 15 November 1817

I well know your talents, and am fully confi-dent that if you applied [yourself] as youought to do, you would be the first painterin America.. .. Your pictures of still-life areacknowledged to be, even by the Paintershere, far exceeding all other works of thatkind—and you have often heard me say thatI thought with such talents of exact immita-tion your portraits ought also to be moreexcellent— My dear Raph. then why will youneglect yourself—? Why not govern everyunruly Passion? why not act the man, andwith a firm determination act according toyour best judgement? Wealth, honors andhappiness would then be your lot! . . .

I must change the subject, to invite youto take lessons from me in painting— Thesystem of colouring which we had fromRembrandt [Peale], I considered as excel-lent, but he has now given me one much su-perior, much more simple, and more easy inexecution— I am certain of your great im-

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provement in portrait as soon as you maketryal of it. The effect of the mode of col-ouring is beautiful in every kind of com-plection, and so easy that the mind is nottroubled over colouring while making outall the parts of drawing, shading and round-ing, making the hair, limbs. . . .

28. Charles Willson Peale to Raphaelle Peale,Belfield, 2 February 1818

My dear RaphaelleIt gives me pain to think how wretchedlyyou govern yourself. I am not uninformedof your associations you are possessed ofsuperior talents to most men, and yet youwill associate with beings that disgraceyou— you have promised time after time torefrain from intemperance and you havenearly destroyed, or thrown away your life;you have been on the brink of the Grave,and you must certainly know the cause of allyour sufferings! then why not act the Manand respect your self— which if you oncewould take the firm resolution to do, otherswould then respect you— How can you ex-pect encouragement to your superiorpowers in the Arts, which would in a littletime make you independent, unless youchange your company— will creditablepeople go into a House ofRendevous to sittfor their portraits, or give any other en-couragement— but why should I namethese things, you know as well as I do howyou should conduct yourself, you have an in-finity of knowledge, but do you not lackcommon sense? After you left Philad.a Ihave made every excuse I possibly could tothose who enquired after you; I have toldyour children that I expected in a little timethat you would return and aid them, can it

be possible that you have no sympathy; nolove for them?— This cannot seriously bepossible

In some of your letters you said you hadpictures engaged— It is wonderfully strangethat you cannot maintain yourself alone—how can you expect that Patty should main-tain herself and all her children? and yourtime in Oh! how painful is my task towrite this— Raphaelle compare your powerswith mine, and see how I sink in thescale... .

Your Mother loves you, she knows thegoodness of your heart think of her, of me,of your brothers & sisters and know that youcan if you will it make us all happy— thenthink also of your wife & children and put avalue on yourself. . ..

29. Charles Willson Peale to Raphaelle Peale,Belfield, i March 1818

Dear Raphaelle yesterday Patty sent for meand when I see her she told me that shewanted me to prevail on her Children toconsent to be separated, as she was not ableto keep them together by her exertionsalone, she said by putting them out amongsther friends, she might by taking a Roomwith the work of her needle maintain her-self and the youngest of them. She thinksthat you ought to come home and help heralong in their expences, & advises that youshould sell your House, pay your debts, anddo what you can to gain a support for thefamily. She seemed fearful that you wouldabuse her and said that she did not knowthat she would be able to bear it. ... I wroteto you on 2d Feb It contained some censureof your conduct, do you not deserve it? Itgave me pain to write such complaints, but I

105 TEXTS A N D D O C U M E N T S

72. Raphaelle Peale, Still Life with Steak, c. 1817.Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute Museum of Art

hoped that I might rouse you from yourlethargy, might stir up your pride to honor-able actions. If I did not know your capacityto earn a genteel living, my feelings wouldbe different— I know you possess a goodhead—, I know you possess superior?] qual-ifications, yet what does it all avail, since

you have no resolution to act as you mustknow you ought to do? . . . I am certain thatyou do not want a monitor in your breast,then why not reflect on what you ought todo? If you feel disease do you not know thatyou are deserving of pain? that some indis-cretion, some neglect of a necessary case

106 T E X T S AND D O C U M E N T S

have brought affliction which by a properprudence could have been prevented. . . .I speak to a Man of superior Powers of theMind, shall I always speak in vain? I hopenot. Then dear Raphaelle have respect foryour self, and firmly determine to honoryourself, and in doing so, know how muchhappiness you may give to those who oughtto be near and dear to you, nay carry itmuch farther, for know that many Gentle-men of my acquaintance lament the prosti-tution of your talents. I want no morepromises, let actions continue to speak yourpraise. Covet, only, the admiration of goodmen—all others are beneath your notice.. . .

30. Charles Willson Peale to Titian RamsayPeale, Belfield, 7 March 1818

It is a considerable length of time since Ihave heard from Raphaelle. I don't knowwhat he is doing at Norfolk. I have wrotetwice to him of late giving him by best ad-vice. I fear he is not doing so well as heought to do with his superior talents insome department of the Arts.

31. Charles Willson Peale to Raphaelle Peale,Belfield, 26 June 1818

. . . But I fear, Raphaelle that you are notright. I am led to think so by seeing theword Suicide in your letter [to Patty]. He is amiserable poor wretch who has not senseenough to know the folly of such rashactions, he can have but little intellect, whothinks that he can justify himself in the op-pinion that he can dispose of himself as hepleases fearless of the consequences. Hasnot every man numerous obligations to ful-

fill? We do not live for ourselves alone. Is itnot one of our first duties, to endeavor tomake all other beings happy? by such con-duct, do we not enjoy the most sublime felic-ity? this being granted, is it not criminal inus to neglect our duties to those who oughtto be dear to us? I hope you will not thinkthat [I] write with too much severity to you,my intention is only to rouse you up from astupor or lethargy that may have seigedthee, for I well know your powers of intellectare equal if not superior to most men, I onlymean to try to bring you to serious reflec-tion, and if you have courage you will doevery thing in your power or we could wishyou to do. I will here drop this subject. . . .

32. Charles Willson Peale to Angelica PealeRobinson, Belfield, 24 July 1818

you ask me where Raphaelle is, The otherday I received a letter from him, which in-forms me that he has been almost at deathsdoor, reduced to a Skeleton by a fitt of theGout [which] confined him 8 weeks— I havewrote to advise him to get from the countryas soon as possible as I have always consid-ered the neighbourhood of Norfolk an un-healthy country.

33. Charles Willson Peale to Angelica PealeRobinson, Belfield, 23 September 1818

. . . it is not too late to recover his wantedstamina, provided he will follow my adviceand to encourage him to be diligent inpainting still life, I will purchase every piecethat he cannot sell, provided it is wellpainted, he tells me he has improved in por-trait painting and that he is fonder of doing

107 T E X T S AND D O C U M E N T S

them than he was formerly. If so I know hewill excell in a high degree, if his immita-tions of the human face is like those faithfultints he produces of still-life. For he has nothis equal in that line of painting.

34. Charles Willson Peale to Rubens andRaphaelle Peale, Washington,19 November 1818

Dear Raphaelle you ought not to expect ahigh price for every picture you paint.These kinds of pictures would give you agood profit at 15$ provided you employedthe greater part of your time in producingthem as with constant production you mightpaint 2 or 3 of them in a week. You cannever want subjects to immitate, any com-mon objects grouped together might form apicture, and instead of having only one pic-ture for sale, you might soon have a Doz11,and such a number would be a curiosity ofthe lovers of the art to see them, . . . I fearyou loose as much time in shewing your pic-tures or more than it would take you to pro-duce them. I feel sensibly for all yourdifficulties and would be very sorry to saythat, which would hurt your feelings, youknow my affection for you, How often have Ipraised your talents? and how often have Igiven you the best advice in my power, andhad I the means I would most gladly relieveyou from duns.

35. Charles Willson Peale to Rembrandt Peale,Belfield, 23 February 1819

Raphaelle has painted some still-life piecesequally good, if not superior to any he hasever painted— He works diligently but at alow price, and conducts himself very well.

36. Sarah Miriam Peale to Titian RamsayPeale, Philadelphia, i May 1819

—Raphael has had the gout very bad in hisright hand, but I believe it is gettingbetter—

37. Charles Willson Peale to Angelica PealeRobinson, Belfield, 19 July 1819

Raphaelle I am happy to say is very dili-gent in painting Portraits mostly in minia-ture, and enjoys good health, though nowand then he has some twinges of the Gout-however he looks well and may be called ahandsome Man.

38. Sarah Miriam Peale to Titian RamsayPeale, Philadelphia, 7 November 1819

Raphael. . . has had as much work as hecould do for four, or five, weeks past. I hopeit may continue so.—

39. Charles Willson Peale to Titian RamsayPeale, Belfield, 21 February 1820

Raphaelle has a tolerable share of work hisprices being small—

1O8 T E X T S AND D O C U M E N T S

73- James Peale, Still Life with Fruit, 1824-1826?Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute Museum ofArt, Museum Purchase in Memory of William C.Murray

lOQ T E X T S A N D D O C U M E N T S

74- Raphaelle Peale, Melons and Morning Glories,1813. National Museum of American Art,Smithsonian Institution, Gift of Paul Mellon

11O TEXTS AND D O C U M E N T S

40. Charles Willson Peale to Raphaelle Peale,Belfield, 4 July 1820

I hope on the next annual Exhibition [at thePennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts] thatyou will shine as a Portrait Painter—for as Ihave always said, if you could have confi-dence in yourself, and paint portraits withthe same exactness of finish as you havedone in still life, that no artist could be yoursuperior in that line.

41. Charles Willson Peale to Raphaelle Peale,Belfield, 22 July 1821

My Dear RaphaelleIt is long since we have heard from you, Ifear your sufferings are great, your letter toEliza [Raphaelle's daughter] spoke of yourreturning so far to health as to enable you toresume your Pencil, although much debili-tated, why do you not write to some of thefamily, or if you are not able, get some per-son where you are to do it for you? I havebeen once or twice in the City of late, andgoing to your House, each time Patty said,that my rap at the door made her expect itwas the Postman with letters, and week afterweek they expect in vain, it is cause of muchdistress to all the family.

42. Rubens Peale to Benjamin FranklinPeale(?\ Baltimore, n June 1822

[Raphaelle's] promises and fair words . . .are like the dust that is now rising, promis-ing a severe storm but it all ends in dust andbut little sprinkling. Or a soap bubble.

43. Charles Willson Peale to Rembrandt Peale,Philadelphia, 15 August 1822

Raphaelle is diligent at his pieces of stilllife, but of portraits he has nothing to do forsome time past, & he very seldom can getany thing for what he does, of course I amobliged to find him market money—

44. Charles Willson Peale to Rubens Peale,Philadelphia, 19 January 1823

And poor Raphaelle with every exertion hecannot get a support.— He is now paintingsome fruit pieces to send to Vendues[?]—He tells me that he has wrote to you to pro-pose to get a sale of his fruit pieces you haveby a raffle & he thinks that painting somesmaller pieces that each person accordingto their lott may each have a picture— andhe says it may save expence & when youwrite to me, mentioning your Ideas on thesubject.

45. Charles Willson Peale to Rubens Peale,Philadelphia, 5 March 1823

Raphaelle has no work at present, yet heis not Idle, he paints some fruit pieces—also he paints such persons as will give himanything for his painting. He is engaged totake carpenters work for a Portrait, thus hegets what is wanting in repair of his house,streching frames &c. he hopes that whenthe Steam boats run & people travel morethat he may then get some work for the sup-port of his family—

111 TEXTS AND D O C U M E N T S

46. Charles Willson Peale to Rubens Peale,Philadelphia, 5 April 1823

48. Charles Willson Peale to Rubens Peale,Philadelphia, 23 November 1823

Raphaelle being out of work is in need ofsupport— he requests you to send to himthe pictures remaining with you as soon asyou can conveniently do it— as he must tryto sell some or all of them by some means toget money to meet expenses

47. Charles Willson Peale to Rubens Peale,Philadelphia, 5 August 1823

I am much troubled with Raphaelle's badconduct, and his difficulties are encreasingon him.. . . Patty wants to get the propertysecured to her support and payments on thedebts— a Law of Pennsyl.a enables the near-est relations of a drunken spen[d]thrift toapply and have appointed two persons toact as trustee's— I was applyed to thisbusiness— my reply was that I would nothave any thing to do at such business, Thebreaking up of a family is a serious thing. Isome time past told Patty that I would notgive her money, that what they got of memust be through Raphaelle this I did in or-der to oblige her to be more attentive to hiscomforts, and finding some time of late thathe was getting into his old habits, I told himthat he displeased me, nay deceived me bysaying that he drank nothing but water, atthe same time I was supply8 the family, butalso giving him the means to indulge hisvile habit, and I have determined that heshall work for what I must give him— and ifhe will not do it I cannot be longer a suf-ferer, except in my sorrow for an unfortu-nate Son. Patty's violent temper I conceiveis a principle cause of his bad habits. I havesaid enough on a disagreeable subject.

Raphaelle has his baggage on board aSchooner bound to Charleston and will Sailtomorrow or next day, he has one or two pic-tures engaged there, this will serve as a be-ginning, .. . He says that He now expects tomake money, having rid himself of a load,[and] intends to be very industrious & pru-dint. and he will remit to me occasionallymoney to pay what Debts he owes.

Patty takes boarders and she has 7 atpresent, but at a low price 2'/2 & 3$ per weekThose finding their bedding the lesser pricemaking the present amount 19$ per week.

and possibly she may make out to live,yet her Sons Charles & Edmond I muchsuspect will be a burden on her— I toldRaphaelle not to give me any trouble withher—as it is my absolute determination todo nothing for her. You know my senti-ments of her disposition and believe think[sic] with me that Raphaelle would havebeen a better man if she had conducted her-self with kindness towards him. His naturaldisposition is affectionate and she hadpower to win him to noble actions had shewilled it.

49. Charles Willson Peale to Rubens Peale,Philadelphia, 30 November 1823

Raphaelle is about this time near thecoast of South Carolina. I go, he said to meunencumbered, tho' poor yet with goodprospects before me I will be industorus,and prudent and I hope to make money bythis undertaking. I gave him my best advice

112 T E X T S AND D O C U M E N T S

75- Raphaelle Peale, Peaches, c. 1817. Richard YorkGallery, New York

T E X T S A N D D O C U M E N T S

76. Raphaelle Peale, Fruits and Nuts in a Dish, 1818.Courtesy Mr. and Mrs. Robert C. Graham, Sr.

114 T E X T S AND D O C U M E N T S

saying you may yet by temperance restoreyour powers of body & mind but otherwiseyou will soon die in misery.

50. Charles Willson Peale to Raphaelle Peale,Philadelphia, 21 February 1824

when you write to me say nothing aboutyour drinking only water, as some that seeyour letters will not give credit to you. It isbetter to practice and not speak of it, as theresult of good conduct will be more power-ful than words to do you justice. It will makeme happy to hear of your success in busi-ness and that you are comfortable . . . with-out a family to maintain by a little industry.

51. Charles Willson Peale, Autobiography

. . . he has to record the death of his eldestson Raphaelle, the talents of whom has beenmentioned in a former part of this history,and he will only say that he possessed aheart of universal benevolence, and just be-fore his departure when his father was set-ting before him meditating on the uncer-tainty of human life; on the causes of manymiseries which men go through in theirjourneying here, Raphaelle's daughter set-ting near him, knowing his father's want ofhearing, he desired Eliza to tell his fatherthat he loved and respected him, and that he wasdesireous that he should know that he was per-fectly resigned to his fate, that he was happy, andshould die contented, for he said, that he neverdid injury to any man, and he was easy in hispresent condition. This character of himself isundoubtedly a correct one, as far as the au-

thor knows and believes of this son. and hehas the consolation of believing that he didas much as he was able to promote that sonshappiness throughout the short space of hisdays years [sic].

52. William Dunlap, History of the Rise andProgress of the Arts of Design in the UnitedStates 2 (New York, 1834)

Mr. R[embrandt]. Pfealej. says, "all thesechildren but two [of Charles Willson Peale]were named after painters, although onlytwo of the number adopted the profession.Raphael was a painter of portraits in oil andminiature, but excelled more in composi-tions of still life. He may perhaps be consid-ered the first in point of time who adoptedthis branch of painting in America, andmany of his pictures are in the collectionsof men of taste and highly esteemed." Hedied early in life, perhaps at the age of forty,after severe affliction from gout.

53. Reminiscences, George Escol Sellers* toColeman Sellers, Crestview,21 January 1897

.. . Uncle Raphael . . . was in reality the mosttalented of Grandpa's sons and it was theRevolution that made him the wreck he was.

* George Escol Sellers (1808-1899) was the son ofCharles Willson Peale's daughter Sophonisba Angus-ciola Sellers. These "Reminiscences" were writtenwhen he was eighty-nine, of events that occurredmore than seventy years earlier.

115 T E X T S AND D O C U M E N T S

54- Reminiscences, George Escol Sellers toHorace Wells Sellers, Crestview,2 February 1897

I have alluded to the distortion of UncleRaphael's hands with chalk knuckles whichhis Father always attributed to gout fromearly high living and intemperance. . . . howmuch more likely was Uncle Raphael's caseone of mercury and all his gouty sufferingalso from the same cause. He was a very ac-complished Taxidermist and . . . did all ofthe larger animal preparation for the Mu-seum. Arsenic was all that was used for birdsand small animals, but by its use the skinsand the hair of larger animals were not pro-tected from the ravages of moths and otherinsects and Bichloride of Mercury, Corro-sive Sublimate, was resorted to. The skinswere soaked in a liquid solution (Alkali) andthis was freely handled by Uncle Raphaelfor days together. . . .

The reference Grandfather makes to thedeath of his son Raphael [in his "Autobiog-raphy"?] recalls one of the saddest recollec-tions of my early life.* It was on a morningof a cold raw March day that Uncle Raphaelcame into the Market St. store, and shiver-ing took a seat on the bench behind the oldsix plate wood stove. They were in verystraitened circumstances, but I will here re-mark that it was Grandfather's rule to keepposted as to circumstances through ElizaPeale and through her to keep them fromabsolute want, but never through Aunt Patty.Raphael called me to him and showed meseveral closely written cap pages and saidthat a confectioner and candy maker onMarket St. below 4th St. paid him a certain

* George Escoll Sellers was seventeen years old whenRaphaelle Peale died in

price for couplets, for what at that timewere called secrets, but that he preferredcomic to lovesick. He amused me by readingmany of them. He said it seemed hard thatart was at so low an ebb that an artist wasobliged to write doggeral for his bread andbutter. He left to deliver his work and gethis pay.

Late in the afternoon of the same daythe police officer of the Markets came andtold us that Mr. Raphael Peale was in the 3rdSt. market house, dead drunk. .. . He was sit-ting on a stall, supported by the men withwhom the officer had left him in charge. Hewas insensible and it was some time beforeFather and Copper [a friend of Raphaelle's]succeeded in arousing him and then it didnot seem like a man recovering from adrunken sleep. . . . He said that while at theconfectioner's he was suddenly attackedwith the gout in his stomach which doubledhim up and that the confectioner had givenhim a drink of hot toddy which gave somerelief, and when he thought he could walkhome he started for a grocery store for someprovisions he wanted to take, but how he gotinto the market house he did not know.Father and Copper had great difficulty ingetting him home in consequence of theattacks of pain. I do not remember how longhe lived but his suffering was very great. Atthe time grandfather refers to he was en-tirely free from pain for mortification hadset in, and his death was what might becalled a living death, for gangrene was do-ing its work while he was still conscious....

Il6 T E X T S A N D D O C U M E N T S

Notes1. The Collected Papers of Charles Willson Peale and HisFamily, ed. Lillian B. Miller (Millwood, N.Y., 1980,microfiche edition), series II-C.

2. The Selected Papers of Charles Willson Peale and HisFamily, vol. 2, Charles Willson Peale: The Artist as MuseumKeeper, ijgi-iSio, ed. Lillian B. Miller (New Haven,1988), pt. i, p. 604.3. Selected Papers 2, pt. 2, pp. 960-962.4. Selected Papers 2, pt. 2., p. 967.5. Selected Papers 2, pt. 2, pp. 1,008-1,009.6. Selected Papers 2, pt. 2, p. 1,021.7. Selected Papers 2. pt. 2, pp. 1,096-1,097.8. Selected Papers 2, pt. 2, p. 1,140.9. Selected Papers 2, pt. 2, p. 1,231.10. Collected Papers, series II-A/48.n. Collected Papers, series II-A/49.12. See document heading.13. Collected Papers, series II-A/51.14. Collected Papers, series II-A/52.15. Collected Papers, series II-A/52.16. See document heading.17. Collected Papers, series II-A/2.18. Collected Papers, series II-A/53-19. See document heading.20. Collected Papers, series II-A/56.21. Collected Papers, series II-A/56.22. Collected Papers, series VIIA/3.23. Collected Papers, series XD/i.24. Collected Papers, series V/i.25. Collected Papers, series II-A/59.26. Collected Papers, series II-A/59.27. Collected Papers, series II-A/6o.28. Collected Papers, series II-A/6o.29. Collected Papers, series II-A/6o.30. Collected Papers, series II-A/6o.32. Collected Papers, series II-A/6i.33. Collected Papers, series II-A/6i.34. Collected Papers, series II-A/6i.35. Collected Papers, series II-A/62.36. Collected Papers, series III/4-37. Collected Papers, series II-A/62.38. Collected Papers, series III/4-39. Collected Papers, series II-A/63-40. Collected Papers, series II-A/64.41. Collected Papers, series II-A/66.42. Collected Papers, series VIIA/4.43. Collected Papers, series II-A/67.

44. Collected Papers, series II-A/68.45. Collected Papers, series II-A/68.46. Collected Papers, series II-A/68.47. Collected Papers, series II-A/69.48. Collected Papers, series II-A/69.49. Collected Papers, series II-A/69.50. Collected Papers, series II-AA/o.51. Collected Papers, series II-C.52. See document heading.53. Unpublished, American Philosophical SocietyLibrary, Philadelphia.54. Unpublished, American Philosophical SocietyLibrary, Philadelphia.

77. Detail of fig. 40

117 TEXTS AND D O C U M E N T S

Tcollection

78. Raphaelle Peale, Cake and Wine, 1813. Private

A Checklist of ContemporaryExhibitions

HE STILL LIFES RAPHAELLE PEALE EXHIBITED

during his lifetime as listed in catalogues ofthe Columbianum exhibition in 1795 and ex-hibitions of the Pennsylvania Academy ofthe Fine Arts from 1812 through 1824 (theyear before his death) indicate, more thando his surviving paintings alone, somethinglike the true range of his enterprise as astill-life painter. We learn, for example, thathe painted more deceptions than the singlepainting that has come down to us, and thathe painted such things as eggs, jelly, breadand butter, apricots, persimmons, and rad-ishes, none of which occur in the still lifeswe now know. Not only does this suggest aconsiderably richer and more varied subjectmatter than the known works indicate, italso shows that the number of still lifesPeale exhibited greatly exceeds the mostgenerous count of surviving ones. From theexhibition record at the Pennsylvania Acad-emy particularly, it is possible to monitorthe intensity of Raphaelle Peale's activity asa still-life painter by the number of still lifeshe exhibited, by the proportion of still lifesto portraits, and by the way he listed his pro-fessional specialties (miniature painter in1811, portrait, miniature, and still-life painterin 1814, still life, fruit, portrait in 1818).

Raphaelle Peale clearly exhibited the

same pictures in several exhibitions, andwhen titles are general, such as Still Life—Peaches, it is impossible to tell which are newpaintings and which old. It is difficult toknow, too, if works with general titles corres-pond to known paintings. Whenever thereappears to be a plausible correspondence ofsubject and date to paintings in the presentexhibition, appropriate reference is made.Peale's professional specialties, when givenin the catalogues, appear in parentheses fol-lowing the date of the exhibition. When heshowed paintings other than still lifes, theirnumber and kind are given in brackets fol-lowing the list of still lifes.

THE EXHIBITION OF THECOLUMBIANUM

1795 (PORTRAIT PAINTER AT THE MUSEUM)A ShadHerringsSmall FishA Covered PaintingStill LifeStill LifeA BillA Deception[5 portraits]

119

AT

PENNSYLVANIA ACADEMYOF THE FINE ARTS

1811 (MINIATURE PAINTER)[2 miniatures]

1812 (MINIATURE PAINTER)Bread, Cheese, &c.Fruit, &c.Eggs, &c.Catalogue for the Use of the Room.

A Deception[i miniature, 2 portraits]

1813 (PORTRAIT AND MINIATURE PAINTER)Fruit Piece. FOR SALEFruitFruit. FOR SALEStill LifeFruitVegetablesMackerelFruit Piece. FOR SALEStill LifeStill LifeBread and ButterStill LifeWater Melon [fig. 74 ?][2 miniatures, 2 portraits]

1814

1815

See fig. 74

(PORTRAIT, MINIATURE, AND STILL-LIFEPAINTER)Peaches and GrapesLemonsPeachesBlackberries [fig. 44?]Cheese and Crackers [fig. 12?]

JellyAppleApricotsJellyPound cakeCherriesLemonsPeachesCorn and CantaloupePersimmonsSmoked Shad, Cabbage, &c.OrangesWater Melon[2 portraits]

Water MelonStill LifeHerring [fig. 29?]Orange and Book [fig. 3?]

See fig. 3

79. Detail of fig. 44 (opposite page)

121

See fig. 12

Fruit, Still Life, Peaches and GrapesFruit, Still Life, Peaches

Still-Life — Cherries. FOR SALEStill-Life — Peach. FOR SALE [fig. 70 or 43?]Still Life — Wine and CakeStill Life — BlackberriesStill Life — Wine and CakeStill Life — Peaches. FOR SALEStill Life — Peaches. FOR SALEStill Life — A Catalogue and Papers Filed

1818 (STILL LIFE, FRUIT, PORTRAIT, &c.)[May]Still Life— ApplesStill Life — Peaches[July]Still Life — Peaches and Grapes (1811)Still Life — Apples and Grapes (1811)Still Life — A Catalogue and Papers Filed

1819

See fig. 17

See fig. 43

1817 (PORTRAIT AND MINIATURE PAINTER)Still Life—Cheese and Crackers. FOR SALEStill Life—Cakes and Jelly. FOR SALEStill Life—Book and Orange. FOR SALEStill Life—PeachesStill Life—Radishes. FOR SALEStill Life—ApplesStill Life—Apples and MelonStill Life—PeachesStill Life— Water Melon. FOR SALEStill Life—Strawberries and Cream.

FOR SALEStill Life—Bread and Butter. FOR SALEStill Life—Beef and Cabbage. FOR SALE

[fig. 72?]Still Life—Peach. FOR SALE

[fig. 70 or 43?]

(PORTRAIT AND STILL-LIFE PAINTER)Still Life— Wine, Cakes, &c. [fig. 66?]Still Life — Wine, Cakes, Grapes, &c.

[fig- 50?]Still Life — Orange, Apple, Prunes, &c.Still Life— Apples, &c.Still Life — PeachesStill Life — File of Papers, &c.[2 portraits]

See fig. 50

122

(1813).

1816 Fruit, Still Life, Peachehes and Fox Grapes[fig. 9]

[fig. 17]Fruit, Still Life, Apples and Fox Grapes

1820 (STILL LIFE, FRUIT, PORTRAIT, &c.)Still Life—Apples and Fox GrapesStill Life—Peaches and Fox GrapesStill Life—File of Papers, &c.

1821 (STILL-LIFE AND PORTRAIT PAINTER)Still Life—Peaches and GrapesApples, Grapes, &c.

1822 (PORTRAIT, MINIATURE, AND STILL-LIFEPAINTER)Still Life—Apple, Cake, and Raisins.

FOR SALE [fig. 5?]Still Life—FruitStill Life—FruitVenus Rising from the Sea—A Deception

(1822). FOR SALE [fig. 37?]Still Life—Apples, Wine, Cake, &c.

FOR SALE

Still Life—Peaches and Grapes. FOR SALEStill Life—Water Melon and Grapes.

FOR SALE [fig. 51?]Still Life—Peaches and Grapes. FOR SALECakes, Wine, &c.Still Life—Oranges, &c., and a Miniature

Portrait of a LadyYellow Peaches and GrapesStill Life—Heath Peaches and Grapes[2 portraits]

1823 (PORTRAIT AND STILL-LIFE PAINTER)Still Life—Lemons, Flowers, &c.Still Life—PeachesStill Life—FruitStill Life—Fruit

1824 (STILL-LIFE, PORTRAIT, AND MINIATUREPAINTER)Still Life—Water Melon, Grapes, Peaches,

&c.Still Life—Strawberries, Nuts, &c.[fig. 4i?]Still Life—Peaches and GrapesStill Life—PeachesStill Life—Cakes, Wine, Apples, &c.Still Life—Lemons, &c.Peaches and GrapesApples and Grapes

See fig. 5

See fig. 51 See fig. 41

123

8o. Raphaelle Peale, Still Life with Raisins, Yellowand Red Apples in Porcelain Basket, c. 1820-1822. TheBaltimore Museum of Art, Gift of Mrs. FrancisWhite, from the Collection of Mrs. Miles White, Jr.

Lenders to the Exhibition

The Baltimore Museum of Art

Berry-Hill Galleries, Inc., New York

The Brooklyn Museum

Detroit Institute of Art

JoAnn and Julian Ganz, Jr.

Mr. and Mrs. Robert C. Graham, Sr.

The Henry E. Huntington Library andArt Gallery

The Historical Society of Pennsylvania

Jeanne Rowe Mathison Trust

Eleanor Searle Whitney McCollum

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Munson-Williams-Proctor InstituteMuseum of Art

Museum of Fine Arts, Springfield,Massachusetts

National Museum of American Art,Smithsonian Institution

The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art,Kansas City, Missouri

The New-York Historical Society

Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts,Philadelphia

Philadelphia Museum of Art

Private collectors

Reading Public Museum and Art Gallery

San Diego Museum of Art

Mrs. Frank S. Schwarz

Kathryn and Robert Steinberg

The Toledo Museum of Art

Eric M. Wunsch

Richard York Gallery, New York

125

List of Illustrations

Asterisks denote works in the exhibition. 5Dimensions are given height before width.

*i. Raphaelle Peale, Still Life withOranges, c. 1818oil on panel, 18% x 2215/i6 in.The Toledo Museum of Art, Gift ofFlorence Scott Libbeysigned across bottom: Painted for the 6.Collection of John A Alston Esqr. I ThePatron of living American ArtistsRaphaelle Peale Phila.

*2. Raphaelle Peale, A Dessert [Still Lifewith Lemons and Oranges], 1814oil on panel, 13% x 19 in. 7.Collection of JoAnn and JulianGanz,Jr.signed lower right: Raphaelle PealeAug1. 5th 1814/Philadelphia

*$. Raphaelle Peale, Still Life with Orangeand Book, c. 1815 *8.oil on panel, 83/4 x 11 in.private collection

4. Detail of fig. 19

Raphaelle Peale, Still Life with Apples,Sherry, and Tea Cake, 1822oil on panel, io]/2 x 16% in.Collection of Mr. and Mrs. PaulMellon, Upperville, Virginiasigned lower right: Raphaelle Peale

Jany. 1822

John Lewis Krimmel, Fourth of July inCentre Square, 1812oil on canvas, 22% x 29 in.Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academyof the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, Acad-emy Purchase Fund

William Birch, An Unfinished House, inChestnut Street Philadelphia, 1800etching and engraving, 10 x 87/8 in.Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Acad-emy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia,John S. Phillips Collection

Raphaelle Peale, Peaches and UnripeGrapes, 1815oil on panel, 14^2 x 17^2 in.Kathryn and Robert Steinbergsigned at bottom: Peaches & unripeGrapes by Raphaelle Peale Septr. 1815

126

*9- Raphaelle Peale, Fox Grapes andPeaches, 1815oil on panel, g3/4 x nVs in.Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Acad-emy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphiasigned at bottom: Fox Grapes & Peachesby Raphaelle Peale /August 1815

*io. James Peale, Still Life No. 2,1821oil on panel, iSVie x 267/i6 in.Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Acad-emy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia,Henry D. Gilpin Fund

11. Detail of fig. 69

*i2. Raphaelle Peale, Cheese and ThreeCrackers, 1813oil on panel, 7 x io]/2 in.Mrs. Frank S. Schwarzsigned lower right: Raphaelle Peale 1813

*i3. Raphaelle Peale, Still Life with Water-melon, 1822oil on canvas, 24^2 x 29^2 in.Museum of Fine Arts, Springfield,Massachusetts, The James Philip GrayCollectionsigned lower right: Raphaelle Peale 1822

*i4. Raphaelle Peale, Fruit and Silver Bowl,1814oil on panel, 12 x 19 in.private collectionsigned lower right: Raphaelle PealeOctr. 81814

15. Benjamin Tanner after J. J. Barralet,Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts[first building], 1809engraving and etching, 5 x 6 l l / i6 in.Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Acad-emy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia,John S. Phillips Collection

*i6. Raphaelle Peale, Still Life with Celeryand Wine, 1816oil on panel, i23fe x 17 Vs in.Munson-Williams-Proctor InstituteMuseum of Artsigned lower right: Raphaelle Peale 1816

*i7. Raphaelle Peale, Apples and Fox Grapes,1815oil on panel, 9% x ii7/i6 in.Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Acad-emy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphiasigned at bottom: Apples &Fox Grapesby Raphaelle Peale/Phila. Sept 71815

18. Detail of fig. 22

*ig. Raphaelle Peale, Still Life with WineGlass, 1818oil on panel, io]/4 x 13% in.Detroit Institute of Arts, FoundersSociety Purchase, Laura H. MurphyFundsigned lower right: Raphaelle PealePinx1 A.D. 1818

20. Charles Willson Peale, The Artist inHis Museum, 1822oil on canvas, 103% x 79% in.Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Acad-emy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia,Gift of Mrs. Sarah Harrison (TheJoseph Harrison, Jr., Collection)

127

*2i. James Peale, Fruit in a Basket, 1820-1825

Eric M. Wunsch

*22. Charles Willson Peale, The Peale Family,c. 1771-1773 and 1808oil on canvas, 56% x 8gl/2 in.The New-York Historical Society,New York, Bryan Collection

*23- Charles Willson Peale, Portrait ofRaphaelle Peale, c. 1817oil on canvas, 29 x 24 in.private collection

24. Charles Willson Peale, William Smithand His Grandson, 1788oil on canvas, 51^4 x 40% in.The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts,The Robert G. Cabell III and MaudeMorgan Cabell Foundation and theGlasgow Fund

*25- Charles Willson Peale, The StaircaseGroup, 1795oil on canvas, 89% x 3gV2 in.Philadelphia Museum of Art,The George W. Elkins Collection[shown only in Philadelphia]

26. Sir Joshua Reynolds, Self Portrait,c. 1780oil on panel, 50 x 40 in.The Royal Academy of Arts

27. John Trumbull, Self Portrait, 1777oil on canvas, 29% x 23% in.Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Bequestof George Nixon Black

28. Detail of fig. 37

2g. Raphaelle Peale, Still Life with DriedFish [A Herring], 1815oil on panel, g5/8 x 14lk in.The Historical Society ofPennsylvaniasigned lower right: Raphaelle PealeFeby. 221815 /Philadelphia

30. William Michael Harnett, The Banker'sTable, 1877oil on canvas, 8T/8 x i2!/8 in.The Metropolitan Musum of Art,Elihu Root, Jr., Gift, 1956

31. John F Peto, Cake, Lemon, Strawberries,and Glass, 1890oil on canvas, ioV8 x 14 in.Collection of Mr. and Mrs. PaulMellon, Upperville, Virginia

32. Juan Sanchez Cotan, Quince, Cabbage,Melon, and Cucumber, c. 1602oil on canvas, 27^8 x 33]/4 in.San Diego Museum of Art, Purchasedfor the Museum by the Misses Anne R.and Amy Putnam, 1945

33. Follower of Caravaggio, Still Life,1573-1610oil on canvas, ig7/8 x 28^4 in.National Gallery of Art, Washington,Samuel H. Kress Collection

34. Rembrandt Peale, George Washington,Patriae Pater, c. 1824oil on canvas, 72^2 x 54 V4 in.Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Acad-emy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia,Bequest of Mrs. Sarah Harrison (TheJoseph Harrison, Jr., Collection)

128

Toil on canvas, 163/16 x 22 in.

T 1813James Ogelsby Peale

Collection (fromAmerican Art Journal 18, no. 2 [1986]: 9)

36. Joseph Wright of Derby, The Corin-thian Maid, 1783-1784oil on canvas, 41% x 51^2 in.National Gallery of Art, Washington,Paul Mellon Collection

^37. Raphaelle Peale, Venus Rising from theSea — A Deception [After the Bath], 1822?oil on canvas, 29 x 24 in.The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art,Kansas City, Missouri (Nelson Fund)signed lower right: Raphaelle Peale

38. Willem Claesz. Heda, Still Life, 1656oil on canvas, 44 x 60 in.The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston,Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Raymond H.Goodrich

*39. Raphaelle Peale, Still Life with Straw-berries and Ostrich Egg Cup, 1814oil on panel, i2*/4 x 19^4 in.private collectionsigned lower left: Raphaelle PealeJune 1814

*4O. Raphaelle Peale, Lemons and Sugar,c. 1822oil on panel, 12% x 15% in.Courtesy of the Reading PublicMuseum and Art Galleryinscribed (falsely) lower left: R. Peale

41. Raphaelle Peale, Still Life with WildStrawberries, 1822oil on panel, 16% x 22% in.The Art Institute of Chicago, Lent byJamee and Marshall Fieldsigned lower right: Raphaelle PealePinx1. 1822

*42. Raphaelle Peale, Still Life with RaisinCake, 1813oil on panel, 7% x nVs in.private collectionsigned lower right: Raphaelle Peale

*43. Raphaelle Peale, Still Life with Peach,c. 1816oil on panel, 7% x 9 in.San Diego Museum of Art, Purchasedthrough funds provided by the EarleW. Grant Acquisition Fundsigned lower right: Raphaelle Peale

*44. Raphaelle Peale, Blackberries, c. 1813oil on panel, 7]/4 x io]/4 in.private collection

45. Raphaelle Peale, Strawberries andCream, 1818oil on panel, 13 Vs x g]/2 in.Collection of Mr. and Mrs. PaulMellon, Upperville, Virginiasigned lower right: Raphaelle Peale 1818

*46. Raphaelle Peale, Fruit Piece withPeaches Covered by a Handkerchief[Covered Peaches}, c. 1819oil on panel, 12^2 x 18 Vs in.private collectionsigned lower right: Raphaelle PealePinx.

129

1847

1813

of the Peale Museum, 1813jsme Orgelsby Peale

182/?/Pinx.

47- Samuel F. B. Morse, The Old House ofRepresentatives, 1822oil on canvas, 86^2 x 130% in.The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Mu-seum Purchase, Gallery Fund, 1911

48. Samuel F. B. Morse, Gallery of theLouvre, 1831-1833oil on canvas, 73% x 108 in.Courtesy of the Daniel J. Terra Collec-tion, Terra Museum of American Art,Chicago

49. John Vanderlyn, The Palace and Gardenof Versailles, panorama, 1816-1819oil on canvas, 12 x 165 ft. [length ofboth panels combined]The Metropolitan Museum of Art,Gift of the Senate House Association,Kingston, New York, 1952

*5O. Raphaelle Peale, Still Life with Cake,1818oil on panel, 10% x 15^4 in.Lent by The Metropolitan Museum ofArt, Maria DeWitt Jesup Fund, 1959signed lower right: Raphaelle PealeFeb g 1818

*5i. Raphaelle Peale, Still Life with Water-melon, 1822oil on canvas, i63/4 x 26^2 in.Berry-Hill Galleries, New Yorksigned lower right: Raphaelle PealePinxl.i822Phila.

52. Advertisement, Poulsoris AmericanDaily Advertiser, 10 October 1801

*53. Raphaelle Peale, Still Life with Liqueurand Fruit, c. 1814oil on panel, i3]/4 x igT/2 in.Eleanor Searle Whitney McCollum,Houston, Texassigned lower right: Raphaelle PealeAug'. i8[f]

54. Cover drawing by Sempe, © 1988,The New York Magazine, Inc.

55. Detail of fig. 44

*56. Rembrandt Peale, Rubens Peale with aGeranium, 1801oil on canvas, 28 x 24 in.National Gallery of Art, Patrons'Permanent Fund

57. Charles Willson Peale, Benjamin andEleanor Ridgely Laming, 1788oil on canvas, 42 x 6oV4 in.National Gallery of Art, Washington,Gift of Morris Schapiro

*58. James Peale, Fruit Still Life with ChineseExport Basket, 1824oil on panel, 14% x 17% in.Jeanne Rowe Mathison Family inMemory of Robert Vincent Mathison

59. Ralph Earl, Daniel Boardman, 1789oil on canvas, 81% x 55^4 in.National Gallery of Art, Washington,Gift of Mrs. W. Murray Crane

60. Gilbert Stuart, Mrs. Richard Yates,1793~1794oil on canvas, 30 V4 x 25 in.National Gallery of Art, Washington,Andrew W. Mellon Collection

130

61. Detail of fig. 56

62. Detail of fig. 56

63. Detail of fig. 56

64. Thomas Eakins, Baby at Play, 1876oil on canvas, 32^4 x 48% in.National Gallery of Art, Washington,John Hay Whitney Collection

65. Detail of fig. 56

*66. Raphaelle Peale, Still Life: Wine, Cakes,and Nuts, 1819oil on panel, i23/4 x 14% in.The Henry E. Huntington Libraryand Art Gallerysigned lower right: Raphael Peale Phila.i8ig

67. Detail fig. 2

*68. Raphaelle Peale, Still Life with Grapesand Dish, 1814oil on panel, 8V2 x io*/2 in.private collectionsigned lower right: Raphaelle PealeOctobr.i8i4/Philada.

*6g. Raphaelle Peale, Still Life with Cake,1822oil on panel, g]/2 x n3fe in.The Brooklyn Museum, MuseumCollection Fundsigned lower right: Raphaelle Peale

y. f 1822

*7O. Raphaelle Peale, Still Life with Peach,c. 1816oil on panel, 7% x 8% in.San Diego Museum of Art, Purchasedthrough funds provided by the EarleW. Grant Acquisition Fundsigned lower right: R. Peale

71. Detail of fig. 23

*72. Raphaelle Peale, Still Life with Steak,c. 1817oil on panel, 13% x 19^2 in.Munson-Williams-Proctor InstituteMuseum of Artsigned lower right: Painted by RaphaellePeale

*73. James Peale, Still Life with Fruit,1824-1826?oil on canvas, 18 Vs x 26^2 in.Munson-Williams-Proctor InstituteMuseum of Art, Museum Purchase inMemory of William C. Murray[shown only in Washington]

*74. Raphaelle Peale, Melons and MorningGlories, 1813oil on canvas, 20% x 25% in.National Museum of American Art,Smithsonian Institution, Gift ofPaul Mellonsigned lower right: Raphaelle PealePainted/Philadelphia Sep1. 3d. 1813

*75. Raphaelle Peale, Peaches, c. 1817oil on panel, 13 Vs x ig3/4 in.Richard York Gallery, New York

131

TDish, 1818oil on panel, 10 x 15^4 in.Courtesy Mr. and Mrs. Robert C.Graham, Sr.signed lower right: R. Peale 1818

77. Detail of fig. 40

*78. Raphaelle Peale, Cake and Wine, 1813oil on panel, 7% x nVs in.private collectionsigned lower right: Raphaelle Peale

79. Detail of fig. 44

*8o. Raphaelle Peale, Still Life with Raisins,Yellow and Red Apples in PorcelainBasket, c. 1820-1822oil on panel, 12% x 19 in.The Baltimore Museum of Art, Giftof Mrs. Francis White, from theCollection of Mrs. Miles White, Jr.signed lower right: R. Peale

132

1813

Raphaelle Peale, Fruits and Nuts in a