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Died on 03 October 1860: Rembrandt
Peale, US painter and writer, born on 22 February
1778. He dies the day before the 191th anniversary of the death of Rembrandt
van Rijn, after whom he was named by his father Charles
Willson Peale [15 April 1741 – 22 February 1827], who died on the
49th birthday of Rembrandt Peale. — Brother of Raphaelle Peale [17 Feb 1774 – 25 Mar 1825], Rubens Peale [1784-1864], Sarah Miriam Peale [1800-1885], Titian Peale [1799-1881], nephew of James Peale [1749~1831]
Rembrandt Peale, member of the famous Peale family of artists, painted hundreds of portraits. [portrait of George Washington >]
Rembrandt Peale, born in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, was the son of Philadelphia artist and museum proprietor Charles Willson Peale, and his first wife Rachel Brewer, and the nephew of James Peale. He and his siblings, Rubens, Raphaelle (A Dessert), Titian Ramsay (Buffalo Hunt on the Platte), Sophonisba Angusciola, and Angelica Kauffmann (named after Swiss Neoclassical Painter Angelica Kauffmann [1741-1807] ), were born during the most productive years of their father's painting career and were named after European artists.
Rembrandt Peale was a precocious artist, painting his first work, a self-portrait, at the age of thirteen. He continued to work as a portrait and history painter for almost seventy years, producing more than a thousand works. His most original works date from the first three decades of the nineteenth century. Although Philadelphia was his home town, Rembrandt worked at various times in most of the other major eastern United States cities, including Boston, New York, Baltimore, Washington and Charleston. As a young artist he benefited from his father's friendships and patronage in Federal America. He studied the work of contemporary painters, including Gilbert Stuart and Robert Edge Pine, as well as paintings by European artists that could be found in private collections.
His father made it possible for him to paint life portraits of George Washington (1795) and Thomas Jefferson (1800, 1805). Charles Willson's ambitions also made him a museum director at times. In 1795-1798, for example, he went to Charleston, Baltimore, and New York City to paint portraits and exhibit sixty copies of his father's museum portraits, painted by himself and Raphaelle. In Baltimore in 1796-98 he managed the first Peale family museum outside of Philadelphia.
In 1798-99 he worked as an itinerant artist in Maryland. In 1801 he assisted his father in unearthing the bones of prehistoric mammals in Newburgh, New York, and the following year he and Rubens took the skeleton assembled from these remains to England for exhibition. From 1813 to 1822 he established and managed the Peale Museum in Baltimore.
More than was true for his father, Rembrandt benefitted as an artist from extended periods spent in European capitals. He studied briefly at the Royal Academy while in London in 1802-1803. He traveled to France in 1808, and again in 1809-1810, painting portraits of French scientists, artists and writers in Paris for his father's collection of portraits. His third European stay was in Italy, in 1828-1830, where he copied old master paintings for American collectors. On his last European trip, in 1832-1833, he returned to England.
As a result, especially of the early trips, Rembrandt's style of painting changed, when he was still a young artist, from the tight, closely observed eighteenth century manner of his father, to a style strongly influenced by French neoclassicism and the work of Jacques-Louis David. His first attempt at a grand manner history painting was The Roman Daughter (1811). Even more ambitious was his enormous, multifigured painting of Court of Death (1820), whose theme of individual choice in creating a happy and rational life expressed the tenets of the new, controversial religion of Unitarianism. Next he turned his attention to creating a heroic portrait of Washington. His result was the painting known from its inscription as the "Patriae Pater" portrait — Washington as Father of his Country (1824). Later, in the 1840s, Peale returned to painting replicas of his portrait of Washington, capitalizing on the fact that he was the only living artist who had painted the first President's portrait at life sittings.
While Rembrandt's ambitions and opportunities were very much derived from his father's energy and drive, the results and the context of his work was of his own generation. After his trips to England and Paris, Charles Willson Peale turned to him to learn new techniques for painting. His creation of an idealized portrait of Washington was a response to the nationalistic demands of the 1820s, marking the end of the Revolutionary era. His subject pictures of the 1830s and 1840s reflected the sentiments of the Victorian era.
Rembrandt Peale was the husband of Harriet Cany Peale.
Peale also promoted his theories of art and its role in a democracy by publishing brochures, articles and books. Some, like Description of the Court of Death; an Original Painting by Rembrandt Peale (1820), were written to accompany exhibitions of his work, held in several American cities. Others, including Graphics; A Manual of Drawing and Writing for the Use of Schools and Families (1835) and Introduction to Notes of the Painting Room (1852), were intended as drawing and painting manuals for mechanics and art students. He also wrote reminiscences of his life and family, poems, and accounts of his travels. From 1855 to 1857 he offered a personal history of US art in his Reminiscences and Notes and Queries published in The Crayon, a popular art periodical. He died in Philadelphia on 03 October 1860, the day before the 191th anniversary of the death of Rembrandt van Rijn, after whom he was named.
— LINKS
— Rubens Peale with a Geranium _ Rubens Peale with Geranium, (1801)
— Portrait of Rosalba Peale (1820) — Michael Angelo and Emma Clara Peale (1826)
— Falls of Niagara Viewed from the American Side (1831) — George Washington (1814)
— Porthole Portrait of George Washington (1795, 90x74cm) _ In 1823 (1853?) Rembrandt Peale announced that he, one of the few living artists who had painted Washington from life, would create a portrait of the subject that would surpass all others in its authenticity and expression. The result was what has become known as the "porthole" Washington, from the trompe-l'oeil stone frame that surrounds the bust. Peale launched a publicity campaign that evidently worked, for it is estimated that between seventy-five and eighty replicas were produced.
_ Although known as a member of one of the US's most famous artistic families, only recently has Rembrandt Peale emerged from the group as an individual who virtually embodied the industrious, experimental, yet above all fickle age of capitalism in which he lived. Ever seeking imaginative means by which to weave the production and appreciation of art into the fabric of the US's democratic enterprise-working in many of America's growing cities and founding a museum to foster national taste-Rembrandt Peale forged a career for himself characterized as much by failure as success. But, whereas such fits and starts were once considered reason to overlook him, the persistence with which he met them can be considered as the quality that makes him a quintessentially US painter. Raised in the long shadows of his accomplished artist-father, Charles Willson Peale, and the heroes and statesmen whose portraits lined the walls of his father's gallery, Rembrandt was, in a sense, surrounded by the achievements of past masters. The challenge to distinguish himself as an artist was compounded by a lack of public interest in the arts, his poor business skills, and his desire to depart from the well-trodden path of portrait painting.
However, it was as a portraitist that Peale was able to support his large family and combine his high-minded, nationalist ideals with an art that appealed to a large audience. Having first painted George Washington in 1795, and having won acclaim for his Patriae Pater (1824), Rembrandt stated in the 1850s that his true calling was "to multiply the Countenance of Washington.113 By his death in 1860 he had done so no less than seventy-nine times, systematically producing simplified versions of the Patriae Pater that became known as the porthole portraits, of which the Butler Institute's is one. Possibly seeking to surpass his father in painting the US's great figures, Rembrandt sought to capture the visage of the founding father both for the edification of the public and as the crowning achievement of his career. He perceived himself singularly qualified to paint what he called the "standard likeness" of Washington, writing that, 'Among the few persons now living, who can speak of their own impressions . . . concerning the personal appearance of Washington, I may be supposed to have some claim on the confidence of the rising generation-educated to venerate the memory of him, who will always be 'first in the hearts of his countrymen!" Emphasizing the fact that he had painted Washington from life, Rembrandt supported his claim by soliciting testimonials from other men who knew Washington personally and could confirm the accuracy of his portrait. He sought to distinguish himself from other artists who had painted the first president from life, and at last to match the accomplishments of his father, whom he acknowledged as having painted "the first portrait of Washington in 1772. Rembrandt's insistence on the importance of his direct contact with Washington is ironic. With his subject long dead, his Patriae Pater and the subsequent porthole portraits were actually composites of his 1795 portrait and others he had admired, such as the famous bust by the French sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon. Nevertheless, his enterprise was a success, coming at a time of renewed interest in Washington as a national hero. The importance of Rembrandt Peale's icon-making to the evolution of American culture has been confirmed most recently in the potency of 1960s Pop Art images, and by that movement's revelation of our society's ongoing interest in icon creation.
— Gilbert Stuart (1805, 60x50cm) _ Charles Willson Peale accompanied his son and protégé, Rembrandt Peale, to Washington, DC, in 1805 to assist him in obtaining important portrait commissions that would establish him as a painter. It was at this time, for example, that the younger Peale painted the Society's portrait of Thomas Jefferson. This portrait of fellow-artist Gilbert Stuart was also painted in Washington at this time.
— Thomas Jefferson (1805, 71x60cm) _ Rembrandt Peale first painted Jefferson in 1800 (oil at Peabody Insitute, Baltimore). In 1805 he and his father, Charles Willson Peale, went ot Washington where Rembrandt painted portraits of national celebrities to hang in their Philadelphia museum. When the Peale Museum was dispersed in 1854 this portrait was purchased by the subject's namesake, Thomas Jefferson Bryan, and subsequently given by him to The New-York Historical Society.
