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| "Rubens Peale with a Geranium," by Rembrandt Peale, the sitter's older brother, 1801. |
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| Miniature portrait by Anna Claypoole Peale, the sitter's first cousin, 1822. |
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| Watercolor on ivory, 2 7/8 x 2 1/4 inches. |
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| "Rubens Peale as a Mascot," by Raphaelle Peale, the sitter's eldest bother, 1795. |
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| Miniature portrait by Raphaelle Peale, circa 1801. |
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| Watercolor on paper, 3 3/4 x 2 5/8. |
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| A second portrait by Rembrandt Peale, 1807. |
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Rubens Peale (4 May 1784, Philadelphia - 17 July 1865, Philadelphia), American museum administrator and artist, the fourth son of artist-naturalist Charles Willson Peale. Due to his weak eyesight, he did not set out to be an artist, unlike most of his siblings; it was not until the last decade of his life that he began to take up painting seriously. In 1803 he attended classes at the University of Pennsylvania and was director of his father's museum in Philadelphia from 1810 to 1821, and then of the Peale Museum in Baltimore, which he ran with his brother, Rembrandt Peale. He married in 1820 - he and his wife would have seven children - and he opened his own museum in New York in 1825. The Panic of 1837 sent his museum into debt and eventually, in 1843, he was forced to sell his entire collection to P.T. Barnum. He retired to the estate of his father-in-law, near Schuylkill Haven, Pennsylvania, and lived as something of a country gentleman, at Woodland Farm. He experimented with mesmerism, and wrote to his brother Rembrandt about it. In 1855, he began keeping a journal and turned to still-life painting as an extension of his interest in natural history. In 1864, he returned to Philadelphia, and studied landscape painting there with Edward Moran. In the last ten years before his death at the age of eighty-one, he produced one-hundred and thirty paintings.
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| Detail of "Rubens Peale with a Geranium." |
His only daughter, Mary Jane (1826 - 1902), was among the last members of the Peale family to paint professionally, having studied with her uncle Rembrandt. She is actually sometimes credited with teaching her father to paint, after his retirement. There is also evidence that some of the works attributed to him may have instead been collaborative creations between the two. And after her father's death, Mary Jane completed his unfinished paintings.
I liked the Peale Museum because of the portraits, but particularly because of its architectural history.
ReplyDeleteThe Museum was opened in 1814 by Rembrandt Peale, son of portrait painter Charles Wilson Peale.
The museum was renovated and used as the seat of city government from 1830-76, then a school and then as Municipal offices and as a municipal museum until the late 1990s. Later the Peale Centre for Baltimore History and Architecture agreed to restore the famous building and use it as public space. Thankfully in 1971 it was named as a National Historic Landmark.