1987.41 Peale, George Washington | DMA Staging Content Management System

GENERAL DESCRIPTION

The then seventeen-year-old artist Rembrandt Peale painted George Washington (1732-1799) from life for three days in 1795. The opportunity came thanks to his father, artist Charles Willson Peale, who had befriended the president and completed several acclaimed portraits of Washington as a general. As Rembrandt Peale remembered later about the seven a.m. appointment with the president, "I was up before daylight and putting everything in the best condition for the sitting with which I was to be honored, but before the hour arrived became so agitated that I could scarcely mix my colors."

Although Washington's popularity waned at the end of his life, the country's return to war with Great Britain in 1812 and Mexico in 1846 brought new cultural significance to the nation's founding. In 1823, long after Washington's death and in response to the enduring popularity of Gilbert Stuart's portrait of the president, Peale revised his original studies into Patriae Pater (1824), a work he intended to be the "standard likeness" for future generations. The neoclassical portrait, which associated President Washington with Solon, the Lawgiver of Athens, epitomized the young nation's desire to emulate the civic virtues of the first republic.

Peale was keenly aware of the symbolic, and he hoped financial, benefits of establishing himself as the premiere painter of the first president. The work shown here is one of the estimated seventy-nine replicas of Patriae Pater's primary motif produced by Peale between 1824 and 1860. Peale widely advertised these works through pamphlets that included confirmations of the president's appearance and personal recollections by Washington's friends and acquaintances. He also delivered lectures on the portraits, believing that, in addition to edifying the public, such a personal association with Washington dignified his own career as a portraitist.

In this painting, Peale idealized Washington's features according to fashionable theories of physiognomy, in which facial proportions acted as signs of character or moral standing. The very soft modelling in this example is characteristic of the later copies that Peale produced for admiring patrons. He also set the three-quarter length bust into a fictive oval opening recalling both antique sculpture and Renaissance and Baroque state portraiture, perhaps angling for display in the neoclassical interiors of the nation's new Capitol Building. The architectural oval, called a porthole, was often used in paintings and prints to signify the honorable status of the sitter. The clouds filling the background of the oval indicate the heavens and suggest the first president's enlightened mind and ennobled stature.

Adapted from

William Keyse Rudolph, DMA Label copy (1987.41), May 2006.
Gail Davitt, DMA Exhibition Label copy (1987.41) for "Faces of a New Nation: Colonial American Portraits" (October 19, 1997 - January 10, 1998), September 1997.
DMA Label copy (1987.41), TMS curatorial remarks, 1987.

NOTES

Reviewed education file on Rembrandt Peale.

Reviewed object file.

Searched Peale in Piction.

August 31, 2018- web visitor notified Brian Long that the incorrect description was showing online for Ranney's Veterans of 1776. The error was caused by the rule on this note which was applied to 1981.40. I made the change to apply this content to 1987.41. (EAS, 8/31/2018)

As of August 2016- the TMS record was minimal- no provenance, no published references, no bibliography, and only one exhibition recorded.

Added alternate and former titles:

Alternate title- Portrait of Washington (shown on 1964 and 1971 loan paperwork attached as media in TMS)
Alternate title- George Washington (The "Porthole" Portrait)- Title used by William Keyse Rudolph in correspondence with the Hoblitzelle Foundation. Title also used in secondary literature on this series of portraits by Peale.
Alternate title- George Washington, Porthole Portrait
Former title- George Washington, Standard Likenesses- Title used by Rembrandt Peale.
Former title- George Washington, copies- Title used by Rembrandt Peale.

Archived current label copy/public notes as a text entry.

Added four additional text entries with earlier labels, including the label that was found in "curatorial remarks."

Added Famous Families in American Art as an pre-acquisition exhibition and related exhibition (because the exhibition records already exists).

Artist information to add to TMS:

birth- Richboro, Bucks County, PA- b. 22 Feb 1778-
death- Philadelphia- 3 October 1860
Trained- London-(1802-1803) Studied under Benjamin West; took one of the completed mastadon skelatons for exhibition in London.
Worked in Charleston, SC- (1795-1796) Moved to Charleston, Savannah, and Baltimore with elder brother, Raphaelle Peale in search of portrait commissions and to display "Portraits of Patriots."
Worked in Savannah, GA- (1795-1796) Moved to Charleston, Savannah, and Baltimore with elder brother, Raphaelle Peale in search of portrait commissions and to display "Portraits of Patriots."
Worked in Paris (June 1808- October 1808 and October 1809- October 1810)
Worked in Philadelphia (1803-06, 1810-13, 1830s-1860) Helped found Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, built exhibition space that he named the Apollodorian Gallery of Paintings. Returned to city regularly while traveling in search of commissions and then settled there for the final decades of his life.
Worked in Boston (1827-1828)
Worked in Baltimore (1796, 1798, 1814-1822) Moved to Charleston, Savannah, and Baltimore with elder brother, Raphaelle Peale in search of portrait commissions and to display "Portraits of Patriots." Managed Baltimore Museum; commissioned by Baltimore to paint six portraits of the city's war heroes from War of 1812.
Worked in NYC- (1822-1827) A founding member of National Academy of Design in 1826.
Worked in Florence (1828, 1830)- befriended Horatio Greenough, produced "Fac-similes" of Old Masters intended for sale and reproduction in U.S.
Worked in Europe (1831-34) Publishes Notes on Italy (1831) about part of his travels.

Future research:

Correspondence implies that a cat raisonne was in the works by the National Portrait Gallery in 1987. Did this happen?
Vose Galleries, Boston-- Undated documentation in object file- unclear if this is the info for the DMA object. Did the Hoblitzelle Foundation acquire the work from Vose Galleries? If so, then this documentation may offer more details on the provenance, frame, and exhibitions. Based on the exhibitions, it seems doubtful that this is the same work as ours because it lists shows that would have probably been recorded in the object file?
Mr. President- exh id 10879- included one of Peale's Port of GW, but not clear if same painting. Maybe not same as DMA because this was lent by Knoelder Galleries. Again- how to learn where Hoblitzelle acquired the work?
Would be nice to provide Peale's "Ode Suggested by Rembrandt Peale's National Portrait of Washington," Philadelphia: Jesper Harding, 1824" as a supplementary asset online. (EAS- I scanned the photocopy of this source form the object file- see scan saved in Evernote or Dropbox. Did not have time to add to Piction.)
Bibliographic additions- Rembrandt Peale's published writings: Travel accounts- Notes on Italy, 1831; Drawing Manual- Graphics, 1835; The Portfolio of An Artist, 1839; "Reminiscences" published in Crayon 1855-1858

Catalogue essays

Hoblitzelle Foundation

Peale Family (American artists)

Artist/designers

Cultures

Geography

Place of origin- Philadelphia

Process/materials

oil paint

canvas

Historical periods

1783-1800, United States, "Young Republic"

1800-1860, United States, "Exploration, Expansion, Nationalism, and Reform"

1775-1783, United States, "American Revolutionary War"

Individuals

Washington, George (American, 1732 - 1799)

Subject terms

portrait

bust

coat

epaulets

general

man

president

veteran

revolution

war

shirt

soldier

uniform

physiognomy

oval

trompe l'oeil

clouds

American colonies

copying

RELATED OBJECTS

PROVENANCE

As of 1960: Hoblitzelle Foundation, Dallas, TX [1]

From 1987: Dallas Museum of Art, The Karl and Esther Hoblitzelle Collection, gift from the above

[1] The provenance given here is taken from Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, Famous Families in American Art, Dallas, TX, 1960, cat. no. 10, unpaginated.

AUDIO ASSETS

Gallery talk- American Portraiture- Martha MacLeod- 3/25/2015; object number in Piction cataloging. 193852334

Gallery talk--American Revolution in 19th Century Art, Dr. Emily Schiller 272222591

VIDEO ASSETS

IMAGE ASSETS

WEB RESOURCES

Rembrandt Peale, George Washington, Patriae Pater, c. 1824 (Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts)~Look at the painting that Rembrandt Peale considered the "standard likeness" of Washington and served as the basis for the copies he produced for the remainder of his life.
Rembrandt Peale, Portrait of Mary Washington, c. 1856~Compare Rembrandt Peale's portrait of the first president with Peale's portrait of the first, first lady (available through Wikimedia).
Rembrandt Peale on American National Biography Online~Read more about this artist in Carol Eaton Soltis's biography of Rembrandt Peale.
Manuscript, "Portrait of Washington," c.1820s~Look through the digitized papers of Rembrandt and Harriet Peale, including an essay about the importance of presidential portraiture, through the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
George Washington, A National Treasure~Read a full analysis of Gilbert Stuart's influential portrait of the president through this special feature on the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery's website.

ARCHIVAL RESOURCES

FUN FACTS

When Rembrandt Peale had to leave his position as the director of the Baltimore Museum in 1822 because of personal debts, his younger brother Rubens Peale took his place.
In the numerous copies of this portrait, Rembrandt Peale occasionally made small changes—George Washington sometimes is shown looking to his left, or he wears civilian rather than military attire.
When he first went to study under Benjamin West in London, Rembrandt Peale and his brother, Rubens, were transporting one of their father's prized mastodon skeletons.
In 1816, Rembrandt Peale was one of the founders of Gas Light Company of Baltimore (now Baltimore Gas & Electric Co.), the country's first commercial gas company.
According to a letter from Rembrandt Peale to journalist Charles Henry Hart (September 24, 1860), in addition to making at least seventy-nine copies of the porthole portrait, Peale also made at least thirty-nine copies of his father's portrait of the first president. The DMA owns two reproductions based on Charles Willson Peale's portraits of Washington (1941.20) and (1992.B.56).
Among his many talents, Rembrandt Peale was an author. He published an account of his voyage to Italy in 1831, a manual for artists in 1835, an autobiography in 1838, and a series titled "Reminiscences" for the journal Crayon from 1855 to 1858.

TEACHING IDEAS

RULES

Apply to objects where number equals 1987.41

General Description

The then seventeen-year-old artist Rembrandt Peale painted George Washington (1732-1799) from life for three days in 1795. The opportunity came thanks to his father, artist Charles Willson Peale, who had befriended the president and completed several acclaimed portraits of Washington as a general. As Rembrandt Peale remembered later about the seven a.m. appointment with the president, "I was up before daylight and putting everything in the best condition for the sitting with which I was to be honored, but before the hour arrived became so agitated that I could scarcely mix my colors."

Although Washington's popularity waned at the end of his life, the country's return to war with Great Britain in 1812 and Mexico in 1846 brought new cultural significance to the nation's founding. In 1823, long after Washington's death and in response to the enduring popularity of Gilbert Stuart's portrait of the president, Peale revised his original studies into Patriae Pater (1824), a work he intended to be the "standard likeness" for future generations. The neoclassical portrait, which associated President Washington with Solon, the Lawgiver of Athens, epitomized the young nation's desire to emulate the civic virtues of the first republic.

Peale was keenly aware of the symbolic, and he hoped financial, benefits of establishing himself as the premiere painter of the first president. The work shown here is one of the estimated seventy-nine replicas of Patriae Pater's primary motif produced by Peale between 1824 and 1860. Peale widely advertised these works through pamphlets that included confirmations of the president's appearance and personal recollections by Washington's friends and acquaintances. He also delivered lectures on the portraits, believing that, in addition to edifying the public, such a personal association with Washington dignified his own career as a portraitist.

In this painting, Peale idealized Washington's features according to fashionable theories of physiognomy, in which facial proportions acted as signs of character or moral standing. The very soft modelling in this example is characteristic of the later copies that Peale produced for admiring patrons. He also set the three-quarter length bust into a fictive oval opening recalling both antique sculpture and Renaissance and Baroque state portraiture, perhaps angling for display in the neoclassical interiors of the nation's new Capitol Building. The architectural oval, called a porthole, was often used in paintings and prints to signify the honorable status of the sitter. The clouds filling the background of the oval indicate the heavens and suggest the first president's enlightened mind and ennobled stature.