Existing comment:
Charles Willson Peale, 1741-1827
This meticulously rendered portrait depicts the accomplished artist, naturalist, engineer, and museum-founder Charles Willson Peale. Committed to the Revolutionary cause, Peale, who fought alongside George Washington, painted more than a thousand portraits of major American political and cultural figures. Peale's museum, which included the skeleton of a mastodon he helped exhume, attained scientific recognition and international fame. Late in life, Peale even became a dentist, pioneering in America the use of porcelain for false teeth.
The delicate details of this drawing were copied from an 1807 profile engraving by Charles Balthazar Julien Févret de Saint-Mémin. The artist is most likely Peale's youngest son Titian Ramsay Peale II (1799–1885). Like his siblings, Titian expanded upon the scientific and artistic pursuits of his father and, as a budding naturalist and illustrator, demonstrates here the close observation and precise hatching that would characterize his ornithological and entomological sketches.
Attributed to Titian Ramsay Peale II, c. 1810-20 |