Portrait in a Minute: Charles Willson Peale

I'm David C. Ward, and this is Portrait in a Minute. Today we're looking at a 1791 self-portrait by the artist Charles Wilson Peale. Peale, when he did this picture, was 50 years old, roughly halfway through his extraordinarily long career, first as an artist and then as a museum keeper. He was making that transition at just about this time, founding his Philadelphia Museum. He was an orphan. His father died when he was 8. He was raised in difficult circumstances. His education ended early. He was raised in Maryland by his mother as part of a very large family. And he took whatever jobs he could get as an artisan, and he was handy. And one of the things that he was handy at was painting pictures. He saw some early colonial pictures, some early colonial painting, and said, hey, I can do that, which he did. And he was good enough so that the wealthy patrons in Maryland sent him to London to become a trained portrait painter in the studio of Benjamin West, the king's painter. And what he realized in London was what he could do and what he couldn't do. What he realized was that he was not going to ever be the sophisticated art historical painter of Benjamin West doing large tableaux, large canvases on historical subjects. But what he recognized was that he could take a likeness. He could represent the individual who was sitting in front of him. So he comes back to the United States and made himself the painter of the rising American generation, the generation that fought and won the Revolution, the generation that created the Constitution and the early Republic. He relocated from Maryland to Philadelphia to paint the political class. He painted the politicians from Washington and Jefferson. He made something of a specialty of painting Washington. And he painted them in a way which was appealing to Americans. And you can see that appeal in this painting, where Peale looks at us directly, honestly, openly. Not a lot of flamboyance, not a lot of luxury, but what you have is the penetrating gaze of a man who knew who he was and knew what his country was all about. There was no better painter of the American people than Charles Wilson Peale. This has been Portrait in a Minute.