Charles Willson Peale: Art and Selfhood in the Early Republic 9780520930506, 9780520239609

Citation preview

charles willson peale

Self-Portrait, Study for “The Artist in His Museum,” 1822. Oil on canvas, 26 × 22 in. Private collection.

Charles Willson Peale Art and Selfhood in the Early Republic

~ david c. ward

University of California Press berkeley

los angeles

london

University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2004 by the Regents of the University of California in cooperation with the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the University of California Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed to with the appropriate reprographics rights organization.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ward, David C., 1952– Charles Willson Peale : art and selfhood in the early republic / David C. Ward. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-520-23960-1 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Peale, Charles Willson, 1741–1827. 2. Painters—United States—Biography. I. Peale, Charles Willson, 1741–1827. II. Title. nd237.p27w295 759.13—dc22

2004 2003022858

Manufactured in the United States of America 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.48–1992 (r 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

A H M A N S O N • M U R P H Y F I N E

A R T S

I M P R I N T

   has endowed this imprint to honor the memory of       

.

   

who for half a century served arts and letters, beauty and learning, in equal measure by shaping with a brilliant devotion those institutions upon which they rely.

Published with the assistance of the Getty Grant Program

For My Family

The fact is that I have a colorick disposition and therefore I am obliged to keep a bridle constantly tight-reined to stay my tongue and hands from mauling everyone that approaches me. charles willson peale to angelica peale robinson, 1813

contents

List of Illustrations

xi

Acknowledgments

xv

Preface. Charles Willson Peale: This New Man

xvii

part i “[w]hy not act the man[?]” 1

Forging: Charles Willson Peale and His Father

3

2 “This Faint Spark of Genius”: Fortune, Patronage, and Peale’s Rise as an Artist

23

3 “Application Will Overcome the Greatest Difficulties”: Work, Career, and Identity in Peale’s Art and Life

44

part ii “i scru[t]inize the actions of men” 4

A Good War and a Troubled Peace: Charles Willson Peale’s Search for Order, 1776–94

5 “The Medicinal Office of the Mind”: The Peale Museum’s Mission of Reform, 1793–1810 6 “The Hygiene of the Self”: Work, Writing, and the Enlightened Body

71 95 111

part iii “it would seem a second creation” 7

The Struggle against Dispersal: Work, Family, and Order in Peale’s Family Portraits

8 “I Bring Forth into Public View”: Peale’s Secular Apotheosis in The Artist in His Museum

135 155

Notes

193

Index

231

illustrations

All illustrations are by Charles Willson Peale, unless otherwise indicated. Frontispiece. Self-Portrait, Study for “The Artist in His Museum” (1822; private collection) 1. First page, Charles Willson Peale’s manuscript autobiography (1825; American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia)

xviii

2. The Artist in His Museum (1822; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia)

xix

3. George Washington at Princeton (1779; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia)

xxi

4. John and Elizabeth Lloyd Cadwalader and Their Daughter Anne (1772; Philadelphia Museum of Art)

18

5. Judge James Arbuckle of Accomac (1766; private collection)

26

6. Charles Carroll, Barrister (1770; Mount Clare Museum House, Baltimore)

27

7. Benjamin West, Charles Willson Peale (c. 1767–69; New-York Historical Society, New York City)

31

8. Boy with a Toy Horse (1768; Bayou Bend Collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston)

34

9. William Pitt (1768; Westmoreland County Museum and Library)

36

10. John Dickinson (1770; Atwater Kent Museum of Philadelphia)

38

11. John Beale Bordley (1770; National Gallery of Art,Washington)

40

12. George Washington in the Uniform of a British Colonial Colonel (1772; Washington and Lee University)

47

xi

xii

•

List of Illustrations

13. Benjamin and Eleanor Ridgely Laming (1788; National Gallery of Art, Washington)

49

14. Polygraph sold to Thomas Jefferson by C. W. Peale (n.d.; University of Virginia Library)

55

15. Mr. and Mrs. James Gittings and Granddaughter (1791; Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore)

59

16. William Smith and His Grandson (1788; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond)

60

17. Benjamin Rush (1783; Winterthur Museum, Delaware)

62

18. David Rittenhouse (1791; American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia)

63

19. John Adams (c. 1791–94; Independence National Historical Park Collection, Philadelphia)

72

20. Self-Portrait in Uniform (1777–78; American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia)

73

21. (Above) Peale’s signature, CWP to George Washington, February 27, 1787 (American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia) (Below) Peale’s signature, CWP to William Hollinshead, December 21, 1779 (American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia)

75

22. Gouverneur Morris and Robert Morris (1783; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia)

80

23. Alexander Hamilton (1790–95; Independence National Historical Park Collection, Philadelphia)

84

24. James Wilkinson (1796–97; Independence National Historical Park Collection, Philadelphia)

84

25. Johann, Baron de Kalb (1781–82; Independence National Historical Park Collection, Philadelphia)

85

26. Benjamin Franklin (1785; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia)

85

27. Benedict Arnold and the Devil (1780; Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia)

86

28. Drawing by Lester Hoadley Sellers, “A Reconstruction of Peale’s Transparent Triumphal Arch, 1783–84” (American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia)

91

List of Illustrations

•

xiii

29. The Staircase Group (Portrait of Raphaelle Peale and Titian Ramsay Peale) (1795; Philadelphia Museum of Art)

100

30. Titian Ramsay Peale, Missouri Bears (c. 1819–22; American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia)

106

31. Mary (“Molly”) Tilghman (1790; Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore)

116

32. Charles Willson Peale (c. 1791; National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington)

117

33. Page, autobiographical fragment (1790; American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia)

118

34. Thomas Jefferson (1791–92; Independence National Historical Park Collection, Philadelphia)

124

35. The Goldsborough Family (1789; private collection)

137

36. Thomas McKean and His Son (1787; Philadelphia Museum of Art)

138

37. The Peale Family (1773, 1809; New-York Historical Society, New York City)

139

38. Exhuming the First American Mastodon (1806–8; Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore)

148

39. After Charles Catton, Noah and His Ark (1819; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia)

151

40. Self-Portrait with Spectacles (1804; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia)

156

41. Self-Portrait, “In the Character of a Painter” (1824; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia)

157

42. Self-Portrait, “For the Multitude” (1824; New-York Historical Society, New York City)

158

43. Self-Portrait, “Painted in the Eighty-First Year of His Age without Spectacles” (1822; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco)

159

44. Herman van der Myn, Charles Calvert, Fifth Lord Baltimore (c. 1730; Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore)

164

45. Raphaelle Peale (1822; private collection)

165

46. Raphaelle Peale, Venus Rising from the Sea: A Deception (After the Bath) (c. 1822; Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri)

166

xiv

•

List of Illustrations

47. Charles Willson Peale and Titian Ramsay Peale, The Long Room, Interior of the Front Room in Peale’s Museum (1822; Detroit Institute of Arts)

169

48. Rembrandt Peale, Charles Willson Peale (1811; Atwater Kent Museum of Philadelphia)

173

49. “The Philadelphia Arcade” (c. 1827; unlocated woodcut reproduced in J. Thomas Scharf and Thompson Westcott, History of Philadelphia, 1609–1884 [Philadelphia, 1884])

191

acknowledgments

This book had its beginning in a lecture on Peale that I gave at the University of Kansas. It was subsequently published in Word and Image as “An Artist’s Self-Fashioning: The Forging of Charles Willson Peale.” I would like to thank Charles Eldredge, who invited me to address the Kress Art History Department, not only for an enjoyable visit to Lawrence but also for the opportunity—and the spur—to organize my thoughts about Charles Willson Peale. In 1999 I approached fine arts editor Stephanie Fay, at the University of California Press, about doing a book on Peale. Stephanie guided this book through the proposal, writing, editing, and publication processes. I would like to thank her, editorial assistant Erin Marietta, and the staff of the University of California Press for their expertise. At the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, I received the support and assistance of director emeritus Alan Fern and current director Marc Pachter. Barbara Hart, formerly associate director of the NPG, helped guide my book contract through the Smithsonian’s Office of the General Counsel, which approved it. Because I am an employee of the federal government, any and all royalties from this book are assigned to the NPG. Eloise P. Baden, NPG’s chief administrative officer, and her staff, Kristy Sohl and Sonia Pearson, provided logistical and accounting support to pay for rights and reproductions. The staff of the library assisted me as I prepared the manuscript, especially with interlibrary loans. I thank them all. I am grateful for the support I have received from my friend, colleague, and scholarly collaborator Sidney Hart, with whom I have worked at the Peale Family Papers for over twenty years. Now editor of the Papers, Sidney has given me encouragement on all my publications, including this one. I also thank the art and cultural historian Tess Mann, assistant editor of the Peale Family Papers, for her incisive criticism of a first and subsequent drafts. Among my personal obligations, I owe a tremendous debt to Dianne S. xv

xvi

•

Acknowledgments

Ward for her support. Allison B. Freeman, Frank Goodyear, the late Ellen H. Grayson, Jennifer A. Greenhill, Stephen A. Mihm, Mary Panzer, Leslie Reinhardt, Darcy Tell, Jennifer N. Thompson, Andrew Ward, and Chris Ward also made significant contributions to this book. Rosemarie P. McGerr of Indiana University helped provide sources in English literature about the Fall of Man. While writing this book, I had the opportunity to work with the staff at Independence National Historical Park, Philadelphia, on the redesign of their exhibition at the Second Bank Building of Peale’s portraits and his museum. This work helped me clarify my thinking about the museum and gave me the opportunity to look at their great collection of Peale portraits. I want to take this opportunity to pay a long overdue personal and scholarly bill by thanking my teachers: at the University of Rochester, the late Christopher Lasch and Eugene D. Genovese; at Warwick University (England), Tony Mason; and my late father, John William Ward.

preface

charles willson peale: this new man In autumn 1825 the artist and museum proprietor Charles Willson Peale, aged eighty-four and with less than two years to live, started writing a manuscript he titled “The Life of Charles Willson Peale” (Figure 1). Working with characteristic dispatch, Peale raced through his life, bringing the manuscript up to the events of 1825 before he stopped writing, in April 1826. In about six months, Peale produced a manuscript that fills just under a thousand notebook pages approximately 7 by 5 inches, capping a decade in which he was preoccupied with self-portraiture. In the early 1820s he painted six self-portraits, showing himself in his public roles of artist and museum director. The final one, a pictorial summation of his life, was The Artist in His Museum (Figure 2), the masterwork by which he is best known. It has become an icon of early American culture. Although it is no surprise that Peale would paint himself, to write an autobiography was exceptional at a time in American history when the genre was almost nonexistent. Earlier confessional works, which offer the closest American approximation, tend to focus on the writer’s relationship to God; in contrast, Peale’s extraordinary text presents a completely secular life, describing not how God made him but how he worked to make himself.1 Although best known as an artist who painted hundreds of portraits, Peale had a lifelong preoccupation, verging on an obsession, with writing. His extant personal and familial archive includes more than six thousand documents, ranging from ephemera to a sixty-year correspondence, diaries, and the autobiography. The connection between the visual and the verbal is arguably stronger in Peale than in any other artist in any era. In a way Peale’s manuscript autobiography serves as the longest museum label ever written, designed to “explain” the figure that he exhibited in his self-portraits.2 xvii

xviii

•

Preface

figure 1. First page, Charles Willson Peale’s manuscript autobiography, 1825. American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia.

The autobiography, resolutely chronological and empirical like all Peale’s writings, is stylistically the measure of the man. It demonstrates Peale’s Enlightenment faith that the encyclopedic cataloging of descriptive phenomena would yield knowledge and mastery. Peale wrote about himself in the third person in the autobiography and in many of his letters, treating himself as a subject for scientific scrutiny. He created narratives of his life’s activities as he lived the life itself, ultimately tying all the narratives together in the autobiography. In all these writings, though, Peale avoided introspection, offering instead a chronological account of his activities, particularly his work.3 If a man’s worth is known by his work, Peale’s worth was immense. Charles Willson Peale gave a face to America from 1765 to 1824. Neither as gifted as John Singleton Copley nor as innovative as Benjamin West, Peale built his reputation as the illustrator of the young Republic by producing hundreds of portraits of both political leaders and “middling people.” These portraits tracked the growth of Americans’ material and intellectual selfconfidence, celebrated the leaders and the participants in the cause of

figure 2. The Artist in His Museum, 1822. Oil on canvas, 1033⁄4 × 797⁄8 in., acc. no. 1878.1.2. Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. Gift of Mrs. Sarah Harrison (The Joseph Harrison, Jr., Collection).

xx

•

Preface

independence, and, as a collective biography of young America, contributed to a democratic ideology reconciling individualism and the nation-state. They served the aesthetic and social needs of the political class. When Peale concluded after the Revolution that private art was not enough for the new nation’s public, he became active in presenting political spectacles that dramatized the great events of the revolutionary and constitutional periods. Such spectacles, however, proved too ephemeral for Peale. Seeking an institutional platform to present his ideas, he founded his Philadelphia Museum (or, familiarly, Peale’s museum) in the 1780s. There he acted as America’s educator, presenting the exhibition of natural and human history as a means of perfecting individuals and society. His audience shifted from the single patron to the nation at large as he demonstrated the role of culture and cultural institutions in reinforcing democratic republicanism.4 Peale worked hard in his autobiography and elsewhere to make the course of his long life seem inevitable and seamless in its progress. In this he succeeded: his historical position is defined, as he intended it to be, by the monumental, emblematic self-portrait The Artist in His Museum. In art historical terms, Peale’s self-projection in this portrait calls to mind not just the great public portraits of the American founders—especially the Washington portraits painted by Peale (Figure 3) and Gilbert Stuart—but even the imperial portraiture of European court painters such as Allan Ramsay’s paintings of George III. But unlike those portraits, which match the grandeur of the portrait to that of the subject, Peale’s grand self-portrait represents an eighty-one-year-old artist whose public and private achievements, though substantial, did not extend to officeholding, let alone national leadership. What led Peale to this audacious self-depiction is a central issue of this book.5 Would Peale have been pleased to know that posterity has acquiesced to the terms of his self-portrayal? Peale framed his persona as he did, concealing his struggles and uncertainties, to give his life course the appearance of an inevitable progression and thus control and limit questions. Peale scholarship has been positively Manichaean in its division between those who see The Artist in His Museum as the sign of Peale’s virtue and those who see its virtuous surface as a cover for the artist’s unsavory acts and motivations. It is counterproductive to continue to argue about Peale’s life as either fact or fiction, truth or lie. It ought to be possible now to present an interpretation of Peale’s life and career in the context of the early national period. There was no “one” Peale who can be pinned down, verified, and classified like a scientific specimen. In Peale’s life, creating the masterful figure who appears in The Artist in His Museum was more challenging than the painted

figure 3. George Washington at Princeton, 1779. Oil on canvas, 93 × 581⁄2 in., acc. no. 1943.16.2. Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. Gift of Maria McKean Allen and Phebe Warren Downes through the bequest of their mother, Elizabeth Wharton McKean.

xxii

•

Preface

image indicates or scholarship suggests.6 Peale lived at the time when the Enlightenment gave rise to political and economic revolutions in America and western Europe. The people who made those revolutions considered themselves masters of the worlds they were making. Yet as the poet Joseph Brodsky writes, “Seen from the outside, creativity is the object of fascination or envy; seen from within, it is uncertainty and a tremendous school for insecurity.” While Peale’s archive demonstrated his creative attempt to master himself, and thereby the world, it also is the arena in which all his uncertainties and insecurities, beginning with the early death of his father, manifested themselves.7 During his staggeringly full life, Peale played many roles. Son of a convicted felon, Peale himself was an indentured servant, an artisan, an aspiring artist and student, an established portrait painter who produced an unparalleled body of work, a revolutionary soldier, a radical activist and officeholder, a quasi-official artist who produced public portraits and political spectacles, an impresario of moving pictures, and a natural historian and proprietor of one of the first modern museums. He was an inventor; an essayist on health, science, and natural history; and an indefatigable correspondent with like-minded men, such as Jefferson, about topics as varied as cooking utensils and the extinction of species. Never permitting himself to be inactive, Peale, during a decade of rural “retirement,” became a scientific agronomist and landscape architect. This list encompasses only Peale’s major public pursuits; it cannot do justice to his daily activities. During all his careers, Peale supported, and was supported by, his large nuclear family and an extended family that included his brother James Peale, also an artist. Given the fullness of Peale’s life and the amplitude of his writings, I present, not an empirically all-encompassing biography of Peale, but a biographical interpretation of his life and art. Such an interpretation of Peale must include the ongoing process of self-creation, through writing and visual representation, as well as the myriad other events of his life. Peale selfconsciously constructed his persona, compulsively recording himself both in writing and in painting. He was that particularly American phenomenon, the self-made man—self-made not only in the usual public sense of economic and social success but in the private sense I have described.8 Although Peale is my focus, the wider social world—broadly, the economic and political changes marking the transition from the eighteenth century to the early nineteenth—is always implicit in his decisions and actions. In augmenting and projecting his personal autonomy and power, Peale both reflected and supported the developing culture of American individualism.

Preface

•

xxiii

Work was central to him as a way of maintaining personal autonomy as well as the social order. The experience of being in debt and ideas about indebtedness were also critical to his life and aesthetic. In Peale’s mind, personal health was related to the “health” of the body politic. His devotion to what Lionel Trilling has called the “hygiene of the self” offers a case study of a modernizing society disciplining the self so that individuals can function at the highest level of energy, thereby replicating both the individual and the society at large.9 Yet Peale’s individualism was constrained by the transitional moment in history through which he lived. During his life Peale endeavored to balance opposing impulses of appetite and restraint. For instance, he had to control his own sexual appetites within the structures of marriage and the family. He had three wives in all and seventeen children, thirteen of whom lived to adulthood. His family was the literal and figurative expression of his potency. Something of Peale’s ego and his desire for fame, which until the end of his life he carefully masked, can be found in his naming his children after famous artists and scientists: Rembrandt, Raphaelle, Titian, Benjamin Franklin, and so on. Within certain norms, Peale could exercise great control in his family. Things were more problematical for him as he moved out of the family and into the complexities of the emerging public sphere. In balancing the power of the individual against the necessity of social order, Peale attempted to reconcile the communal values of traditional society with the instrumental relations of modern life. He pursued this amalgamation of old and new in the family but also in his work—his portraiture, his political career during and immediately after the Revolution, the civic celebrations that he presented, and the organization of his museum of art and natural history.10 Peale’s life history is a document in the development and articulation of a specifically American ideology and culture during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In this study of the private and public dimensions of Peale’s autobiographical project, I ultimately seek to address Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s endlessly fascinating question, “What then is the American, this new man?”11

A Note on Peale’s Texts Quotations from Peale’s writings are rendered literally and thus include all misspellings and grammatical errors. Peale’s significant cross-outs are indicated by angled brackets with the omitted word or words in italics: . Interlineations are not noted except when I consider them important indicators of Peale’s thought processes as he wrote. When a word or meaning is garbled or obscure, I offer my reading of it in square brackets. Finally, Peale habitually referred to himself in the third person, a point I note several times in the text.

part i

“[W]hy Not Act the Man[?]”

~ Charles Willson Peale gave this advice to his eldest son, Raphaelle, in 1817. He chastised his son for his dissolute ways, his failure to earn a living, and his disorganized family life. Part of the force of Peale’s indictment derived from his own parlous beginnings, when, as a young man and the son of a convicted felon, he seemed to have little or no future. The lesson that Peale learned from his own adversity was the necessity of continual self-policing and self-reform.

chapter 1

Forging Charles Willson Peale and His Father

~ Not all great families are founded on a crime, but the Peale family was: Charles Peale (1709–50), the artist’s father, was a convicted felon, transported to America after the commutation of a death sentence he received upon being found guilty of theft and forgery while an officer of the London Post Office. “Charles Peel of St. Mary Woolnoth [London]” was indicted on five counts of theft and embezzlement, including embezzling £170 by stealing, forging an endorsement, and then passing a bill of exchange. Tried at the Old Bailey, he “pleaded Guilty, and thereupon receiv’d Sentence of death” in May 1735. The frequency with which the death penalty was imposed and the expansion of the definition of capital crimes were hallmarks of eighteenthcentury English jurisprudence as the magistrates relied on the noose to protect and maintain both property and property relations.1 Peale was doubly implicated. Stealing a note was a straightforward, “traditional” crime of theft. But it was the forgery that gave Peale’s crime its significance and called down the death penalty on him. Convicted forgers had one of the highest rates of execution in mid-eighteenth-century England; even after the death penalty mania waned toward the end of the century, the sentence continued to be imposed disproportionately in cases of forgery. In the context of a modernizing economy, forgery not only evoked traditional fears about the fragility of identity but, by implying a potential to destroy contractual trust, threatened the very basis on which business was conducted. The abstraction of the market, and especially the representation of specie by paper instruments, required the economic fiction that 3

4

•

Part I

buyer and seller were known to each other and met as equals. As the historian J. G. A. Pocock observes, “Once property was seen to have a symbolic value, expressed in coin or credit, the foundations of personality themselves appeared imaginary or at best consensual: the individual could exist, even in his own sight, only at the fluctuating value imposed upon him by his fellows.” The precept “Who steals my purse steals trash,” but “he that filches from me my good name . . . / makes me poor indeed” was taking on new force: a good name was becoming the equivalent of the clinkingly full premodern purse, and the law increasingly came down hard on counterfeits, both metal and flesh.2 What led Charles Peale to commit theft and forgery? Recent English historiography has produced a new version of the once predominant characterization of the eighteenth century as a period of economic prosperity and political and cultural stability. After a decade of interest in “history from the bottom up” scholarship that emphasized inter- and intraclass conflict, a more conservative political era has spawned a conservative historiography, one especially attuned to celebrating macroeconomic growth and material luxury. In this “Great House” interpretation of the culture, material luxury is taken for the society rather than interpreted as the product of the society. To sustain this view, history has to be largely descriptive, and commodity fetishism tends to creep into the scholarly language: the exquisiteness of a Chippendale obliterates the processes by which it was made and marketed; the richness of an Adam facade hides the working life of a Great House; the extended familial life of the Great House is based on the denial of that life to Caribbean slaves; and so on. In accounts of “progress,” elaborations on “the spirit of the age,” and effusive descriptions of the furnishings, what is omitted is a full reckoning of not only how progress is achieved but what it costs as well.3 If we strip away the rich appurtenances that romanticize Georgian England, we can see it as a culture in which money acted to dissolve traditional relationships of all kinds. If everything from offices to ancient demesnes was for sale and the cash nexus was the measure of all worth, then the list of capital crimes had to be expanded to set the outer limits of what would be socially tolerable. In such a zero-sum society, money was especially important for those who did not have it: most obviously the poor (many of whom, it is often forgotten, lived at or below the subsistence level ) but also those men nearly of the middling sort who yearned for a prosperity they feared would pass them by. For Charles Peale, chafing in a career as a government functionary, the desire to rise, to become a member of the gentry, was so overwhelming that he was willing to steal to satisfy it.4

Forging

•

5

Yet Peale was fortunate. If he ran afoul of the law in its enforcement of property rights, he was probably saved from the gallows by his own membership in the class that the law served—or at least his apparent membership in that class, since Charles Peale is a slippery character, about whom the few details known are shadowed by ambiguity and falsehood. He claimed to be a graduate of Cambridge University, although no record of his matriculation, attendance, or graduation has been found. He claimed an inheritance to an estate in Rutlandshire and thus membership in the English “country” gentry. But his claim to the estate has no substantiation except for his profession of it. The efforts he said he made to obtain his family’s due inheritance never succeeded. It has to be wondered if Charles Peale’s forgery speaks to a tendency to dissemble, to inflate his own credentials, and even to assume the persona of another. The small case of Charles Peale, which on one level is an instance of simple résumé padding, says something about the strength of the desire for social mobility—the desire to remake oneself— in eighteenth-century England. Paul Baines has concluded that in that society, “forgery was a kind of bourgeois treason,” but with the crucial difference that the forger wanted to sell into the society, not sell it out. Forgery pushed beyond the permissible limits of shape-shifting in eighteenthcentury England, but it did so (and became a major criminal problem) only because it skirted legitimate methods of success so closely. In eighteenthcentury England, Charles Peale’s crime was not just that he stole but that he failed.5 As the law was designed to benefit the bourgeoisie as a class, it usually benefited its individual members. Despite his questionable résumé, Charles Peale had enough of a foothold in respectable society to have his sentence mitigated. He could not escape his conviction, but he did avoid “Tyburn’s tree.” Perhaps because he pled the case or had influence at court, Peale’s capital punishment was commuted to transportation to the American colonies. Parliament had passed the law permitting transportation in 1717, with felons to serve a term in bondage of seven or fourteen years, depending on the crime. The availability of transportation as a punitive option may have been one reason for the reduction of Peale’s sentence. Charles Peale was duly embarked on the ship Dorsetshire on January 25, 1735, and sent to America with a “cargo” of 169 other felons. After crossing, the Dorsetshire dropped its transportees in Virginia, where Charles Peale landed, and Maryland.6 Lucky in avoiding the gallows, Charles Peale found himself fortunate again upon landing in Tidewater America. He arrived at just the moment when the system of bond labor for whites was ending in colonial Virginia, to be fully replaced by chattel slavery. Socially, bond labor had posed in-

6

•

Part I

tractable problems for the colony and the Crown as bond men, once their terms expired, were released into a society that could not assimilate them economically or socially. After Bacon’s Rebellion (1676), the threat of another class insurrection had to be removed for good. The remedy was a fullfledged commitment to develop slavery as the colony’s primary labor system for staple agricultural production. Concomitant with the move to slavery was an improvement in the colony’s economy that positively affected all its white residents. From the early to the mid–eighteenth century in Virginia, the rich were getting richer, but so were the less rich, and the class of the poor declined in both absolute and comparative terms. As the locus of coerced labor shifted from the general society to the plantation (and as racism and draconian racial laws metastasized in order to justify slavery for blacks), the result was a loosening of legal and customary restrictions on white laborers, including even transported felons.7 Culturally and politically the big planters put aside their class pretensions to embrace lower-class whites in common cause against Africans. Disembarked in Virginia, Charles Peale found the conditions of his punishment so lenient as to be nonexistent.While unable to continue his career as a postal official in the colonies—he apparently sought such an appointment but the authorities prudently turned him down—he was able to work in Virginia as a tutor and later as a schoolteacher, with some pretensions to publishing instructional books. With the War of Jenkins’ Ear (1739), Peale left Virginia for Annapolis, Maryland, where he continued his career as a teacher. He married the already pregnant Margaret Triggs on November 1, 1740, and on April 15, 1741, their first of seven children, Charles Willson Peale, was born.8 Charles Peale was disappointed by his failure to become one of the landed gentry in England or the slaveholding planters in the Tidewater. He lived out his life as a schoolteacher, dying at age forty-one. The meagerness of his property at his death attests to a life lived on the margin. The total estate was valued at just more than £59. The inventory catalogues thirty-four categories of personal and household property, such as six “Rush bottomed Chairs” totaling fifteen shillings, a tea table also at fifteen shillings, “1 Coffee Mill” valued at sixpence, and “2 Armed Chairs” worth two pounds. The inventory lists one suit of clothes, “Coat vest & Breeches,” valued £1.5. The most valuable items enumerated are three horses and one colt, worth a total of £16.10, and a “Riding Chair,” or light carriage, assessed at £12.5. Peale kept a pig and an unspecified number of piglets (£2), owned the rights to the annual crop of a wheat field, for the cultivation of which he had “1 old plow and Irons,” and owned the time of an indentured servant named Eliza, valued at £13.9

Forging

•

7

Peale owned practically nothing that gave him standing in a Tidewater society whose status derived, above all, from the ownership of land and slaves. He could only serve those who had it. Lacking resources, he could at best mimic the style and manners of his social betters. For instance, with his horses, one of which was a fox hunter, Peale could cut a stylish figure as well as participate in the rural sports that animated the social life of men in the colonial and antebellum South. Horses literally and figuratively gave status to their riders; the historian Rhys Isaac reminds us that the eighteenthcentury landscape looked very different to those who walked and those who rode. On a horse, a man could make a display, demonstrating his mastery over both the animal and other men and his equality with other men on horseback. In January 1745/46, Charles Peale missed school “to go a foxhunting” and then reacted bitterly when his students’ parents complained about his absence. It is doubtful that Peale’s response—“when I was paid better, for their Schooling, they might with more Propriety found Complaints agst. me”—mollified them. Peale was forgetting his place. He might ride to hounds alongside the gentry, but he would never be one of them, and the peevishness of his response reveals the weakness of his position. Charles Peale was not likely ever to be paid better, and adopting the arrogance of the planter class was not likely to win him further students.10 Charles Peale’s choler was part of his general character. From his few surviving letters comes an image of a perpetually disgruntled, dissatisfied, and frequently self-pitying man. His ill temper may have been exacerbated by health problems, on which he dwelled in morbid detail, as when he described “Pains in my Bowels & lower parts of the Belly” and went on to add that “I am sometimes with [bowel movements] very sick & mawkish at stomach.” He concluded that this pain “generally much dispirits me.” Perhaps he would have felt better if he had made any progress in his career and family life. Instead, his low and erratic salary left him floundering: “I have but a poor school; and my Income at least £100 less than it was when first I came here. And every Article of our Cloathing so extravagently dear that I cannot get my poor dear little Ones a second Shirt or Shift to wear.” The repetitive dear in this passage, referring both to price and children, should not be taken to signify too much in the way of a connection. But in a cri de coeur written in 1747 about his dashed hopes for patronage and a better situation, Charles Peale starkly linked the relationship of debt and family: “Good God that I were out of Debt—or had no family.”11 Unfortunately, Charles Peale had both, and he attempted to get out of his predicament by appealing for patronage from the rich and politically powerful. In 1746 he solicited the colonial government for the position of coun-

8

•

Part I

try sheriff, which would provide him with a steady income from the collection of dues and fees. Later that year he applied to Benedict Calvert, one of the colony’s grandees, for the position of overseer. He wrote about the attractions of the job: “I don’t know that any thing that I shou’d be better pleased with, and that I cou’d acquit myself better in, from the natural Inclination I have & ever had to Farming & Plantations Business, than serving Mr. Calvert as a Steward or manager over his Plantations, because my Family wou’d thereby be situate on some quite refined Place.” If he received the position and discharged his indebtedness, Charles Peale would enter into a “new Scaene & Oeconomy of Life, for which I am sure nature designed me tho Fortune diverted me from such a Line.” In evoking “Fortune” to explain his predicament (on another occasion he wrote that he had to submit to the “Will of God”), Charles Peale absolved himself of blame and took refuge in a quietism that reinforced his self-pity. Neither fortune nor Benedict Calvert smiled on Peale: he did not receive the position.12 Charles Peale was not an outright failure but a marginal man, one who spent his life scrabbling for a secure toehold from which to ascend. Although he was not a prepossessing character, and might have failed in any era, the details of his biography cast some light on the problems of social mobility in the eighteenth century, when the political culture lagged in its adaptation to changes and growth in the economy. Commercial opportunities that rewarded risk taking and entrepreneurship coexisted uneasily with traditional notions of hierarchy, deference, and patronage. As for Charles Peale, the gap between aspirations and the means at his disposal was simply too great for him to bridge. Charles Peale’s big gamble was his resort to the crime of forgery, whereby he sought to appropriate an identity in order to obtain a status he could not reach on his own. Transported, with few resources, he foundered, trying fruitlessly to play the traditional game of deference and patronage, all the while complaining about his health, his debts, his inattentive, unintelligent students, and their demanding parents. Emotionally, he responded with a resigned fatalism that occasionally flared into dyspeptic anger. Charles Peale’s statement that “nature designed me” indicated his fatalism as well as the belief in premodern societies that each person, as a link in the great chain of being, had a “place”; society was thus naturalized to justify stasis and acquiescence among the ranks. Such passivity, if one lacked patrons, was antithetical to the strong will and self-determination needed to succeed in the transitional eighteenth century, especially in raw America. When Charles Peale died, of an unknown cause, his eldest son was eight. In his autobiography, Charles Willson Peale gave his father a brief obitu-

Forging

•

9

ary: “Mr. Peale, the Father, had a liberal Education; was a polite, agreable companion [above the line: “man”] & was great esteemed by all his acquaintance. He was truly a good man.” Peale’s indecisiveness in choosing between companion and man is significant, since the only criticism he leveled against his father was that he had “been used [to] much polite good company” and thus was “perhaps not the best Economist in the world,” especially on the low income of a schoolteacher. The two words companion and man suggest the difference between outer- and inner-directed character that would mark much of Charles Willson Peale’s life and art. Charles Willson Peale wrote companion on the line as the first word that came to mind to characterize his father. In concluding his eulogy, he crossed out the blunt conclusion that his father “died po[or].” Instead, he wrote about the effects of his father’s early death: “he left his Widow to support h[is] five Children by her Industry alone.” Charles Peale, his son intimates, was swayed by others to the point that he failed his family. It was not just that he died poor but that he left his widow unable to provide: attracted by and seeking to impress his companions, he failed his family as a man.13 The death of the father placed the Peale family in parlous economic circumstances. Peale had four siblings, and his mother had no means of support. In his autobiography, Peale recalled of his mother that “in her excess of Grief she could not, for some time, take any measure to assist herself & Children.” Eventually she moved the family from Chestertown to Annapolis, where she could be supported by her own family and friends while she worked as a seamstress. Peale mentions the help provided by John Beale Bordley, a graduate of Charles Peale’s school, but does not specify what it was. (Bordley, fifteen years Peale’s senior, would become a lifelong friend and patron.) Lest it be thought that Peale’s brief treatment of his father was overbalanced by a long appreciation of his mother, he wrote of her only that “[s]he ever possessed an even temper, and was kind to all her children and their connections, which continued to her last moments; thus she lived and died much respected by all who knew her.” Peale’s childhood is murky because he never discussed it. He begins to emerge as a historical actor in his own right only upon leaving school and apprenticing to a saddler. At age thirteen, a self-described “Orphan,” Peale was on his own.14 Peale had his formative experience of work not as a skilled artisan but as a bound apprentice. He was articled to Nathan Waters, an Annapolis saddlemaker, from 1754 to 1761. He described himself as an apt and willing worker, one who responded to encouragement and rewards. “The Youth,” Peale wrote about himself, “was disposed to be industrous, & the master to encourage that Industry, allowed him to work for himself after he had done

10

•

Part I

his task.” Peale was eager to take on extra work because he was impatient to become an adult. With the money earned from his piecework he bought two emblems of status, a watch and a horse. Luxury items of material display, they symbolized Peale’s evolving personality: the watch, his desire to manage his time, and the horse, his wish for mobility and autonomy. In other words, Peale’s very first purchases demonstrated the contrasting needs for order and boundlessness that would govern his life.15 Peale was also eager to start a family—whether to constitute the nuclear family that had been denied him by his father’s death or to regularize an outlet for his sexual drive is not known. The two wants would not have been mutually exclusive, for they combined Peale’s tendencies toward order and appetite. By the time Peale was seventeen he was actively prospecting for a bride. Though he could not marry until his term as an apprentice expired, he courted nonetheless, promising marriage upon the expiration of his bond. He was rebuffed by one candidate, Rachel Brewer, whom he did later marry, because, by his own admission, he was too importunate: “He knew and felt the openness of his disposition, but did not consider that the delicacy of a Lady required a more tender, and wining proceeding to produce a confession of Love.”16 Peale’s second attempt, which had its farcical elements, came immediately thereafter. Peale rode out to a family he had met at his master’s house, asked to speak to the daughter alone, and then flatly expressed his desire for a wife, asking the woman if she had any suitors. Stunned by this whirlwind approach, she could barely respond. Peale described her confusion and wrote that she “seemed to be at a loss to know how to answer such a question, but she faintly intimated that she had. He replied that he was sorry for it . . . and very politely took his leave of her.” Perhaps timing this romantic interlude with his new watch, Peale recorded that “[t]his Courtship did not take more than one hour from the beginning to the end.” A young man on the make, Peale had violated the eighteenth-century code of sensibility, in which desire was masked by the profession of tender sentiments and courtships proceeded in a ritual dance between couples and their families. Peale learned the right lesson from these failures: successful courting required the male suitor to make allowances for the role women played to protect their sexuality. Peale would learn to act the part, even though he found the conduct of “coquetish” women “repugnant to the disposition of our generous open hearted lover.”17 Running through Peale’s narrative of his youth and the piquant details of his courtships was his intense desire to act autonomously and without encumbrances, either personal or social. His contract as an apprentice and

Forging

•

11

his indebtedness were obstacles to these desires. Toward the end of his apprenticeship, Peale had a dispute with his master over an agreement for an early release from his obligations that roused all his resentments against the conditions under which he worked. Peale’s first comments about work in his autobiography had stressed the positive effects on both morale and productivity if a worker had incentives, either monetary or other. To induce his master to make good on his promise, Peale threatened a work slowdown; he invoked peer pressure by seeking an Annapolis friend of his master’s to intercede on his behalf; and he threatened to file suit, arguing that the papers indenturing him were improperly drawn up since they did not consider his status as an “orphan.” His master backed down, agreeing to a fourmonth reduction in Peale’s term.18 Peale exulted in almost biblical terms at his release from bondage: “How great the joy! How supreme the delight of freedom! It is like water to the thirsty, like food to the hungry, or like the rest to the wearyed Traveller, who has made a long and lonesome journey through a desart, fearfull wilderness.” Peale defined the desert in which he suffered as the world of compulsory labor: “a release from a labour, from Sun rise to sun sett, and from the beginning of Candle light to 9 O’clock during the one half of each year, under the controls of a master, and confined to the same wall and the same dull repititions of the same dull labours.” It was not work that Peale indicted but the un-free conditions of labor. As I have noted, he had responded with alacrity when allowed to work independently and for his own benefit but objected to repetitive labor done under compulsion. As an apprentice he experienced the pain of dependency, the denial of personal autonomy in a social condition only a step or two up from chattel slavery.19 Despite his passionate outburst against bond labor, Peale did not question that work was necessary; nor did he fundamentally question the structures of work, including the bound labor of apprentices and slavery itself. Instead, he drew an analogy between work and the family. He persisted in seeking an early marriage in part because he associated founding a family with attaining an independence based on work. Originally, when he wrote about the end of his apprenticeship, he focused on his immediate desire— it “gave the Youth the opportunity of getting Married even before he came of age.” Peale subsequently altered this sentence and, changing his tone from the practical to the abstract, launched into the paean to the joys of freedom quoted in the preceding paragraph.20 Peale came of age when free labor was still emerging unevenly from premodern forms in which compulsion more or less predominated. The unevenness of this process is revealed most dramatically, as we have seen, in

12

•

Part I

the irony that bondage for whites (including Charles Peale) could be alleviated only by the institution of a far worse bondage for blacks. The continued association of the familial household with production, especially in agricultural regions such as Chesapeake Maryland, made it logical for Peale to view family and work relations as intertwined and to present a paradigm of social organization in which authority always resided with the masterfather. Masters should treat their apprentices as fathers did their sons—and vice versa. Under this model, social conditions could be ameliorated only case by case where good-hearted sensibility elicited good behavior. Peale laid down the lesson: “Let Masters who have Apprentices, reflect on the feelings of the apprentice, and make that bondage as light as possible, let the Parents who have Children forbear to beat them, who are also in bondage to them one third of their lives.” Peale concluded with an exhortation that precisely encapsulates the new sensibility: “Let Love and not fear be the mover to good works.”21 Peale, generally silent about life in his father’s household, never discussed how Charles Peale maintained discipline at home. But whether Charles Peale was loving or cruel mattered less than his absence from his son’s life, which was crucial. Buffeted by his father’s precarious circumstances, deprived of him at age eight, and farmed out as an apprentice in his early teens, Peale must have thought as a young adult that his life, like his father’s, might be one of dependence and unfulfillment. He hastened to establish his own family to reconstitute the paternal family he had never had. His sense that he was following his father could only have increased when, at age twenty, having completed his apprenticeship, he found himself enmeshed in severe indebtedness. The irony of the situation must have been inescapable to the young Peale as well as to the older man looking back on his life and career. Charles Peale had been a “poor economist,” and the son seemed to have inherited the trait. Immediately after his release from his obligations, Peale, to set himself up in business, entered into a purchase agreement with Nathan Waters, his old master, that saddled him with a large debt and a draconian repayment schedule. Peale’s indebtedness was compounded by his having borrowed £20 from one of the colony’s grandees, James Tilghman, to make the down payment on the goods sold by Waters. Peale, in other words, went into debt to qualify for further indebtedness, a compounding he would quickly regret. He felt pressured to accept Waters’s offer, even though he thought the “Articles illy assorted” and more than he wanted: “being over persuaded he [Peale] took the Goods on Credit, gives his note as an acknowledgement of the Debt, but mark! That, as soon as he came to the age of 21 Yrs. Mr. Wa-

Forging

•

13

ters calls on him and takes his Bond on Intrest.” Thus in his early career as an artisan Peale threw off the bound labor of the precapitalist economy only to face the risk of a market in which the skill of the artisan was inadequate without stock, marketable products, and liquidity. The older economy depended on personal honor and traditional obligations, while the emerging economy depended on the assumption of fair and open dealing. In both cases, the young Peale felt himself prey to his superiors’ false professions: “How cruel it is for those, whom years had ripened in the knowledge of the world, to impose a wrong advice to the young and uninformed Youth!”22 Peale interpreted his mistreatment as a violation of an ideal order in which society is modeled on the family, with the old instructing the young. He also identified interest as “the cause of mans doing such actions, as are base and unmanly, unbecoming the boasted reasoning of these Lords of the Creation. (as men vainly call themselves).” Peale did not indict the profit motive. He only obliquely attacked the economic system of which interest was a part, and he did not distinguish a fair rate of return on investment from usury. Rather, he criticized interest for tempting the appetite. Not only did it corrupt and unman men, but it also created disequilibrium because it violated the beauty of reason.23 Peale took his subject to a higher level with his sardonic reference to men as the “Lords of the Creation.” That Miltonian phrase alludes to the prelapsarian state of Adam and Eve: “God-like erect, with native honor clad / In naked majesty seemed lords of all.” Interest, the tempting “apple,” unmans by turning the male into a susceptible Eve. As God rebukes Adam in Paradise Lost: Was she thy God, that her thou didst obey Before his voice, or was she made thy guide, Superior, or but equal, that to her Thou didst resign thy manhood, and the place Wherein God set thee. . . .

In Peale’s cosmology, the Fall of Man means also the Fall of Reason, but the consequences are distressingly similar: man must work and suffer.24 Peale glossed over and evaded his own responsibility for his predicament. He blamed his creditors for failing to put the higher law of human relations before the economic laws of credit and interest. Retrospectively, Peale used an anecdote from Rousseau’s Confessions to indict his creditors. Rousseau described an incident in which as a servant he had permitted the household’s cook to be blamed for his own theft of a piece of ribbon; the cook was fired.

14

•

Part I

Rousseau tortured himself with a guilt for which the Confessions were, in part, expiation.The anecdote speaks tellingly of the canker of guilt and shame that eventually has to be cut out, but Peale’s situation and that of the cook in Rousseau’s story are not really analogous. (Rousseau and the cook were roughly co-equals in the household, there was no betrayal of the young by the old, and the act was theft compounded by false testimony rather than a perfectly legal loan.) Indeed, Peale may have recounted this particular anecdote because he identified with Rousseau; he may be obliquely revealing his own sense of guilt for allowing himself to be tempted into a financial trap.25 If Peale shirked responsibility for his predicament, he did, at least retrospectively, accept the consequences of his personal “fall.” Having voiced his animus against the property-owning class, Peale backed off and reverted to bourgeois bromides about success, writing that any misfortune is an opportunity for personal and social progress. Necessity, for Peale and the Protestant ethic, was the mother of improvement, since “as it very frequently happens, that those things which we conceive to be great misfortunes, in the end, become great blessings. If Peale had not been perplexed with debts, perhaps he would not have made those exertions to acquire knowledge in more advantageous Professions, than that in which he first set out with, and perhaps he might have been contented to have drudged on in an unnoticed manner through life.” This at least was how the older Peale framed the biography of his younger self. Peale’s mention of the desire for fame (“drudged on in an unnoticed manner”) can only have been retrospective. Few, if any, narratives of the self-made man in America end in failure.26 Peale was thrown back on his own resources as an artisan, and he conceived his sense of self through work. He linked interest and theft by noting that interest robbed both debtor and creditor of autonomy and therefore self-worth.The debtor, made dependent, ceded his autonomy to another. The creditor, dependent in turn on a parasitical practice, was unavoidably shamed by it. “Some will foolishly say, and perhaps imagine that the wealthy, who live in splendor on their riches gotten by unjust means, are happy, because they wear the Garb of chearfulness,” but this disconnection between appearance and personality could not long be sustained: “[T]hey may for a time have art enough to hide their feelings from the bulk of mankind, and their pride and weakness may be so great that they cannot take the resolution to set about a reformation, and therefore keep their inward sufferings to themselves, and too frequently end their days in selfmortification.” By “art” Peale means artifice, not the fine art of the portrait

Forging

•

15

painter. A personality can be disguised by artifice in dress or behavior only for a limited time before its true nature appears. Pride (and not just false pride) is linked to weakness: only those who, like Peale, have gone through the process of self-abnegation are able to attain full humanity.27 Again, there is an echo of Paradise Lost in Peale’s writing. Milton contrasts the innocent, naked transparency of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden with what is to follow for fallen man: Sin-bred, how have ye troubled all mankind With shows instead, mere shows of seeming pure, And banished from man’s life his happiest life, Simplicity and spotless innocence.28

Instead of “art” there should be “artlessness” to avoid the falsity of those “shows . . . mere shows” and effect personal reform. Here, Peale alludes to the eighteenth-century culture of sensibility, which emphasized artlessness of presentation. He also alludes for the first time to medicinal theories in which the body’s health was regulated by purgatives. The undeserving wealthy end their days in “self-mortification” in the sense that their vital or active qualities decay; such persons are, metaphorically, hollowed out. And because, in Peale’s view, the upper classes have a special responsibility to maintain and protect the manners and morals of the society, their lack of standards necessarily spreads to corrupt the whole society. Peale did not yet recommend that society purge those who parasitically enriched themselves, but he would do so later, during the radical phase of the Revolution. Peale attacked “interest” because it was unearned: money, not man, did the work. Peale’s view was the almost reflexive animosity of the have-nots against the haves: he produced what others took and profited from to his disadvantage. As Susan Rather shows in her study of John Singleton Copley and artisanal republicanism, eighteenth-century political theorists tended to treat artisans with obloquy and contempt, claiming that because of their narrow interest in trade they could not articulate the interest of society as a whole and act “disinterestedly.” But Peale’s career reminds us of the popular, radical dimension of this political debate and the issue of class in eighteenthcentury Anglo-America. Peale’s idea of autonomy, in which resentment broadened into an ideology, was rooted in a rudimentary, unarticulated labor theory of value. The artisan’s control of the means of production—his tools, but above all his skills—made him an individual and empowered him, potentially, as a political force. From his particular “fall” Peale learned the dignity, not the disgrace, of labor.29

16

•

Part I

When Peale was in his late teens, though, it was by no means certain that his misfortunes would end in success or that he was as resolute as he later depicted himself. Peale’s plight in the 1760s was dire. By 1765 he was £900 in debt, a tremendous sum in a century where the average annual income has been calculated at between $40 and $65; against his debt, Peale held paper credits, of doubtful collectibility, amounting to £300. It is not known how Peale accumulated such a huge debt; the interest on the £120 he owed Waters and Tilghman could hardly have amounted to such a sum in five years. In any event, Peale scrambled for work. He branched out from his original trade as a saddler to the related work of harness making and then upholstering. He took up watch repair, and from that he says he began a “new Profession, Watch and Clock Making,” although it is likely that he built up timepieces from parts (especially watches as opposed to the more rudimentary clocks) instead of from scratch. From this part of the jeweler’s trade he also went into silversmithing, making “Buckles, Buttons, Rings, &c and he once cast a set of Stirrups in Brass.” Peale also expanded his territory, taking his skills and stock on the road as an itinerant artisan: “Mr. Peale made many efforts to raise money by his trades, to pay his debts, and several times made up a good assortment of saddles and Saddlery and sett out to travel through several counties with a Cart loaded with those articles . . . intending in those excursions to pay his expences by his knowledge of Clock, Watch making & the Silversmiths business.” But, unfortunately, “in every attempt he was unsuccessfull.”30 Struggling to find ways to generate income, Peale expanded his repertoire of traditional trades to a novel one: painting. Peale presented his development as an artist, like most of his major career changes, in an offhand, laconic manner. On his travels he saw some paintings that were “miserably done” and decided he could do better. Had they been better efforts, he noted, they might have “smothered this faint spark of Genius.” But since they were mediocre, Peale felt he might be able to transfer his skill with tools to the brush. His autobiographical citation of that “spark of Genius” suggests how a career as an artist enabled him to acquire an elevated sense of social status. The artist as genius is a familiar trope, and we should not be surprised at Peale for associating himself with it. Nonetheless, it was an ex post facto explanation. The actual circumstances by which Peale came to painting were pragmatic: it was a livelihood that might make independence and autonomy, and thus self-definition, possible.31 In the mid–eighteenth century, the shift from artisan to artist was not unusual, for art, not yet considered a profession, had a quasi-handicraft status. Like Peale, the artisans Jacob Eichholtz and Joseph Badger shifted their

Forging

•

17

focus from making things to making faces. John Singleton Copley would write of these early days of portrait painting that “[t]he people generally regard it no more than any other usefull trade . . . like that of a Carpenter tailor, or shew maker, not as one of the most noble Arts in the World.” His complaint was not just that Americans lacked the taste and culture to appreciate the painter’s work. It was that painters were not set off from the working class: the “noble Arts” mingled with the vulgar trades, and artisans moved back and forth between the two, blurring their distinctions. Peale concludes the section of the autobiography on his early career as a painter by recounting that he realized “he possibly might do better by painting, than with his other Trades, [a]nd he accordingly began the Sign painting business [italics added].” Peale continued to think of himself as an artisan first. In an early passage of the autobiography he speaks of painting a ship for a sea captain, and it is not clear whether he produced a marine portrait or painted the hull.32 Becoming a fine artist gave Peale a major advantage in gaining employment. He competed in colonial Maryland against a plethora of artisans, but “[b]efore these times there had been in Maryland only four persons professing the art of portrait Painting.” And Peale’s timing was right. Receiving his first commission in 1763, he started his career at the onset of the consumer revolution that transformed American material culture and stimulated American nationalism.The 1760s saw an exceptional jump in the consumption of imported, and especially luxury, goods as Americans began to fashion and emphasize a national identity, in part by purchasing novel, ornamental, and luxury products. A commissioned portrait was a display of conspicuous consumption in which the artist’s depiction of the sitter’s possessions and luxurious surroundings was perhaps as important as his skilled draftsmanship. Fortuitously, Peale was present at the beginning of this material revolution: international trade undercut the work of indigenous artisans just as the market for paintings started to develop. Portraits became an important sign of status not only because they indicated the sitter’s ability to commission them but also because their props, costumes, and scenery encapsulated and signified the attributes by which Americans wanted to be known. Thus Peale’s portrait John and Elizabeth Lloyd Cadwalader and Their Daughter Anne (Figure 4), which seems to draw the viewer’s gaze to Cadwalader’s impressively stout form, advertises the sitter’s patriarchal authority and social power, and the luxuriousness of his and his family’s life. In its intentions, eighteenth-century American portraiture was not all that different from sign painting: both were forms of advertisement.33 The late eighteenth century, especially in the middle colonies, was a

figure 4. John and Elizabeth Lloyd Cadwalader and Their Daughter Anne, 1772. Oil on canvas, 511⁄2 × 411⁄4 in. The Philadelphia Museum of Art: Purchased from the Cadwalader Collection with funds contributed by the Mabel Pew Myrin Trust and the gift of an anonymous donor.

Forging

•

19

transitional period. While material abundance indicated the triumph of the marketplace, Peale still lived in a society in which personal, rather than instrumental, relationships determined status and power. In the family, for instance, the model was one of patriarchal control over the family and the household servants, both slave and free. Outside, in the wider society, links of both kinship and patronage bound the upper classes in a web of mutual dependence and support. Peale entered this world, a long leap for the son of a transported felon, by a time-honored method of social mobility: he married up. In 1762 Peale, four months shy of twenty-one, married seventeenyear-old Rachel Brewer and through her family entered Maryland’s political and social elite. Among the Brewer kin were the powerful Maccubbin and Carroll families, including the notable and influential Charles Carroll, Barrister.34 After the failure of his initial, whirlwind courtship of Rachel Brewer, Peale modulated his approach and, after apologizing for his initial precipitousness, soon obtained her assent. The historian Lance Humphries, in an ingenious piece of detective work, has challenged Peale’s description of his courtship as the triumph of romantic love. The episode is one of the most curious in Peale’s biography. Around the time of Peale’s marriage, he was the “victim” of either a prank or a malevolent scheme to mock or anger him. Peale reported receiving a letter from a “Captain James Digby” in England indicating that Charles Peale’s claim of a wealthy family was true and that Charles Willson Peale was entitled to an inheritance of £2,000.The letter from Digby urged Peale to go immediately to London to claim his right. Instead, Peale sent letters to London, never received a reply, and concluded that the whole episode was a hoax. Peale speculated that it was perpetrated by some rival in Annapolis “with the View of making this young man leave his business and go abroad.” Since he did not, the matter was closed.35 Humphries, unconvinced by Peale’s account of events, notes that Peale gave two different versions of the chronology of the Digby deception. Peale’s preliminary, fragment autobiography (written in 1790 during another courtship; see Chapter 6) mentions that he received the letter before Rachel accepted his proposal, whereas the finished manuscript autobiography puts the letter’s arrival after the marriage. Humphries supposes that the first version is more plausible—Peale first wrote the truth and then rewrote it to put himself in a better light—and suggests that Peale used the claim of an inheritance in Oxfordshire to enhance his marriage prospects and raise him to a par with his prospective in-laws’ extended family. Humphries further deduces that this letter could have been written (its authorship has never been determined) only if the Peales, father and son, had talked widely enough

20

•

Part I

about their familial background to ensure the circulation of their claims to gentility.36 In writing about the Digby episode, Peale continues the pattern of romanticizing his early years as a solitary youth, orphaned and in desperate circumstances, repeatedly beset by troubles that he surmounts by determination, application, skill, and innate moral sense. Peale called his autobiography a “novel,” and the structure of its opening pages follows that of the eighteenth-century picaresque romance. Peale alternates the narratives about his successive predicaments with intervals in which he pauses to impart a lesson, as when he appeals to masters to treat their apprentices better. The genre requires that the naive and blameless young man be thrown by circumstances into situations that he overcomes and from which he learns. If the youth (or, as Peale called himself, “our young adventurer”) is not actually innocent, he must make himself appear so; therefore, Peale downplayed his assent in going into debt and blamed the failures of his first courtships on the “coquettishness” of young women. The Digby hoax is a particularly piquant addition to the perils of the young Peale because it raises the issue of the Peale family’s social origins, as well as the accusations of forgery and false identity that dogged the family into the third American generation, when Rembrandt Peale was accused of artistic plagiarism. Peale presents himself as the hapless victim of this deception. Humphries has suggested that the timing of the hoax gave Peale the opportunity to present disinterested testimony about his family in order to impress Rachel Brewer and convince her family of his worthiness.37 No one has ever raised the possibility that Peale perpetuated the hoax or forgery himself. In the absence of the actual letter, its authorship can never be conclusive, and to insist on ascribing it to Peale would be malicious. Peale, however, has to be considered a suspect, in no small part because he had most to gain from the letter’s arrival. Alternative authors suggested for the letter are unconvincing.The Digby letter, after all, is not a “forgery” but a pseudonymous letter; does the adoption of the term forgery betray guilty knowledge? Peale, who attributed the letter to a malicious competitor, was a run-of-the-mill artisan. Why would anyone harass him, especially in such a convoluted way? If the Peales irritated people with their bragging, the letter actually confirmed their claim to a gentle birth and an inheritance. Its immediate local impact in Annapolis, as Humphries discerns, was to enhance the Peales’ status. Of all the possible authors of the “hoax,” only Peale had the inside knowledge necessary to concoct the scenario of an inheritance. Whether he simply exploited the fortuitous arrival of the Digby letter or forged it, in effect following his father’s criminal example, must remain a

Forging

•

21

tantalizing unknown. What is clear, thanks to Humphries, is that Peale probably made his marriage look more romantic and less motivated by his desire to rise socially by dating the letter after his marriage—a smaller fabrication, but a fabrication nonetheless. Arguing against Peale’s authorship of the Digby letter is the trouble and expense he went to in retaining counsel and preparing a dossier supporting his family’s claim to the “inheritance.” That dossier included Peale’s first letter. Interesting, then, that this letter, his response to “Captain Digby” on September 25, 1762, is not in Peale’s own hand but in that of an unidentified copyist. Although Peale exhibited visual and manual dexterity in his work as an artisan and painter, his handwriting was poorly formed, and his spelling and grammar were shaky as a consequence of his lack of schooling. To add weight to his case, Peale had his appeal written out by a handwriting expert or drafted by a lawyer, complete with elaborate ornamental curlicues and furbelows; not even the signature appears to be Peale’s.38 The Digby letter permitted Peale to write out a formal statement to a lawyer in London summarizing his family’s situation and emphasizing how well he and his brothers were doing. In other words, the Digby episode, as a legal dispute, gave Peale the opportunity to write about himself and his family without appearing to brag. Working hard to ingratiate himself with the Brewers, Peale knew that his self-presentation in response to the forgery was as important as the hoaxing letter itself. This was the first, but not the last, time that Peale, on the assumption that the written record was transparent, gave evidence in writing that he was what he professed himself to be. Equally important, writing was a way for Peale to assure himself of his own stability and worthiness to enter a higher station in life. In responding to the Digby hoax, Peale wrote not just his own history but his own present. Paul de Man’s thesis that a life does not exist until a person begins writing it was proved true by Charles Willson Peale in the case of his first marriage and throughout his adult life. The episode of the letter also paid off for Peale in posterity. By encoding the family myth of a lost inheritance in the legal documents Peale assembled, he made it easier for later historians to skip over the facts of Charles Peale’s biography and assert that the Peale family lineage was genteel. Just as artists such as Copley distanced themselves from the trades, so an older generation of art historians was interested in enhancing the social origins of artists and the arts in early America.39 Finally, the myth of a lost inheritance, of hopes raised and dashed, of courtship thwarted and then consummated, added a romantic fillip to the course of the young Peale’s life. By 1761–63 Peale had both achieved his ambition of finding a career that held promise and married the woman who

22

•

Part I

had first attracted him when he was a lowly apprentice. Not just married, Peale had married well. In one carefully constructed scene where Peale describes his courtship of Rachel, it is impossible to miss the implication that new doors were opening for him. Peale writes how he knocked on the front door of the Brewer house and was rebuked by the daughters of the house for his presumption. “Go round to you Impudent baggage,” they shouted at the visitor, not recognizing him. The abashed Peale— “our young adventurer”—made his way to a back door, whereupon the social snub dissolved in smiles, blushes, and civility as Peale showed himself. Adopting a plot development universal to all romances, Peale avowed that he was attracted to the rudest of the girls and that she in turn was attracted to, and ultimately married, him. While Rachel initially rebuffed the precipitate Peale, he persevered and eventually won her consent. Having convinced Rachel’s family that he had a promising future and was a suitable husband, he hoped never again to enter by the servants’ entrance. With a wife and the possibility of a good career, Peale was no longer a dependent or what the girls called him, “baggage.”40

chapter 2

“This Faint Spark of Genius” Fortune, Patronage, and Peale’s Rise as an Artist

~ Peale, aged twenty-one, with a new wife and the prospect of a new career, seemed to face a rosy future. But in reality he was barely getting by. His debts and interest continued to mount, and creditors began pressing him for repayment.With his new household and a first child on the way (born in 1763, died in infancy), Peale’s expenditures surely increased. He had taken an apprentice in the saddlery trade, one Thomas Stinchcomb, in 1763; the term of Stinchcomb’s service was three years, but nothing is heard about him after the initial indenture agreement. In the following year, on June 9, 1764, Peale purchased a slave girl named Lydia for £35 in a private sale from his kinswoman by marriage Ann Ogle. More than a simple outlay of cash, the purchase of a slave indicated Peale’s commitment to rising in the social hierarchy of Maryland. An inheritance in England was a chimera, but ownership of slaves was a conspicuous and necessary display of wealth and power in the slave colony. (Land ownership was the other component of class power in the colony, one that Peale assuredly aspired to.) Peale was constructing what looked like a model Tidewater household—patriarchal head, extended family, slave and servants—though behind the facade he scrambled to keep his place, let alone rise. Again, he seemed to be following his father’s path, maintaining the appearance of gentility while lacking its substance.1 Instead of succeeding, Peale cracked. He was served writs by his creditors, including James Tilghman, and absconded, fleeing Annapolis and leaving behind his pregnant wife. Peale first headed overland to Virginia and then took passage to New England. He explained his flight as an almost in23

24

•

Part I

voluntary response to his situation when he realized how dire it was. He described his vertiginous fall, excusing himself by saying that “he engaged in so many labours of body and mind . . . that he allowed himself no time for reflections of any kind. He did not seem to regard the future, being wholly occupied with the present, or feared danger untill he was overtaken by difficulties.” Fight or flight? Peale chose flight despite knowing that this was a shameful abrogation of his duties: “A Lonesome disconsolate Journey it was. The leaving a beloved wife, big with Child to subsist by the bounty of their friends, was truely affecting.” As for Rachel’s situation, Peale claimed that she had family and friends who “were not wanting in love and duty to her.” But he had failed his essential duty as head of his family: like his father, he was unable to support them.2 Peale was absent from Annapolis from June 19, 1765, to October 9, 1766. Self-exiled, he drifted between ambition and ennui. While in Newburyport, Massachusetts, “having nothing to do [italics added],” he painted a small portrait of himself: “this being seen got him the portraits of 3 Children of a wealthy mercht: to paint” and then the commission for a portrait of a lady. But further commissions were not forthcoming, and Peale spent most of his time reading. On two trips to Boston he was able to visit the studios of the late John Smibert, where he saw works “in a stile vastly superior to any he had seen before,” and of John Singleton Copley; the latter visit was “a great feast to Peale.” Copley treated Peale “civilly” and let him copy a “candle piece” for practice, but Peale does not report what lessons he learned from either the painter or the collections. Despite the inspiration of these studios, Peale could not find work in Boston after moving there from outlying Newburyport, “with the hope that at least he might be improving himself.” After his visit to Copley he practiced miniature painting, but otherwise “[t]he time passed on in various amusements of this large Town and his Cash wasting daily away, without any prospects of imployment.” He was considering setting out as a journeyman saddler when, his money exhausted, he sold a painting that enabled him to leave Boston and head south.3 Peale’s career floundered at its outset because eighteenth-century America lacked institutional or even customary means by which an artist could establish himself. Peale made himself into an artist through an act of will. Sometime later he traveled to Philadelphia and surveyed artist supplies, including paints, and bought some instructional books: “He then returned to his lodgings and studied his Books for 4 days, with very little intermission, and from his now acquired knowledge, he purchased his paints and returned home, earnest in persueing his new profession.” Notice the confidence expressed by Peale when he wrote “now acquired” instead of the

“This Faint Spark of Genius”

•

25

“new acquired” which one might expect of the neophyte. The cross-out, replacing business with the higher-status profession, shows exactly the upward mobility that Peale hoped to achieve as an artist. Though Peale was able to teach himself painting with some tutoring from John Hesselius and the example of the studios in Boston, the only way to get commissions was to establish a reputation. Peale was able to do this in a minimal way in Newburyport, but both the market for portraits and a career as an artist were merely potential in the 1760s. Although Peale had correctly gauged the cultural market, there existed no formal way to develop his skills and make a living. The artist had to learn by doing, and in that he was on his own. The artist had to earn his status by pleasing his patrons and relying on word of mouth for more business.4 At this dire moment, Peale’s career was rescued by the “pluck and luck” that characterizes American success stories. Peale—almost out of money, having sold his last valuable possession, his watch—was considering becoming an itinerant saddler when he sold a “small portraitt” for $12. That sum enabled him to sail from Boston to Virginia (keeping the drama high, he reports barely escaping a shipwreck while making a landfall ), where he found himself stranded with “only 1⁄6 in his pocket.” The sine-wave pattern of bad and good luck that marks Peale’s narrative of his beginnings continued as “[a] Boat was seen coming from the shore, and a Gentleman came on board. C. Peale had his portrait hanging up in the Cabbin. . . . [T]he Gentleman enquired who had painted it. [A]nd approving the work, he was pleased to invite our young adventurer to his House, with a promise to recommend him to several Gentlemen of his Acquaintance in that County in order to get him imployment.” This was Judge James Arbuckle of Custis Neck, Eastern Shore,Virginia, Peale’s first important patron. Peale ingratiated himself with the Arbuckles, painted their portraits (Figure 5) as well as those of other local worthies, and practiced his art by copying in oil a print of an unidentified subject by Joshua Reynolds.5 Peale’s narrative of his early adult life shows him oscillating between precarious individualism and safer institutional or traditional structures, especially the extended family that he entered with his marriage. In the midAtlantic colonies, the patriarchal family with its kin networks was a quasipublic institution.Through its web of personal and instrumental connections the elite ruled colonies like Maryland. As an evolving ideology of individualism drove social mobility, the premodern world of the manor house checked and channeled ambition. Class power was not, however, exercised monolithically or mechanistically.The Maryland election of 1764 saw a fight between the proprietary and antiproprietary factions (or “court” and “coun-

26

•

Part I

figure 5. Judge James Arbuckle of Accomac, 1766. Oil on canvas, 48 × 361⁄2 in. Private collection.

try,” to adapt the terminology of English politics). This fight was not strictly along class lines but between the “ins” and the “outs,” inflected by the displaced conflict between the colony and its colonial masters in London. The proprietary faction tended to represent the big grandees; the antiproprietary side appealed to a broad membership, including wealthy planters but also smallholders, artisans, and other rising men, among them Charles Willson Peale, who was connected by self-interest reinforced by genealogy.6 This group of political allies and kin provided a safety net for Peale. He had sent the painting he had copied after Reynolds to Charles Carroll, Barrister (Figure 6), thus restoring communication between himself and Annapolis. According to Peale, the gift alerted Marylanders to his developing talent: the Barrister exclaimed that if Peale could make a living by art in New England, whose natives he derided as stingy in money and taste, then he could succeed anywhere! The Barrister interceded, and a deal was struck that allowed Peale to return to Annapolis with a four-year grace period to repay his debts. But once safely home in the “Bosom of his family,” Peale was soon in legal trouble again because the agreement had not included the parties who had already brought suit against him. After threats of jailing, he reached a second agreement with his creditors whereby his wife’s por-

“This Faint Spark of Genius”

•

27

figure 6. Charles Carroll, Barrister, 1770. Oil on canvas, 491⁄2 × 38 in. Courtesy of the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America in the State of Maryland, Mount Clare Museum House, Carroll Park, Baltimore, Maryland.

tion of the estate of her father, John Brewer, guaranteed Peale’s debts. Peale never commented on using his wife’s inheritance to solve his problems. Instead, he put his legal problems behind him with a figurative drawing of the curtain: “However a new scene is about to take place.” With this “new scene,” the problem of Peale’s debt disappeared; he wrote nothing about it until he congratulated himself on paying it off.7 Peale’s next big break came when he left an unidentified portrait for John Beale Bordley, his father’s old student, to view. When Bordley “rose in the morning he went into a cold room where the picture was put, before he had gartered up his stockings and staid there Viewing it near 2 hours, and when he came out, he said to his sister, something must and shall be done for Charles.” This is indeed a well-wrought scene, one that overwhelms the details of daily life with the transformative power of art and genius; it gains added power because it is set not in a studio in London or Antwerp but in homely Annapolis, amid the rude furnishings of colonial life. Art, and therefore the genius who produced it, surmounts the natural elements, including time and place, and engages the viewer. As Bordley’s deshabille indicates, art catches and keeps viewers off guard, opening them up to powerful emotions and sympathies: it unbinds them. When Bordley awoke from his

28

•

Part I

two-hour reverie, he determined to organize a group of wealthy Marylanders to support the artist for a period of study in London.8 The motives of Bordley and his group, however Peale glossed them, were entirely pragmatic. Sponsoring Peale did not guarantee his success, but the plan had two potential benefits. First, if it worked, it removed the social embarrassment of Peale’s inability to maintain his family. Charles Carroll, Barrister, whose twenty-five guineas was the largest single donation to the total of more than £85 collected for Peale, stressed that angle in a letter of introduction: “I have no other motive to what I advance but to give him the opportunity of Improving Himself That he may be better able to Support himself and Family, I hope he will behave with Diligence and Frugality.” But in helping Peale, the Barrister’s plan promised wider benefits to the group of sponsors. By sponsoring Peale, the Marylanders confirmed their political and social standing as community leaders. They acted generously to aid the family of one of their own. While this patronage benefited a single individual, it had a psychological ripple effect among the community as the grandees were seen to act munificently and yet appropriately for their class. In underwriting an impecunious artist, the “country” party in Maryland was creating its own “court” painter, one who would return from England prepared to celebrate their lives and their class. This was a case of eighteenth-century conspicuous consumption, not least because the consortium, in spending money on an artist whose frugality and diligence were already suspect, had no guarantee of a return on their investment. By bestowing their favor and shoring up the career of a faltering member, they both replicated themselves as a class and validated their cultural and political dominance.9 All these men were politically active at the local, colonial, and later state and federal levels. Some measure of their social and economic eminence can be gauged from the wealth of Charles Carroll of Carrollton, reputedly the richest man in America by the 1770s. But the others were not far behind him in wealth and property. Charles Carroll, Barrister, made the largest contribution to the purse, twenty-five guineas; John Beale Bordley added ten guineas, as did Daniel Delaney; Maryland governor Horatio Sharpe put in £8; Robert Lloyd, Benjamin Calvert, Thomas Spring, and Charles Carroll of Carrollton gave five guineas apiece; Benjamin Tasker, Thomas Ringgold, and Daniel of St. Thomas Jenifer donated three guineas each. That their support was generous is shown by comparing the total amount given to Peale with other economic indicators. For instance, the £85 12 collected from the Barrister’s cohort was roughly one-tenth of Peale’s debt. We can gain some idea of the amount that the Marylanders were willing to spend by compar-

“This Faint Spark of Genius”

•

29

ing the yearly income of Charles Carroll, Barrister’s, estate, £400, with Peale’s payment for the slave girl purchased for life, £35. For free labor, a mid-eighteenth-century Philadelphia manservant received between £16 and £20 per year; a maid, between £8 and £10. Charles Peale’s entire property at his death was valued at only £59. In other words, while the purse was not lavish, the eleven men did not stint once they had decided to help Peale. The money would support the artist in London for an undetermined period of study. The sponsorship was not a debt to be repaid, and Peale could supplement his stipend by selling his work in England.10 Finances aside, the grandees were asserting themselves, but in a culture where colonial taste and behavior were set by the mother country. It is wrong to read colonial actions as always signaling resistance or foreshadowing revolution. The Maryland elite had gained self-confidence, as evidenced in the decision to make Charles Willson Peale the colony’s artist, but both aesthetically and politically that elite operated under rules set by London.11 The power of England was arrayed before Peale when he sailed up the Thames in the winter of 1766–67: “And as they approached London, the quantity of Shipping was such, as their Masts appeared to him like a forest in America.” Peale’s simile comparing the mercantile might of England with the natural abundance of America was almost literally accurate. By the turn of the eighteenth century, the English navy used wood from roughly two thousand trees in each of its capital ships, and those trees came largely from the forests of the Americas. As America’s raw products were brought to England to be reworked by its mercantile and military power, Peale traveled to London to be remade by its cultural authority. Benjamin West had originally made a splash in Europe by exploiting the appeal of the rough-andready American Adam (Benjamin Franklin did something similar with his fur hat and homespun clothing); an Italian cardinal once exclaimed that West was an Indian. But this propensity to see Americans as exotics was the European, not the American, perspective, no matter how much eager colonials were willing to profit from their “exotic” status. West, long since assimilated to English culture, received King George III’s patronage and was named His Majesty’s painter in 1772. By 1767, the year he came to the attention of the king, West was well launched as the central figure of an English finishing school for aspirant American artists.12 Peale’s remaking began with his appearance. Peale was at Gravesend, downriver from London, on February 9 and arrived in the city sometime in the next several days. On February 13, probably his second day in London, he bought some basic supplies (food, bread, and butter) and went on a buy-

30

•

Part I

ing spree, purchasing a variety of items of personal display; his total outlay that day was £9.6.9, or a little more than one-ninth of his total purse. Peale did not attempt to play up his American origins. Instead he attempted to fit into the clothes of a fashionable yet respectable artist. His major purchase was a suit of “Light Blue Clothes” at £5.12. Among the accoutrements he bought to accent the suit were a beaver hat (£1.1), a set of black dress stockings as well as a set of worsted ones, gloves, shoes, and shaving “Utensiels.” Later in his stay Peale additionally purchased such items as a “Surtout Coat” and “Under Jacket,” as well as seven ruffled shirts, six stocks (neckcloths), two sets of silk stockings, and a wig. On clothes alone, omitting additional toilet items such as shoe blacking, soap, perfume, a powder puff, and powder, as well as a snuffbox, by late May Peale had spent £15.0.4 of his stipend. In contrast to his clothing, Peale’s lodgings cost him £2.2 for two months, and his dinners cost him £1 for four weeks.13 Among the books he bought was Abel Boyer’s Royal Dictionary, French and English, and English and French (London, 1764) to further his education and add tone to his vocabulary. Already aware of the importance of orthography and his deficiencies in that area, he bought The Complete Letter-Writer; or Polite English Secretary so that he could achieve a gentleman’s standard, both in content and in style. In his concern about his handwriting, as with his clothes, Peale sought to shape and regulate his outward appearance to maximize the effect of his public presentation. Not only did outward respectability and presentability signal a person’s reliability, but that reliability was linked to a larger justification of the relationship between appearance and nature, nature and politics. Terry Eagleton has concisely summarized the relationship between the presentation of the body and the body politic: “Manners for the eighteenth century signify that meticulous disciplining of the body which converts morality to style, deconstructing the oppositions between the proper and the pleasurable. In these regulated forms of civilized conduct, a pervasive aestheticizing of social practices gets under way. . . . The subject itself is accordingly aestheticized, living with all the instinctual rightness of the artefact. Like the work of art, the human subject introjects the codes which govern it as the very source of its free autonomy.” The image (and the character) that Peale was striving for was depicted, not by Peale himself, but by his teacher Benjamin West in a portrait (Figure 7) presented to the sitter. It shows Peale, his hand and brush cocked like a hunter of images, in the complete fulfillment of the artist’s persona. Is this really a portrait of Peale or one of an idealized “Artist”? This portrait has less to do with creating a realistic likeness than with fulfilling the sitter’s and his audience’s expectations of what a mid-eighteenth-century artist

figure 7. Benjamin West, Charles Willson Peale, c. 1767–69. Oil on canvas, 281⁄4 × 23 in., acc. no. 1867.293. The New-York Historical Society, New York City. Gift of Thomas J. Bryan, 1867.

32

•

Part I

should look like. It might even be suggested that West subsumed Peale’s likeness to a generalized image of the artist; the retroussé nose looks less like Peale’s than like West’s own as he painted himself—also in a profile— in his 1776 Self-Portrait. (Peale never painted a portrait of his mentor.) Peale was attempting to fashion an appearance, thereby transforming an American provincial into a London professional; there is no question in this painting of the subject trying to meld “native” elements into a metropolitan image. Peale was endeavoring to rise to meet the image created by West as much as the other way around.14 The direct relationship between appearance and character was always tenuous in the eighteenth century, as the problem of forgery attests. In many respects, equating one with the other was a legal fiction by which the inner man was taken at face value. But while a man may be made to look like an artist, he may, as Brodsky writes, be shot through with uncertainty. Peale could not match his confident gaze in West’s portrait with his performance as an aspiring artist. Peale wrote to his patrons about his work in West’s studio, “Mr. West is Pleased to give me Encouragement to pursue the Paint.g business to that I have great Hopes of Returning Home, a tolerable proficient and give Some Satisfaction to my Benefactors.” This is a fine expression of eighteenth-century deference from a client to patrons. But Peale’s dutiful gesture hid a more complex reality as he came to grips not only with West’s technical training but with the status of artist he hoped and expected to attain. Peale did not step smoothly into the role of “artist as respectable professional,” let alone “artist as genius”; his apprenticeship with West initially shook his confidence, just as the forest of masts had awed him. Upon arriving in London, Peale confronted West’s concentration on history painting. Peale had none of the classical education and background that could have made him a successful history painter, and, at any rate, he was training to return to an American art market receptive only to portraiture. Moreover, he had decided to specialize in one area of portraiture, miniature painting. Scholars have seen this decision as simply an expression of artistic choice and of Peale’s enterprising search for a market for his talent. But given the hierarchy of artistic specialties, it is likely that Peale, unsure of himself, looked for a safe niche in which to practice. He was, literally and figuratively, scaling down his ambitions.15 Peale’s unhappiness is evident in his letters. He arrived in London in February 1767, and by October word had gotten back to Maryland that he was thinking of returning home; given the slow travel of correspondence across the Atlantic, that means Peale, in London by early spring, wanted to come home by summer. Hearing of Peale’s weakening, Charles Carroll, Barrister,

“This Faint Spark of Genius”

•

33

wrote him a stiffening letter: “[Y]ou are to Consider that you will never be able to make up to your self and family the Loss of the opportunity and that those by whom you have been Assisted will be sorry to find their money Thrown away.” Peale was alone in England, but the Barrister made a point of linking Peale’s individual success with his family’s fortunes. Peale was not supposed to repay his subvention, but Carroll played on the psychic and emotional debt that Peale would find himself in if he funked this opportunity. Carroll went on to stress that Peale should avoid concentrating on miniature painting, not because it was a lesser art form but because it was impractical for the colonial market. “I would have you Consider,” Carroll lectured, “whether that may be so advantageous to you here or whether it may suit so much Taste with us as Larger Portrait Painting which I think would be a Branch of the Profession that would Turn out to Greater Profit.” He also warned Peale off history painting, as it “Requires the utmost Genius in the artist [and] few arrive at a High Point of Perfection in it.” And more to the commercial point, “in this Part of the world few have a Taste for it and very few can go thro’ the Expence” of commissioning a history painting.16 Peale dutifully buckled down, received additional funds (£30), and stayed on in London for two years. About his training, he had little to say in his autobiography except that he worked hard. The argument from silence is inconclusive, but his experience in London must have led him to reassess his artistic ability and his place in the world of art. Recent work on populations and migrations has made us aware that the eighteenth-century Atlantic world was not static and that there was a significant demographic— and hence cultural—interaction between the Old World and the New. But if we focus on those aggregate shifts that seem to anticipate our own interconnected world, we can lose a sense of the cultural gap between London and, in Peale’s case, colonial Annapolis and the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Bernard Bailyn concludes The Peopling of British North America with a haunting image of the cultural collision experienced by Americans even late in the eighteenth century: “What did it mean to Jefferson . . . looking out [in Williamsburg] from Queen Anne rooms of spare elegance onto a wild, uncultivated land?”17 This collision occurred the other way as well. As Peale had been struck by the ships in the harbor, he must also have been staggered by the quantity and quality of works of art at the Royal Academy and in London’s studios. West was not a hands-on or doctrinaire teacher, and his “students” learned by example and trial and error. Peale copied West’s paintings and assisted on works in progress by the master. While the records may be in-

34

•

Part I

figure 8. Boy with a Toy Horse, 1768. Oil on canvas, 36 × 28 in. Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The Bayou Bend Collection, gift of Miss Ima Hogg.

complete, Peale apparently did not derive much instruction from books. He purchased Leonardo da Vinci’s Treatise of Painting (London, 1729), John Henry Müntz’s Encaustic (London, 1760), and John Joshua Kirby’s Dr. Brook Taylor’s Method of Perspective Made Easy (London, 1765). Although he learned by doing, the record of Peale’s artistic output is meager. He wrote that he supplemented his grant by painting “many portraits at a low price,” adding that he charged three to four guineas per miniature and sold them mostly to “country customers,” patrons from the provinces, not London. There are no records of these provincial patrons, however. At the 1768 exhibition of the Society of Artists, Peale showed four works: a threequarter-length portrait of an unidentified young man and three miniatures, including a double portrait of his patron’s sons, Thomas and Matthias Bordley, and a double portrait entitled Mrs. James Russell and Grand Daughter. At the same exhibition, by way of general contrast, West showed Agrippina Landing at Brundisium with the Ashes of Germanicus among his four offerings; Joseph Wright of Derby showed An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump; and Gainsborough exhibited portraits of officers in the army and the navy. Against these major works of the late eighteenth century, Peale’s contributions were invisible; unlike his teacher, Peale made no splash among the patrons and in the exhibition halls of Europe.18

“This Faint Spark of Genius”

•

35

Later in 1768, at another public exhibition, Peale showed a portrait of a child, probably Boy with a Toy Horse (Figure 8). This painting may have been influenced by Kirby’s book, since it reads as an exercise in perspective, with Peale cramming the canvas full of objects, such as the chair, andirons, and the toy horse itself, to give it depth. Framing the portrait of the boy is the receding pattern of the heavily figured carpet along with the vertical and horizontal lines of the niches and cornices of the mantle, fireplace, and wall. To convey the sense of the body in space, Peale poses the boy so that the string of the toy pulls the hem of his clothes away from his figure. Peale represented a replica of the painting above the fireplace to telescope the recessional effect. He would always handle perspective mechanistically, and in many of his pictures one can chart the grid on which he plotted their recessional elements. Moreover, the flatness of Peale’s art, a characteristic that would come to define it, is evidenced in the boy’s face and features. Both Boy with a Toy Horse and the Bordley children’s miniature anticipate Peale’s long-standing practice of solving the problem of depth by giving over a portion of his canvas to a recessional element to depict background; in the Bordley miniature there is an aerial view of London framed by the classical column on the left.19 Peale may have found English patrons, but most of his London paintings were commissioned by the same Marylanders who were subsidizing him and by their friends. John Beale Bordley’s stepbrother Edmund Jenings, an attorney in England, solicited Peale’s largest commission there, a portrait of William Pitt for the gentlemen of Westmoreland County, Virginia (Figure 9). Politically, the commission represented the growth of colonial political impetus toward reform, if not yet revolution. This was Peale’s first big commission and his one attempt at historical allegory, the style in which West worked. In the painting Peale attempted to combine allegory with a contemporary portrait to make a political point about Pitt’s support for the American colonies. Because it would have been anachronistic to place Pitt in the midst of a known classical narrative, Peale brought forward classical and historical allusions to liberty in the painting, surrounding Pitt with them. In effect, Peale reversed Benjamin West’s revolutionary strategy in The Death of General Wolfe. Instead of creating a history painting out of contemporary events, he cast a contemporary moment in the trappings of the antique, making Pitt , at best, an actor in a role.20 Pitt never sat for the portrait, and Peale, relying on sculpture for his likeness, produced an image that was criticized for looking nothing like the man. The central figure looks like the painting of a sculpture, and the surrounding elements that refer to liberty—objects and architectural details—give

figure 9. William Pitt, 1768. Oil on canvas, 951⁄4 × 611⁄4 in. Property of the Westmoreland County Museum and Library Inc. Used with permission. All rights reserved.

“This Faint Spark of Genius”

•

37

the painting a static, reified effect at odds with the dynamism of contemporary politics and the historicity of English liberty. The jumble of historical and allegorical references to liberty, including draping Pitt in a Roman toga, was out of step with an evolving American political ideology of republican simplicity that Tom Paine summed up as “Common Sense.” The symbols in Pitt were sufficiently obscure that Peale produced a pamphlet to accompany the work, laboriously explaining the details. In Pitt, Peale was unable to make a visual statement that stood on its own.21 Peale’s strategy, in other words, ran counter to an emerging political culture of republicanism that vested authority in the individual. The arcane allegories and Old World symbols were irrelevant to the Anglo-American belief in empirical verification. Instead, the visual was buttressed by the verbal: the painting has to be read as a series of references to the history of English liberty, so that Pitt seems more written than painted, all its elements didactically and laboriously spelled out. Writing about a later lithograph of Peale’s that was based on the painting, Copley politely damned the work with faint praise: “The Aligory strikes me as unexceptionably in every part and strongly expressive of the Ideas it is design’d to convey.” One wonders if that “unexceptionably”—Copley’s garbled language seems intended to say there was nothing to object to—was a slip of the tongue and that the older artist found the whole thing unexceptional indeed.22 Peale had hoped to sell lithographs based on the portrait but could not find a market; successful marketing would have shown his patrons that he could make a living as an artist. With the aesthetic failure of his Pitt and failure of the lithographs based on it, Peale reassessed his prospects.Whereas he had doubted himself when he first arrived in London, he now had more resources on which to draw and more confidence that his abilities could be improved through self-scrutiny. His writing showed, for the first time, a clear-eyed self-critical streak, a recognition that he had overreached himself and miscalculated his audience. In a remarkable letter in 1772 to his friend and patron John Beale Bordley, Peale ruthlessly anatomized his weaknesses. “My enthusiastic mind,” he wrote, “forms some idea of it [a painting] but I have not the Execution, have not the ability, [n]or am I a Master of Drawing.” Peale knew he would never have the technical and intellectual resources to become a brilliant or innovative artist: “what little I do is by mear immatation of what is before me, perhaps I have a good Eye, that is all, and not half the application that I now think is necessary.” For the first time in his life, he looked at himself stripped down to first principles and bare essentials, and he concluded that by exploiting his eye and his energy, perhaps “I can please.”23

figure 10. John Dickinson, 1770. Oil on canvas, 49 × 39 in. Courtesy of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania Collection, Atwater Kent Museum of Philadelphia.

“This Faint Spark of Genius”

•

39

In place of the complicated allegories and symbols of the Pitt, Peale was soon espousing a more straightforward representation of the subject in his painting. He now valued the immediate apprehension of nature over the artifice and decadence of European civilization. Back from London and in Annapolis by 1770–71, he wrote that “nature is the best Picture to Coppy, and I do not regrett the Loss of the Anticks [antiques: i.e., ancients], or the works of a Raphael and Corregea, since I am obliged dayly to portray the finest forms.” Continuing to make his artistic declaration of independence, Peale affirmed that “one rude line from Nature is worth an hundred from coppys, enlarges the Ideas and makes one see and feel with such sencesations—as are worthy of the auther.” The ideological and prepolitical cast of Peale’s new aesthetic preference for American truth over European falsehood is spelled out in Tom Paine’s Common Sense (1776): “I draw my idea of the form of government from a principle in nature which no art can overturn, viz., that the more simple anything is, the less liable it is to be disordered.” By art, Paine meant artifice or trickery. Peale was about to demonstrate art’s ability to strengthen the connection between nature and political representation.24 Peale rebounded artistically from Pitt with fine political portraits of John Dickinson (Figure 10) and John Beale Bordley (Figure 11). In these paintings, Peale subtly incorporated political and nationalistic references instead of representing them didactically. (Indeed, Peale was so subtle that the writing Bordley holds in his portrait has only recently been read correctly, by Sidney Hart, as an important statement of colonial independence!) Most important, Peale minimized arcane symbolism, favoring instead the depiction of distinctly American landscapes. These ultimately would be read as signs that in breaking with the Old World, the American Revolution had uniquely American roots. Bernard Bailyn writes, “By 1763, the great landmarks of European life . . . had faded in their exposure to the open, wilderness environment of America.” The view of the Falls of the Schuylkill that dominates the right side of John Dickinson is visual evidence of that transformation.25 The new naturalism in Peale’s painting can be seen by contrasting William Pitt of 1768 with John Beale Bordley of 1770. Peale’s new style of naturalism was a perfect fit with his subject. Bordley was an advocate of American autarky, and Peale shows the Marylander, not in Pitt’s anachronistic toga and greaves, but in brown homespun. The setting, instead of Pitt’s monumental urban stone, is a peach orchard, and in the right background is a sheep meadow. The American flora in the painting include jimsonweed, a hallucinogen with a specific and peculiar association with English rule (since it was reported that English soldiers had indulged in the

figure 11. John Beale Bordley, 1770. Oil on canvas, 791⁄16 × 58 in. National Gallery of Art, Washington. Gift of the Barra Foundation, Inc. Photograph © Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art.

“This Faint Spark of Genius”

•

41

narcotic during Bacon’s Rebellion), and red clover, which Bordley advocated as a rotation crop to keep the land fertile and productive. This contrasting of English irrationality and parasitism with American rationality and selfsufficiency is the central dynamic of the painting. To the right, the sheep (the source of Bordley’s clothing) and an American farm (fount of American self-sufficiency) are bathed in sunlight, a natural light rather than the artificial light of the memorial flame in William Pitt. To the left, under contrastingly dark and ominous skies, a British soldier, skulking under the forest’s canopy, guides away a horse loaded with sheepskins, appropriating the rightful products of American industry. The soldier may reference specific quarrels between England and the colonies over customs regulations and duties, but the image is a generalized sign of England’s usurpation of American products and thus American rights.26 The painting’s visual and ideological background is divided by a vertical and Manichaean line down the middle, but the narrative line that connects that background to Bordley himself traces an elongated S curve from the British soldier to the torn document in the left foreground and then goes vertically through the figure of Bordley, concluding with the statue nestled in the fertile peach tree.This narrative line presents the colonists’ case against Britain and then suggests the solution that will restore harmony and justice to the two sides. The initial dialogue is between the appropriating soldier and the colonists, who, in the torn paper, reject the new customs duties and impositions of the 1760s. The violence implicit in the torn paper (which references as well the opposition of light and dark skies) need not be the final outcome, however. Instead, the painting’s line passes up from a specific, local grievance to the book of law and historical precedent on which Bordley leans and on to the figure, adapted slightly from Pitt, of “Lex Angli,” or English Law, with its scales of justice and the cornucopia from which the law’s blessings flow. Temporally, the narrative moves back from contemporary grievance and misuse of the law to appeal to the specific responsibilities of those who enforce the law and finally to appeal to the law as the institution that ensures not just fairness but liberty.27 Mediating this appeal is the figure of Bordley, who points to “Lex Angli.” Bordley’s position tells the English to act responsibly according to the precedents and traditions of the law. This appeal reflects the “conservative” origins of the Revolution and Bordley’s own politics. It is Bordley’s common sense and balanced equipoise that hold the book of law in precarious balance; if the goodwill of men like Bordley is removed, the law will fall. The visible writing on the open book reads, “Nolumus Leges Angliae mutari,” or “We are unwilling that the laws of England be changed.” In the

42

•

Part I

prerevolutionary phase of the crisis, the colonists sought reform by recalling the English to the obligations incumbent on them by virtue of their own institutions and traditions. Bernard Bailyn characterizes the prerevolutionary pamphleteers as “profoundly reasonable people. . . . For the primary goal of the American Revolution . . . was not the overthrow or even the alteration of the existing social order but the preservation of political liberty threatened by the apparent corruption of the constitution, and the establishment in principle of the existing conditions of liberty. The communication of understanding, therefore, lay at the heart of the Revolutionary movement.” The transgression, or violation, of self-evident propositions and historically derived precedents of the common law could only have resulted from English delusion; hence the jimsonweed was a symbol of temporary insanity. Moreover, if the English continued to ravage American nature indiscriminately, they would have to take the bitter with the sweet. The Bordley portrait supports the colonial cause by appealing to the English to stop corrupting the law by their temporal abuses of power and to return to the purity of the original. The jimsonweed and dandelion that threaten to overgrow “Lex Angli” are to be weeded out and replaced by nourishing red clover. Only then will the cornucopia of benefits deriving from the law continue.28 The tension in the Bordley derives not just from the fine balancing of the book held open under the Marylander’s forearm but from the implicit contrast between the written world of English law and an emerging radical sense of natural law. Bordley’s law book rests on a natural plinth of rock. “Lex Angli” and her cornucopia seem to grow out of the peach tree. By representing the law temporally and symbolically in the American landscape Peale implied that the colonists, if unable to achieve redress, would go beyond the written “law” to obtain justice. The colonies did not have to remain dependent on England for their livelihood or indeed their governance. The line Peale drew in the Bordley, starting with the single depredation of the English soldier packing up American products, ends with the American landscape triumphing over the monumental, classical trappings of imperial rule, whose representation so overdetermined Pitt. They lie in ruins at Bordley’s feet. Among the definitions of rude, virtually none are positive; most oppose the word to attributes such as civilization, erudition, and polish. Peale went to London to acquire training and polish, but he recoiled aesthetically from England’s imperial power in all its manifestations. By insisting on the primacy of that one “rude line from nature,” Peale was fashioning an American etymology and aesthetic that recalled the initial European encounter with the American landscape. America as a “New Eden” was an old story,

“This Faint Spark of Genius”

•

43

one that Peale updated with a political twist. He signaled the relationship between economics, politics, and aesthetics in a decision he made in October 1767, after England had imposed the “Quartering Acts” on New York. He wrote that “[a]fter this transaction Peale, would never pull of[f ] his Hatt, as the King passed by. And then he determined to do all in his Power to render his Country Independant.” The encounter with England replayed, with a wider focus, Peale’s experience as an apprentice. Independence, for Peale and for America, meant economic independence, and Peale’s resolve extended down to (or up from) his own personal appearance. By the end of his stay Peale had determined to give up dressing in London fashions, and now “His first step was not to purchase any cloathing to bring with him to America, but to encourage the manufactures of America.” The dream of America’s return to an Edenic state of nature was unrealizable, but that dream could be recast as American independence, rooted in individual autonomy. The decision to wear homespun encouraged home manufacture, but it also put people like Peale and Bordley symbolically closer to nature while distancing them from European finery. Homespun was rude and thus honest. The metaphor of homespun could also be applied to Peale’s art. As he began with Bordley, Peale would henceforth devote his “rude line” to tracing the contours of the new man, the American. Peale’s experience in England taught him what he could not do but also what he could. In Common Sense, Thomas Paine wrote that “independence [is] a single simple line, contained within ourselves,” uncannily echoing Peale’s aesthetic decision of the previous decade. By 1776 Peale’s career had begun to demonstrate how aesthetics and politics would fuse.29

chapter 3

“Application Will Overcome the Greatest Difficulties” Work, Career, and Identity in Peale’s Art and Life

~ On June 19, 1776, the artist Charles Willson Peale arrived in Philadelphia with his family, completing a carefully planned move to America’s leading city. Throughout the preceding year, Peale had alternated between his family’s home in Maryland, taking portraits of the Tidewater gentry, and Philadelphia, where he exploited a market for portraits swelled by the Continental Congress. Unlike Benjamin Franklin, who in his autobiography described his arrival in the city alone and penniless, Peale was no young innocent seeking his fortune in the big city. In 1776 he was thirtyfive, with a family, had produced a substantial body of work, and had established a considerable reputation in the colonies as an artist. His move to the city indicated that he now wanted to work on a bigger stage. Philadelphia had the wealth and population to support a portrait painter and was especially attractive to the artist as the site of the national government. In 1775 Congress had commissioned Peale to paint a portrait of George Washington, and Peale hoped for more official commissions. Moreover, the wealth and status seeking of Philadelphians would provide him with a better market than the one in the Tidewater, which he had already worked comprehensively. Having explored Philadelphia’s prospects, Peale “found a sufficient run of business, which now induced him to think of settling in that city.” But Peale’s move was more than just a business decision. He was convinced that he could play a major role in the politics and culture of the developing American nation. Peale was a firm supporter of independence, and he wanted to be at the heart of the revolutionary action. He was confident that 44

“Application”

•

45

he could link his artistic abilities to the country in a way that would benefit both parties. Having established himself as an artist, he was now willing to leave the comfortable niche of Tidewater for the political and cultural life of the “Athens of America.”1 After William Pitt, Peale chastised himself not just for lacking artistic ability but also for having “not half the application that I now think is necessary.” Peale did improve as an artist, as Bordley and Dickinson attest, and after returning from England he made sure that he always worked hard. The artist had been lucky and talented, with generous and forgiving patrons, but his apprenticeship had taught him the need for self-reliance based on work. Contrasting innate and acquired talents in the arts, Peale wrote that it is “an adopted opinion that Ginius for the fine arts, is a particular gift, and not an acquirement. That Poets, Painters &c are born such. Now there are proofs of men, that shew an equal readiness to acquire knowledge in what ever may be thought difficult: perhaps their minds may be compared to a fine Soil, in which everything will grow, that is sown therein. But remember that cultivation is absolutely necessary. Application will overcome the greatest difficulties, but there must also be a stimulus to produce a continued exertion.” The key word is “Now,” for Peale distinguished between the past, when each individual’s future was ordained from birth (recall Charles Peale’s fatalistic “Nature made me”), and his own time, when achievement depended on an individual’s will. Peale also distinguished the New World, where all the talents could flourish, from the Old, where birth determined all one could be and do. In America “now,” individual ability was as fecund and as wide-ranging as American nature itself.2 America embodied pure potential, but no individual could achieve that potential without effort. Hard work was crucial, and Peale crossed out the gentle conditional “may also be” to affirm that “cultivation . . . is absolutely necessary.” The natural or physical resources Peale had at his command began with his physical engine. Interpretations of eighteenth-century American culture that focus on aestheticizing the body—evoked in popular imagery of the century as one of cotillions, wigs, and showing a good “leg”—sometimes can ignore the physical body itself and the extent to which societies in the past relied on bodily power and stamina. In a manual economy, physical strength counted not only for ordinary laborers and artisans, who relied on it simply to survive, but also for the top echelons of colonial leadership. Physical power and dexterity—Washington was a superb horseman and dancer— projected an individual’s social and political power to the public. Peale linked Washington’s charisma to his physical power in recounting an incident of 1772, when he made the first of his many portraits of the fu-

46

•

Part I

ture president. Passing the time at Mt.Vernon one afternoon, Peale and some other visitors amused themselves by “pitching the bar,” when suddenly the Colonel appeared among us. He requested to be shown the pegs that marked the bounds of our efforts; then, smiling, and without putting off his coat, held out his hand for the missile. No sooner did the heavy iron bar feel the grasp of his mighty hand than it lost the power of gravitation and whizzed through the air, striking the ground far, very far, beyond our utmost limits.We were indeed amazed, as we stood around all stripped to the buff, with shirt sleeves rolled up, and having thought ourselves very clever fellows.3

This scene wonderfully describes the impression Washington made on his contemporaries. Moreover, in noting Washington’s power, Peale also establishes the gulf between Washington and ordinary citizens. First, Washington had been working on his plantation’s extensive grounds while Peale and the other visitors had been idling at a game that wasted strength to no purpose. Second, Washington did not even have to reveal his body to demonstrate his superiority, hinting at reserves of strength still left untapped. The mythic element in this passage is its hint that Washington’s natural power allowed him to overcome nature as the whizzing iron bar seemed to defy the law of gravity. Peale’s portrait (Figure 12) from that 1772 sitting captures the Virginian’s latent power. In the picture, Washington’s body seems almost to bulge out of his military uniform; his coat splays open across his barrel-like trunk, and his thighs and haunches are those of a draft horse. Washington, adopting the pose of modesty about having his portrait painted, reports that he was so “sullen” (meaning lethargic or sluggish, not sulky) throughout the sitting that Peale would not be able to describe “to the world what manner of man I am.”4 Washington’s gaze is abstracted and he appears impatient to shift his body into motion, leave the artist behind, and strike out into Indian country. In his waistcoat pocket is the “Order of March,” and he is waiting to move down the road at the head of his troops. Although Washington wears an officer’s uniform and appurtenances, Peale indicates that the colonel will engage the fight by the musket slung over his shoulder. Officers did not carry or use long guns in combat. Peale’s inclusion of “Brown Bess” suggests that he wanted Washington to represent the democratic aspects of the colonial militia in contrast with England’s absolutist army. It also suggests that in wilderness battles, like those of the French and Indian Wars, the etiquette of combat did not apply. Above all, the musket demonstrates Washington’s personal eagerness to fight. Peale’s seventy portraits of Washington indicate how the artist identified

“Application”

•

47

figure 12. George Washington in the Uniform of a British Colonial Colonel, 1772. Oil on canvas, 50 × 411⁄2 in. Washington-Custis-Lee Collection, Washington and Lee University, Lexington, Virginia.

with and furthered Washington’s career, serving this leader and other colonial and, later, revolutionary leaders by painting them. Peale may have hoped to become the de facto, if not official, “court” painter of America, a position that would give him both steady income and institutional status. Knowing that the very idea of a “court” painter in eighteenth-century America went

48

•

Part I

against the grain of republican and revolutionary ideology, Peale recognized that unlike his European counterparts he would have to find his subjects among ordinary Americans. “I must,” he wrote, “make these my Anticks [antiques, ancients] and improve myself as well as I can while I am providing for my support.” So Peale was thrown onto the uncertainties of the market. From 1769 to 1791 he painted 686 portraits—largely on painting trips through the middle Atlantic states and often under difficult conditions, as during the Revolutionary War.5 Peale’s writings on his art show him paying far more attention to “providing for his support” than to “improving himself.” He devotes hardly any space to discussing his art. Despite the interest he expressed in mechanics throughout his life, he was uninterested in the mechanics of painting. When making a portrait, he only barely describes what he is painting, never how he is doing it or why. Here are his diary entries from September 1788, when he painted Benjamin and Eleanor Ridgely Laming (Figure 13): 18th. spent all this forenoon waited for Mr. Lamings Carriage. . . . after dinner the carriage came for me. I found Mr. Lamings family at Dinner I sketched out the design. 19th Mrs. Laming sat & I did nothing else the whole day except walking into the Medows after Butter flies & Grass hoppers— 20 Mr. Laming satt in the Morn:g company of sundry Gentleman to dinner the picture thought very like, yet I am determined in my own mind, paint over & place the head in another direction, because by so doing I hope to improve the picture. 22d I paint again the likeness of Mr. Lamming I find as expected the picture improved—Mrs. Laming also sat— 23d painted Mr Lamings drapery 24th went to Town to clean myself returned amediately after breakfast and then painted the background which was view of part of Baltimore Town— 28th having been very bussey at this picture of this family and nothing material happening.

And so on until October 5, when the painting was apparently finished. On October 8, Laming paid Peale $18.50, partial payment on a total fee of £35 (the mixture of currencies shows the instability of early American monetary supply); there is no notation in the diary of Laming’s having paid the remainder. Peale’s diary records the work he performed in the same way that it records the distances he traveled and the prices paid him.6

“Application”

•

49

figure 13. Benjamin and Eleanor Ridgely Laming, 1788. Oil on canvas, 42 × 60 in. National Gallery of Art, Washington. Photograph © 2003, Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art.

Peale’s income from his portraits is difficult to reconstruct—both the details of payment and what they mean, given fluctuating currency values and the mixture of American dollars with English sterling. But we can assess Peale’s commissions by contrasting them with the debt of £900 he incurred early in his adulthood. I derive the following raw totals from his fragmentary painting lists; Peale kept no complete portrait “book”: 1770–72 summer–fall 1778

60 portraits 17 portraits

£538.14 $1,667

(Sixteen of these paintings were miniatures, their high price due to wartime inflation of the American dollar. Peale charged $100 for his wartime miniatures, reflecting the devalued Continental dollar.) August 3–November 3, 1788 1789

7 portraits 5 portraits

(Peale did not receive payment from one sitter.)

£146.15 £56.17.06

50

•

Part I

1789–90 1790

40 portraits 8 portraits

£390.05 £152.05

(On this trip to Maryland, Peale bartered a portrait to the merchant John O’Donnell in exchange for items for his museum and painted another portrait as a present. The Gittings family paid £47.05 to be commemorated with their slaves and land.)7 Itinerant portraiture played to Peale’s strengths, physical stamina and cheerful compulsiveness. Nonetheless, it was a precarious way to make a living. Itinerancy borrowed some features from the premodern tradition of the traveling artisan—Peale himself had worked as an itinerant saddler and odd-jobs man—reflecting again American painting’s debt to the mechanical, instead of the fine, arts. Traveling artisans initiated specialization and division of labor, whereby a farm or household exchanged skills and goods for cash. For painting, though, unlike knife sharpening or whitesmithing, the market was necessarily limited because of the status of paintings as luxury items. Itinerancy, therefore, combined elements of the emerging modern economy with those of an older system based on a personal relationship between painter and patron. The smoothly ordered features of Peale’s portraits that abstracted the social lives of the sitters also hid the uncertain process by which the artist came to produce them. With no institutional support, portraitists like Peale depended on word of mouth, rudimentary advertisements, and sheer hard work to eke out a steady stream of commissions. The difficulties of traveling on inadequate roads to no set itinerary and then working in haphazard conditions should not be underestimated. That Peale worked quickly and according to a formula for rendering human features may have had as much to do with the weather conditions on the Eastern Shore and the social geography of the great estates as with aesthetic theory. Perhaps Peale’s abstemious diet came from his remembering the awful meals he took while on the move!8 • • •

For Peale, in but not of the world he painted, the need for patronage meant a constant tension between self-assertion and dependence. His artistic career was a constant reminder that he was not wholly his own man. Relationships with clients were always precarious. Peale, early in his career, was involved in a nasty spat with Elie Valette, a Maryland public official whose family portrait he painted in 1774. In September of that year, when Valette, despite several requests, failed to pay the thirty-six-guinea fee, Peale took

“Application”

•

51

the dispute public, first publishing a thinly veiled request in the newspaper for “E.V.” to pay his debts and then citing Valette by name. Valette responded: “mr. charles wilson peale, alias charles peale—yes, you shall be paid; but not before you have learned to be less insolent.” The debt was settled in 1775. Charles Coleman Sellers speculates that because of its vehemence and because Peale allowed his debtors lenient terms, seldom pressing them about their debt, this dispute must have occurred because of the sitter’s dissatisfaction with Peale’s portrayal of his family. In the absence of any supporting documents, this explanation is plausible. Aesthetic disagreements aside, Valette refused payment in terms that made clear Peale’s social and personal inferiority, rebuking the artist for his “insolence,” the presumption of his stepping beyond his station in reminding a gentleman and a patron about settling his debt. Ironically, Peale’s painting, by representing Valette’s wealth and professional standing, enhanced his status. The work celebrates Valette’s publication of The Deputy Commissioner’s Guide within the Province of Maryland (Annapolis, 1774) by including the book among the law texts on the table. It shows a richly furnished house as well as a glimpse of a formal garden out the window and door. Nonetheless, real, as opposed to merely pictorial, status required that underlings be kept in their place, and Valette did not hesitate to turn on Peale.9 Not content with reminding Peale of his inferiority, Valette accused him of operating under an “alias.” He intimated that Peale had adopted an alias to perpetrate a fraud against Valette or to get money from him by false pretenses. (And Valette may have been trying to get out of the debt on the technicality that his agreement was with Charles Peale, not Charles Willson Peale.) But Valette shrewdly judged his charge, aiming at what Peale would have been most sensitive about: his identity and his past. Until his stay in London, Peale signed his name, following his father, as Charles Peale. Upon becoming an artist, he began using the middle name Willson, eventually signing his paintings CWPeale. With his entrance into adulthood and a profession, Peale created a new name for himself in fact as well as in deed. Peale’s actual middle name was Wilson; he silently added the extra “L” when he started using it. Did he do so in a subconscious resolve to make self-will central to his life? And was it a sign that through the exercise of that will the son would rise and distinguish himself from the father who named him? Catching Peale as he made the change in names, Valette mocked him for pretension, suggesting that Peale betrayed uncertainty about his identity. Moreover, some in Annapolis must have discerned in Valette’s broadside a veiled allusion to Peale’s father, his forgery, and the “Digby letter” hoax.

52

•

Part I

The son, Valette suggested, was following the family tradition of imposture. Peale did not know his place, or even his name, and to restore order such presumptuousness required a public rebuke. The Valette imbroglio hinged on Peale’s representation of himself. Aside from Sellers’s implication that the Valette dispute was about aesthetics, we have little information about how Peale’s sitters and patrons reacted to his portraits of them. Peale generally conveyed his sitters’ approval by saying they found his portraits “like.” (The Laming picture was “thought very like.”) Peale’s word like, deriving from likeness, indicated how portraits were intended to be the simulacra of the sitter, engaging in the artistic fiction that the canvas and the life were interchangeable. Peale recorded few instances of dissatisfaction with his ability to create a likeness. One such instance occurred in 1792, when he painted a miniature of Cornelius J. Bogart, of New York City, related to Peale through his second wife’s family. Peale painted the portrait in four sittings, with one session to work on the background. Bogart paid fourteen guineas and “appeared perfectly satisfied with the likeness at this time,” but when Peale showed the painting at a family dinner, Bogart’s wife “immediately began saying it was not in the least like.” Her husband demurred, but she insisted that “it was not like, but like a Mr.——.” Peale offered to alter the miniature, but the offer was refused, and Mrs. Bogart continued to disparage it and the painter at social and family occasions around New York, calling it “not worth 2 pence.” Peale was reduced to defending himself on the grounds of Mrs. Bogart’s public rudeness, deflecting the issue from aesthetics to social conduct.10 The Bogart miniature is unlocated, so it cannot be judged against other miniatures that Peale painted in the 1790s. Mrs. Bogart destabilized the relationship between sitter and painter by questioning Peale’s likeness of her husband. Inadvertently, she exposed the artistic fiction of likeness with her expostulation that the miniature was not “like” her husband but “like” another gentleman. Defending himself and unable to propitiate the Bogarts by painting them another portrait, Peale called forward the testimony of “several persons to whom I shewed the piece, and who I supposed did not know of my having such a portrait on hand” and claimed that they “amediately new the picture.” Despite this test, which identified the likeness with the sitter, Peale himself was unconvinced by his own painting. He vacillated in the same sentence between a confession “that it was not so strikingly like as I could wish it, or as my pictures most commonly are” and the assertion that nevertheless it “is a high finished picture, and a picture which the more looked at, would more & more be thought better off.” Peale here abandons likeness as the criterion of critical judgment and shifts the terms of debate

“Application”

•

53

by describing the work of art as a valuable commodity. Seduced by the miniature’s “high finish,” its audience would, he believed, eventually come to accept the likeness as valid. The painting was what the sitter was supposed to look like, and so, in time, he would.11 In his autobiography Peale retrospectively excised unsettling details of the quarrel with Mrs. Bogart, instead asserting his authority as a professional artist over those who did not understand art’s mysteries: “It is unpleasant to undertake any kind of work where the Person employing an Artist has not a knowledge of the art, or the value sett on it.” Although Peale previously had only accused Mrs. Bogart of impoliteness in airing her discontent in public, he now argued that because she did not know enough about art to question his artistic decisions, she should have kept silent. In the revision Peale failed to admit his own uneasiness about the quality of the miniature and his failure to invoke his artistic authority at the time. He had in fact tried to satisfy the unhappy Bogarts, offering to repaint the original or to paint a new version. He alluded instead to Mrs. Bogart’s rudeness, claiming to take the high ground and not stoop to details: “he forbears to transcribe them, because he believes it is better to let it be obliterated rather than any one shall be offended with his remarks.” (By “remarks,” Peale meant his diary entries, not that he was the guilty party.) Peale drew the appropriate moral to close the whole unseemly and, at the time, unsettling episode: “How very important it is that we should not speak before considering the result. [B]ut some persons passions hurries them into trouble.” It was axiomatic for Peale that the passions had to be governed and impatience held in check. In the case of the Bogart miniature, Peale remained silent for some thirty-six years before he could create a narrative to his liking and his advantage, one that reduced the messiness of the actual commission to an insistence on the autobiographer’s artistic and moral authority.12 If Peale cited few dissatisfied patrons, he also reported few occasions when he was praised. Except for reiterating his twin precepts—to paint quickly and be agreeable to his sitters—Peale said nothing of the act of painting or the result.Writing in his diary about painting the Lamings’ portrait, he noted that he was loath to keep a record, confessing his “unwillingness to write before a family, least I should give a suspicion that I am making remarks on the transactions of a family where I am treated with the greatest politeness.— this repunction I have experienced at other times at other families.” In a subservient position, Peale could not afford to be an open observer of the households in which he worked. Apparently, he felt he could not afford to write at all lest he be thought to spy. His silence about his art has a rationale in the context of the work: portrait painting, especially as an itinerant,

54

•

Part I

was a continuation, in a more gilded cage, of his bound labor as a youth. Peale was forthcoming about topics, subjects, and projects over which he was in charge, such as his inventions, his family, and his museum. But about his painting commissions, he limited himself to recording the facts, schedule, and fees of each job. His documents are full of his sketches of inventions, but they contain almost no drawings of his portraits.13 As Peale learned in London, he lacked the classical education a history painter needed. He also lacked the technical training, especially anatomical training, to build up a portrait and individualize it through a thorough understanding of what lay beneath a sitter’s skin. Peale was eager to get on with his career as an artist, and thus unwilling to stop to improve the technique he had acquired ad hoc. Apparently he never did preliminary sketches or studies for his portraits, although he did edit his paintings as he did them. To minimize revisions, he standardized the bodies in his portraits, simplifying and speeding his task. He painted figures flatly; bulking them up was a way of suggesting three-dimensionality, solving the problem of depicting a body in space for an artist who had problems handling perspective. His heads and bodies were inevitably oval. His George Washington at Princeton (see Figure 3) is an instructive case.The picture exaggerates the general’s proportions, narrowing his shoulders while broadening his hips and midsection. (Washington, though being more than six feet tall, had only a thirtysix-inch waist.) Technique aside, the characteristic use of the oval for body shapes in Peale’s portraits, especially for the head, has always been taken as a sign of harmony, tranquility, and order. Peale’s standard format was designed to fit his sitters in a template of the virtues, in which stability of the features, and thus the emotions, was primary. The symmetrically oval head in this and other paintings indicates harmony and equanimity—a wellbalanced character—while corporeal bulk suggests stasis, fixity, and order.14 Compositionally, Peale always foregrounded the figures in his portraits. In his bust portraits of revolutionary heroes, the figure fills the frame. In his more elaborated portraits, especially of families, the figures are on the picture plane, projected toward the viewer to make them seem present, while other biographical features—houses, gardens, other views—are recessional. As I have argued above, these features might be Peale’s solutions to his difficulty with perspective. But it is also possible that he was uninterested in problems of perspective because he wanted to avoid complexity. The artist’s tendency to quarter the recessions in his painting suggests that he might have used a perspective machine (as we know he did in the preliminary drawing for The Artist in His Museum) to manage architectural elements. Aesthetically, this foregrounding of the figures and their flatness ran

“Application”

•

55

figure 14. Polygraph sold to Thomas Jefferson by C. W. Peale, n.d. Thomas Jefferson Papers, the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia Library.

counter to the practice, arising in the Renaissance, of recession from the surface of the canvas. The flatness of Peale’s portraits caused his sitters not to recede but to project forward, into public space: private virtues were represented not for the sitters’ (or just the sitters’) sake but for that of the public, which could connect with and learn from them.15 For both aesthetic and technological reasons, Peale was fascinated by tracing and copying machines, especially the physionotrace. The popularity of the profile drawings—the physionotrace was a huge moneymaker at Peale’s Philadelphia Museum—demonstrated a desire not just for tokens of remembrance but, read according to Lavater’s theories and charts, for scientific reassurance about character. In the public mind profiles created by a machine avoided the subjectivity and vagaries of freehand drawing. Peale adopted the basic mechanism of the physionotrace, the pantograph, to make other drawing and perspective machines (Figure 14) to generate an outline and a structure for an image. These devices were especially helpful for trac-

56

•

Part I

ing in the lines of perspective. Peale writes that he worked out the structure for his and Titian’s Long Room study with “his machine.” Whether he used this or another machine in his portraits is unclear. Although Sellers categorically says that he did not, the evidence is mixed, and Sellers himself says that Peale used a tracing machine of some kind while in London in 1772 but not, subsequently, in his portraits. Sellers offers no evidence for his assertions about Peale’s use of machinery, but he makes the common assumption that the unmediated genius of the artist creates the image. Given Peale’s fascination with machinery, it seems likely that he would have tried it to make preliminary notations on his canvases. Peale’s estate inventory lists a “camera lucida,” the best optical device available for artists to create accurate reduced images. Peale used this machine, but with difficulty, when he did a portrait of Hannah Moore Peale in 1816; whether he tried it again is not known. Absent specific evidence, we might surmise that Peale used a machine to develop confidence in his ability to create an outline and stopped doing so once he had habituated himself to producing a simple, standardized line for the body.16 Portraits were not profiles. But even without an actual machine, Peale’s aesthetic was based on a machinelike ideal of empirically duplicating a subject. Just as his polygraph’s dual pens produced two originals, Peale aimed in painting to turn himself into an instrument to replicate his sitters. For him, portraiture had to “be perfect in the representation or it is of no value. But when it is executed so well as to render it a perfect illusion there is no price too high . . . for such a picture.” Even though he championed it as the highest attainment of the artist, Peale had an uneasy relationship with the concept of illusion. He disparaged trompe l’oeil as a trick that violated rational perception, understanding, and empirical verification. In contrast, Peale’s aesthetic of illusionism was oxymoronic: his canvases would show exactly what was there on the surface. Yet as Peale well knew, such perfect illusionism was a conceit; the polygraph created two indistinguishable letters, but the brush could not create a second sitter.17 Peale’s illusionism in portraiture relied on an understanding or a complicity between artist and subject—and the audience. First, the artist would make himself invisible, reducing his creative activity to that of a painting machine, seeing what was before him. The portraitist fulfilled the expectations of his sitters by ordering signs and attributes to construct an acceptable image, one that mirrored the sitters’ public self-presentation. It is not entirely accurate to describe the sitter’s commissioning of a portrait as an act of self-fashioning, though that desire might motivate the decision to have a portrait made.The finished painting instead reified the sitter’s attainments.

“Application”

•

57

Peale, in one of his few technical discussions of portraiture, described the main artistic problem as rendering or freezing motion, not just getting a subject to sit still but capturing the whole character—the history and biography— that had formed the features. In the eighteenth century, this aspect separated portrait painting from the thousands of instances in which possessions—the kind of silverware, china, or fabrics one purchased and used—defined or elaborated personality. The portrait, though a commodity, was not one commodity among equals; it was never simply “wall furniture.” Rather, it worked symbolically as both a material display and an encapsulation of the world that made that material display possible. Peale’s portraits of planters and merchants signified their attainment of status and class rather than their social and economic mobility.18 A portrait was not just, as T. H. Breen puts it, “cultural commentary”;19 it was the culture itself, and Peale’s empirical aesthetic was particularly suited to represent the individuals who embodied it. In contrast certainly with Copley, but also with West and Wollaston, Peale, with the flatness of his colors, shifted attention from the material culture of the sitters (and the virtuosity of the artist) to his assembly and depiction of the subjects. The “brownness” of Peale’s palette—the olives, russets, and ochers—seems to betray the influence of his origins, redolent of the landscape of the Eastern Shore in fall and winter and of homespun cloth. If Peale’s paintings are homely, it is because they were not about color but about control and status. Wanting control and power over the order of the world, Peale perfectly matched the expectations of sitters who wanted to celebrate the ordering of their particular world. To that extent, a Peale portrait was something of a tautology, since there was rarely a division between artist and subject. Both parties wanted a rational, understandable, harmonious construction of their lives, in which surface appearance was identical to character, whatever the biographical reality. In rejecting allegory and high art conventions for a “plain style” of portraiture, Peale wrote in instruction to his son Rembrandt: “Truth is better than a high finish. The Italians say give me a true outline & you may fill it up with Turd.” This aphorism indicates Peale’s commitment to the line— whether drawn by hand or by a machine—in framing the portrait’s figure; as in flowing handwriting and a benign countenance, externalities were allimportant. But again there is uneasiness about what may be hidden under a plausible surface. That Peale never did the muscular or skeletal drawings that were a staple of an artist’s training may indicate his not wanting to look too closely at the corporeal body, preferring to represent the idealized external appearance that a sitter presented to the public. The flatness and fore-

58

•

Part I

groundedness of Peale’s portraits were a refusal to look too deeply into a character’s complexities and contradictions. Peale’s whole aesthetic, from painting itself to aestheticizing the body with his program of self-hygiene, was committed to ensuring that the outline did not contain a “Turd.” Peale’s autobiographical project inflected his art much more than any aesthetic considerations. Just as he was creating himself, he would create the image of himself in the portraits of America’s upper and rising middle classes. His portraits forged self-constructions that, when generalized, represented and articulated the dominant culture of America’s local and national elites. Peale, who vowed never to paint anyone whose character he disapproved of, represented the values of order and respectability in depicting his sitters. He did not paint Benedict Arnold or Aaron Burr and “some others who might have expected I would ask them the favor of setting to me. Amongst a collection of about 80 Portraits [at the museum] there is none to disgrace the gallery as yet. I hope I shall continue to be equally fortunate in my choise of men.” As Allan Sekula has argued, a portrait gallery is a double system, honoring by inclusion, condemning by omission. To select virtuous men requires knowledge of the excluded other. A Peale portrait was a public stamp of approval.20 All this is illustrated in Peale’s commentary on, and execution of, the portrait he painted of the Maryland planter James Gittings and members of his family in 1791 (Figure 15). In the commentary, after briefly describing the pose, Peale seamlessly dissolves from the landscape depicted in the painting to a description of the plantation Long Green itself: “At one end of the picture is view of Mr. Gittings’ mill and distant lands, nearer a wheat field and the reapers reaping, which actually took place while I was about the part of the picture. The seat of Mr. Gittings is situated in a rich valley where he has all the blessings that a country life can afford. The slaves, of which he [has] a considerable number, appear happy, and great order and quiet is observed in the government of the farm.” Peale perfectly expressed the master class’s ideology. Notice in particular, not just the preemptive assumption that the slaves were “happy” but the omission, in the description of “the blessings that a country life can afford,” of the slave labor that makes those blessings possible. Pictorially, the slaves are represented as black-andwhite dots—anonymous units of labor distinguished only by their color to signal the South’s divisions of race and class—on the golden landscape of Gittings’s wheat field. The slaves are further distanced from the genteel setting of the Gittings family group by the architectural railing and pillar, which frame the landscape as a picture within a picture.21 Yet the slaves are present, imprisoned within that stonework, working

“Application”

•

59

figure 15. Mr. and Mrs. James Gittings and Granddaughter, 1791. Oil on canvas, 40 × 64 in. The Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore.

to preserve the dynastic wealth of the family. The granddaughter plays with a captive squirrel, an artistic reference to Copley’s Boy with a Squirrel, but also a gesture to the master class’s habit of command. This power, which permitted order and quiet to reign, is hidden or displaced in the Gittings family group that Peale portrays. T. J. Clark has written that “[i]deologies naturalize representation. . . . [T]hey present constructed and disputable meanings as if they were hardly meanings at all.” In the managed nature and social world of Mr. and Mrs. James Gittings and Granddaughter, Peale shows how representation naturalizes ideology. James Gittings holds four stalks of wheat, an abstraction of the social and economic power he wields over his property and “his” people.22 Class and social tensions were displaced in the Gittings painting and throughout Peale’s work. Peale depicted nature as an organizing principle that connected human society to natural laws, helping to create and maintain order without any of the fractious disorder of politics. In his double portrait of Eleanor and Benjamin Laming (see Figure 13), the flowers and fruits Eleanor holds suggest not only her fecundity as a new bride but a rooting of the feminine in nature. Benjamin’s status as a Baltimore merchant and his connection to the wider world of commerce are signaled by his telescope (which, Jules Prown has suggested, has phallic implications). Though the marriage is

60

•

Part I

figure 16. William Smith and His Grandson, 1788. Oil on canvas, 511⁄4 × 403⁄8 in. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond. Museum purchase with funds provided by the Robert G. Cabell III and Maude Morgan Cabell Foundation and the Arthur and Margaret Glasgow Fund. © Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.

based on his mercantile practice, business is far removed from the Lamings’ garden refuge; his countinghouse is a speck on the horizon, and Baltimore Harbor has few ships. (The relationship between the Edenic garden and sexual tension is heightened if one reads Eleanor’s sinuous sash as a snake.) The Lamings are placed fully in nature instead of, as in the Gittings portrait, on the edge of the property. But the landscape is still divided. The managed garden is separated from the world by the barren middle landscape—with only a few scrawny trees in contrast to the massive trunk behind the couple— and then another wood before the harbor. The sky over the harbor is sterile, gray, and cold, marking the emotional gap between the instrumentality of the commercial world and the warmth of marriage.23 These portraits (and the one of William Smith and his grandson shown in Figure 16) have been read as part of the georgic tradition of rustic retreat and retirement from worldly care. But Peale worked this vein only as a literary convention. His commitment to a cultural politics of reaction and nostalgia should not be overemphasized. Just as his managed appearance covered the violence of his temper, the placid order he depicted in his portraits of the Maryland gentry masked his republican distrust of wealth disconnected from labor. In his autobiography, Peale digressed from his account of painting the Lamings’ portrait to an attack on the mercantile class and its excesses.

“Application”

•

61

He denounced elements of that class for succumbing to the seductions of a luxurious rural lifestyle—he called their estates “pick pockets”—that drained the political economy of useful capital while diverting the merchants from productive labor into sloth and parasitism. But a portrait’s representation of prosperity hid or excluded the chaos, not to say the corruption and exploitation, of actual market relations. In portraits, as opposed to life, depictions of nature indicated the Enlightenment belief in natural law and the attainment of harmony and order through reason and knowledge.The telescope in the Laming portrait was a way of comprehending the world.24 Similarly, Peale depicted Dr. Benjamin Rush (Figure 17), not as a physician, but as an American philosophe dressed in a robe, writing a scientific manuscript in his study. On Rush’s bookshelf are volumes by authors of the Scottish Enlightenment, Pascal, Sidney, and Franklin, and at the bottom, supporting all that knowledge, Nicholas Malebranche’s volume Recherche / De la / Verité—a title alluding to the central tenet of the Enlightenment, that the truth could be researched and discovered. Implicitly, Peale may have been contrasting Rush’s informal dressing gown (or “banyan”) with academic or even ecclesiastical gowns to make the egalitarian point that there was no closed caste, even of academics, in America. (Peale painted David Rittenhouse, the quintessential American practical scientist, the same way [Figure 18].) And Peale may be alluding to classical robes to match the classical reading on the shelves. But the robe more prosaically illustrates how philosophical inquiry was a way of life: the work of enlightenment brooked no division between public and private, work and home, or even day and night. Once built and set in motion, what Rush called the “republican machine” (a highly politicized state in which citizens were trained and socialized by institutions under government control ) could never be allowed to run down. Just as Peale’s strictures on health required an individual to maintain good posture even during sleep, so the enlightened mind was never truly at rest. The idea that this “new man, this American,” to use Crèvecoeur’s famous phrase, was a machine helped Peale and others of the American Enlightenment to conceptualize the world.25 Whereas Peale gave only a skeletal account in his diary of painting the Laming portrait, in his autobiography that portrait occasioned a diatribe on the gap between appearance and reality in the lives of Maryland’s merchants. Peale praised the Lamings’ estates aesthetically and socially, writing that “they serve for a retreat from the bustle of business, and many in walking distance, this of Mr. Lamings was one of that kind, it afforded a fine view towards Felspoint and its grounds were cultivated with much taste[.] Thus the wives of merchants resided in healthy situations and prepaired the com-

62

•

Part I

figure 17. Benjamin Rush, 1783. Oil on canvas, 501⁄4 × 40 in. Courtesy, Winterthur Museum, Winterthur, Delaware, gift of Mrs. T. Charleton Henry.

forts necessary to refresh their weary’d husbands.” Here is an early instance in the rising modern economy where the family and the countryside are seen as “havens in a heartless world,” insulated from that world’s instrumental relations. Yet Peale’s mood changed as he considered how the estates were obtained. Appearances were deceiving: the estate landscape “may appear to be a pritty picture of happiness, yet when more thoroughly

figure 18. David Rittenhouse, 1791. Oil on canvas, 30 × 25 in. American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia.

64

•

Part I

investigated have some of its alloys [revealed].” This was one of the rare occasions on which Peale reversed his practice of using the autobiography to repress or exclude matters he had written about in his diaries and letters. Peale painted the “pritty picture of happiness” and kept silent at the time, but in the autobiography he dug beneath pretty appearances to indict the merchants, the credit system, and the inevitable decline of morality. He condemned the merchant class, if not the Lamings personally, as follows: “Conscience may be seared, and its throbs disregarded by those once accustomed to sin.” That accusation suggests another view of the gardens in Peale’s paintings: superficially refuges, they were also the sites of man’s corruption. But if the merchants became accustomed to “sin,” what about Peale himself? What price did his conscience pay for his divided consciousness in serving a class whose practices were antithetical to his republican sense of self?26 Peale’s participation in the American Revolution as a “Furious Whig” and radical Philadelphia militiaman, who fought for the revolution at home as well as against the British, was the logical result of radicalism rooted, like Tom Paine’s, in the producer-based republicanism of the artisan class. Peale was part of the great tradition of Anglo-American radicalism, even down to his secularization of Adam’s fall as an animating political lesson empowering the working classes. Intellectually, Peale’s radicalism in the near– civil war of Pennsylvania politics during the Revolution has a clear ideological and political lineage. Yet the fervor with which he pursued radical politics day to day had biographical roots. Peale, dependent on his master when he was an apprentice, became dependent on the upper classes for patronage when he was an artist. But Peale’s chafing at the class that employed him was not just a matter of his resenting having to enter by the tradesmen’s door. Painting portraits raised questions for him about the fixity of identity that destabilized his own mission in life to forge himself. As the Bogart incident verified, a portrait was not a life, and Peale worried about the instabilities hidden by the smooth surface of his canvases. The tension he insinuated into some of his portraits was that of the class as a whole, not that of its individual members. In the portrait of Benjamin Rush, which seems a perfectly poised evocation of Enlightenment confidence, Peale includes a subversive written reference. He shows Rush beginning to write an essay on the causes of earthquakes. This reference cut both ways. Rush was investigating the order of the earth and by doing so extending man’s comprehension of and mastery over the natural world. Yet earthquakes still occurred. They had the power to destroy not only the physical world but also the intellectual assumptions by which man ordered the world. The memory of the terri-

“Application”

•

65

ble Lisbon earthquake (1755), which had shaken the Western world’s faith in a just God and benign nature, was still potent. Just as Peale’s portrait gallery of notable Americans reminded the viewer of the excluded “other,” the rational ordering of nature always implied the tenuousness of that project in the face of nature’s power. In contrast to the verbal inscription of Benjamin Rush, the allusions to instability in the Laming and Gittings portraits are wholly visual, but their salience is supported by Peale’s writings. The Laming portrait inspired Peale’s later diatribe against merchants, extravagance, and indebtedness in his autobiography; whether something specific to the Lamings sparked Peale’s indictment of their class is not known. But something about the occasion of the Laming portrait stuck in Peale’s mind for nearly forty years. Miles and Reinhardt argue that the Laming portrait has a hidden source, which Peale “art[fully] conceal’d,” in the poem Gerusalemme Liberata (1575), by Torquato Tasso. (It combined the fictional tale of the lovers Rinaldo and Armida with an account of the First Crusade. Rinaldo, distracted by temptations from his commitment to the crusade, represented for Peale the need for self-control as the basis for accomplishments in the larger world.) Miles and Reinhardt conclude that the sophisticated literary foundation of Peale’s image of the newlyweds is an example of his “conscious simplicity,” which belies his reputation as a straightforward empiricist. Peale, in other words, was sublimating an extensive knowledge of classical texts and illusions to create a portrait that could be read as both a wedding portrait and, for those in the know, a deeper meditation on love and retirement from worldly cares. In making the formalist case for Peale’s sophisticated artlessness, Miles and Reinhardt do not address, except in passing, Peale’s ambivalence about the idea of worldly retirement, an ambivalence that would later harden into the vehemence of his autobiography. In particular, they ignore how Rinaldo’s seduction by Armida in the garden unmans him, leaving him shamed and “sickened.”27 Peale recognized that country estates served a useful purpose as places of refreshment for men from the world of work. But their use had to be kept in balance. He indicted them because they could lure men away from duty into a social whirl ruled by women. The Laming portrait is poised at the moment of decision. The painting divides vertically as well as horizontally in separating the garden from the world. Eleanor Laming, in her fantasy dress, holds out her tempting fruits. Benjamin, in conventional attire, inclines lazily and adoringly toward her, his back to Baltimore harbor and his businesses. His telescope, a symbol of the world of commerce, droops; if Eleanor tugs on his forearm, the telescope will fall. The parrot suggests a

66

•

Part I

tropical luxuriance, an abandonment to a mood of love and carpe diem. In Gerusalemme Liberata, temptation is indulged and then rejected for the higher cause. Peale is leaving the conclusion open. Will Benjamin Laming succumb to the temptation of the fantasy embodied by his wife? That the lawn behind him is brown and withered, with a single spindly tree, suggests Peale’s answer. Miles and Reinhardt point out that the double portrait of the Lamings is posed completely in the open air. In the Gittings portrait Peale followed his usual practice of framing the background, either exterior or interior, as an insert to the portrait grouping. As I have noted, the stone framework of the Gittings manor captures the land beyond, a picture within a picture to emphasize the element of ownership. No description remains of Long Green in 1791, but it was probably less monumental than the portrait makes it appear; the family sits in what seems to be an open loggia. Just as fictional portraits, such as Peale’s Exhuming the First American Mastodon, brought together people, including the dead, who could not have been together at the same time, fictional architecture was a way for the artist to emphasize the power and position of his sitters. Moreover, the artist who thus set the stage emphasized his own power over his sitters, his control of how they were seen; the power of the portrait redounded to the artist’s power and status as well. The destabilizing element in the midst of all this harmony is the slaves. They are present in the picture as anonymous dots on the landscape, a depiction that reflects their nonbeing and their separation from the world of their white masters. Yet they are present both actually and abstractly in the crop their labor produces: the field of wheat and the sheaf held as a totem by James Gittings. Peale, who owned slaves, was not coding an abolitionist message into the Gittings portrait. He did not ask for sympathy for the slaves or suggest that the pictorial denial of the slaves’ humanity meant its opposite: that their near-invisibility would, under pressure, explode into a violent presence. (If Peale had painted the Gittings family after August 1791, when the slave rebellion in Saint-Domingue broke out, instead of in May 1791, the painting could bear such an ominous interpretation.) Instead, Peale’s concern was the effect of slavery on the masters. Slavery made whites dependent.Their absolute power over their slaves corrupted them as masters, tempting them into indolence and degrading abuses not only against the slaves but against themselves. At bottom, the slaves worked while the master class idled. Idleness led to indulgence and, lacking self-control, the slaveholders became immoral.28 During the Revolution, Peale encountered some Virginia officers who be-

“Application”

•

67

haved badly. He analyzed the reasons for this in a remarkable passage that anticipates the antislavery position of the Republican Party in the 1850s. Peale ascribed the southern officers’ bad behavior, especially their continual cursing, to the great number of Slaves which they have there and being accustomed to tyranize & domineer over, even in their first Education they are Suffered to Lord it over these unhappy Wreches—And by these Slaves are all the laborious works performed, which makes them so necessary that every man who can possibly purchace Slaves does, and becomes Laisy themselves and of Course dissipated. . . . [T]hurs—the inequality of Inhabitants of the Country being genrally composed of very Rich & very poor. . . . [T]he Rich are without Controul the Lords & Masters.

Implicit in this statement is the fundamental incompatibility of the slave system with free labor. Peale never provided a solution to the dilemma he so succinctly posed. Peale embodied many of America’s contradictions and ambivalence on slavery, taking advantage of it or tolerating it even while, in principle, abhorring the system. Given his faith in human perfectability, he might have argued (though he never did) that the slave owners could make the effort to live and act responsibly, overcoming the deterministic elements of their “Peculiar Institution.” But Peale’s indictment of slavery in his description of the Virginia officers suggests that the edifice in which slave owners like the Gittings lived was not as solidly constructed as it appeared. Though a slave rebellion was the ever-present nightmare scenario, the real danger to the Great House came as the planters’ characters and household were bored out from within by their corrupting dependence on slaves.29 In all three examples, Peale’s paintings of major sectors of the early American ruling class—the intelligentsia, merchants, planters—contained the painter’s hints at an instability in the pictorial celebration of intellectual, mercantile, and class power. These hints were only hints, however. They never destabilized the order within which Peale’s compositions placed America’s elite but instead served as a reminder of the inevitable dissolution and corruption that would occur if one ever let down one’s guard and if one’s efforts at work and self-reform flagged. This thread of tension in Peale’s better paintings keeps his portraits, especially when taken en masse, from becoming kitsch, though they skirt dangerously close to kitsch in their formulaic repetition of format and bodily forms, the addition of some individualization to give “charm,” the concentration on surface appearance to satisfy the self-celebrating demands of America’s rising class, and their rapid production to fill the demands of that class. After viewing a large number

68

•

Part I

of Peale portraits, one begins to see the small smile, repeated from one sitter to another, as the knowing and numbing smugness of successful men and seraphic women. But what saves Peale’s art, aside from its documentary aspects, are its hints of the fragility of identity and the precariousness of success in a modernizing society. The maintenance of one’s identity, both inside and out, required constant vigilance. In the next chapter, I examine how Peale remained vigilant in his own life and conveyed his public prescriptions to the citizens of the new nation.

part ii

“I Scru[t]inize the Actions of Men”

~ Peale’s own project of self-reform and self-perfection fueled his desires to find a more influential way than portrait painting to improve American society. These chapters are ordered so that Peale’s reform of the body is then projected outward in the form of projects to reform America as a whole. However, the linearity necessary in structuring a book should not be mistaken for a similar linearity in Peale’s life. His work on himself and his work for the public—especially his development of the American museum idea—went on at the same time.

chapter 4

A Good War and a Troubled Peace Charles Willson Peale’s Search for Order, 1776–94

~ The problem of having one’s character misunderstood from one’s appearance confronted Peale almost immediately after his arrival in Philadelphia during the summer of 1776. In the midst of the Second Continental Congress, Peale was, as the historian Kenneth Silverman describes him, “virtually a delegate himself.”1 But at least one prominent delegate was less than welcoming to the artist. In August 1776, John Adams (Figure 19) met Peale in the artist’s studio and afterward described him in a letter to his wife, Abigail. Peale, Adams summed up, “is ingenious. He has Vanity—loves Finery—Wears a sword—gold Lace—speaks French.” Adams was describing how Peale represented himself at age thirty-five as an established portrait artist living and working in Philadelphia. Gold lace indicated luxury as well as success. The sword, in this context, was the decorative blade of the gentleman, not the utilitarian weapon of the fighting man. The only way Adams would have known that Peale spoke (some) French was if the artist, playing the Continental aesthete, interjected a few French phrases while showing his paintings. Adams was describing a type, and Peale apparently went some way toward fulfilling Adams’s expectations of how artists looked and acted and confirming his derogatory view of them. Meeting Peale a month after the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, during the serious business of revolution and state building, only intensified Adams’s negative reaction. Adams regarded the fine arts warily, and he simply did not know Peale’s story. The smooth appearance Peale presented to Adams belied the biographical reality of Peale’s difficult rise. Both ma71

72

•

Part II

figure 19. John Adams, c. 1791–94. Oil on canvas, 23 × 19 in. Independence National Historical Park Collection, Philadelphia.

terially and culturally, Peale by 1776 had come some distance from his birth in 1741.2 Adams’s conception of Peale in 1776 was only partially or superficially accurate. Peale may have played the “artist” in his studio, but it was not the only role he was playing at the time. Whatever Peale actually wore in his gallery on August 20, 1776, his other activities did not support Adams’s reading of him as the archetypal soft and effete artist. Peale spent the summer of 1776 working hard as a painter but also preparing to fight. He had his musket repaired and bought cartridge boxes and a bayonet; perhaps the bayonet was the blade Adams described, and perhaps the gold he wore was an insignia from his military uniform. On August 9 Peale reported in his diary that he had “entered as a Common soldier in Capn. Peters Company of the Millitia. [W]ent on gard at Night.” Peale also bought a sling for his rifle, making him ready to march and campaign. Revolutionary war was already a certainty, independence possible. Peale himself had already achieved independence in fusing his career as an artist to the project of creating a national identity.3 Peale had a “good” war. He enlisted without hesitation in the Philadelphia Associators (i.e., the militia) and was quickly promoted to lieutenant. He fought in and around Philadelphia and on detached duty with the Continental Army under Washington during the New Jersey campaign. He en-

A Good War and a Troubled Peace

•

73

figure 20. Self-Portrait in Uniform, 1777–78. Miniature in oils, canvas, 6 × 51⁄2 in. American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia.

dured the Valley Forge winter encampment and suffered in the vicious partisan fighting between Philadelphia’s Tories and Loyalists; at times he had to hide out in the countryside to escape Tory gangs. He thrived on campaigning and fighting, and he painted a small self-portrait during the war (Figure 20) that shows him cheerful and willing under his tricorn hat. Though he painted the work during the Valley Forge winter of 1777–78, it gives no sign of demoralization or fatigue; Peale even hints at a small smile, something singular in his self-portraiture, though typical in his portraits of others. Peale took great pride in carrying out his duties as an officer, taking special care of his men and sacrificing his own time to make sure that they were well treated and supplied. But above all he was avid for combat.4 In the autobiography, Peale minimized his zeal for combat to burnish his pacifist credentials. But during the Revolution, Peale wanted to fight. Just before the Battle of Princeton, Peale thought he might be detailed to nurse the wounded. He wrote in his diary about the prelude to battle that “he wonderfully [emphasis added] escaped going with a Surgeon of his acquantance to assist in cuting of the limbs & dressing the wounds of those unfortunate men of that day, in which case he would have been left behind on the march of the army.” Instead of staying in the rear, Peale led his unit into battle and later wrote one of the first eyewitness records of combat in American history. In addition to his active service, he put his mechanical abilities in the service of the cause, experimenting with gunpowder and other ordnance. He was especially interested in adapting telescopic sights for muskets. Not only

74

•

Part II

did he want to make shooting more accurate and more individualized, but, in a sinister analogue to the portrait painter’s desire to “take” a likeness, he also wanted an American shooter to “know” his target before he killed him.5 In addition to campaigning against the British, Peale was active as a radical agitator and officeholder in both Philadelphia and the Pennsylvania state government. Retrospectively, he maintained that he had been a reluctant participant who had gone to a public meeting out of “curiosity” and found himself thrust into politics. Stressing his accidental entrance onto the political stage, Peale later proclaimed how distasteful he had found politics: “And from this accidental affair, the launching out into that dangerous and troublesome, Political Sea, subject to like troubles by every blast, and very often in contrary directions. And thus . . . it was that Peale considers as the most disagreable part of his Life.” Stressing that his political career had been accidental was a way for Peale to avoid culpability for his actions. But at the time Peale was a fervent activist in Pennsylvania’s revolutionary politics. He helped pass the state’s radically populist constitution, and his main activity in Philadelphia was the confiscation of estates from Loyalists and lukewarm patriots. That Peale was exploring a new, public role for himself is evident in his adoption of a new form of signature: not the slantwise CWPeale but an upright and fully spelled-out Charles Willson Peale, a signature commensurate with his public and official role (Figure 21).6 Peale’s political activism swung between aggression and passivity, activity and withdrawal; not an opportunist, he was nonetheless aware of his own self-interest in a changeable political situation. Politically, he was allied with the republican cause, yet he frequently counseled moderation when events threatened to become violent and out of control. For instance, he withdrew his support from the Philadelphia radicals who precipitated the Fort Wilson Riot, arguing that the attempt to forcibly remove disloyal individuals from the state was both tactically unwise and morally wrong. He thought himself vindicated when the attempted seizure resulted in a confused and bloody fray with several casualties and the militiamen ended up in the dock for their part in the riot. For Peale, the moral of the Fort Wilson Riot was that it was too easy for even men of goodwill to lose control: “In times of civil wars, men of the most upright intentions cannot always avoid turmoils that lead to sad catastrophes if they allow themselves the liberty of speech on passing transactions.” Passion, political and otherwise, had to be regulated and governed. Yet if Peale backed off from the more enthusiastic popular radicalism of the street, he was a fervent supporter of the republican cause when it was channeled through democratically established institutions and procedures.7

figure 21. (Above) Peale’s signature, CWP to George Washington, February 27, 1787. American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia. (Below) Peale’s signature, CWP to William Hollinshead, December 21, 1779. American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia.

76

•

Part II

Serving on the “Committee of Safety” from 1777 to 1779, Peale assiduously carried out his duty to seize Tory property. He also served on committees charged with regulating prices and investigating trade abuses. The historian Kenneth Silverman has charged anachronistically that Peale was the “Robespierre of Philadelphia” during the Revolution, exaggerating Peale’s actual political role to make a polemical point. Peale was never involved in anything close to state terror. Committee of Safety in 1777 did not carry the messianically violent connotations that the term would acquire during the Parisian Terror of 1793. Both sides gave as good as they got in Philadelphia because there was no centralization of power, such as Robespierre enjoyed as head of the revolutionary state. Yet Silverman is not entirely wrong about Philadelphia radicalism; it was a localized, haphazard, and undeveloped rehearsal of the rites of ideological purification in France in 1793 that culminated in the September Massacres.8 After Peale was involved in a street fight with a conservative opponent (he does not mention the episode in his autobiography), his supporters presented him with a club that they called Hercules. The name Hercules here signified not just strength but the hero’s twelve labors, especially the cleaning of the Augean stables.The adoption of metaphors of cleansing, allied with the concept of public “safety,” was decisive in the development of modern politics. Unlike such traditional calls to arms as crusades, dynastic wars, or spoilation, the idea of “safety” moved the justification for conflict from the secular to the ideological. “Safety” presupposed a natural state of political health that had to be restored and protected lest the citizenry be infected.9 Ideological purity found an analogy with good health as the Committee of Safety purged the body politic of noxious, debilitating elements. This purification was literal as well as rhetorical. The Fort Wilson Riot was incited by the attempt of the radicals to eject the families of Philadelphia’s Tories from the city. Peale, as we have seen, counseled against using physical force against individuals, calling it inhumane. From his point of view, force (as in the street fight) was a defensive measure; in a reformed society it would be unnecessary. But he showed no qualms about moving against the property of Loyalists, a punishment that effectively forced their emigration. In addition to being directed against “foreign” elements that threatened the revolutionary body, measures to ensure an ideological purity metaphorically equated with bodily purity were issues in the “revolution at home.” Peale’s involvement in price regulation and against “engrossers” used the same presumption of a natural state of bodily harmony and equilibrium to regulate the economy politically. Engrossers were monopolists who hoarded essential goods, gaining personal advantage and undermining the general

A Good War and a Troubled Peace

•

77

welfare. A subsidiary definition of engross is to become fat; and in the political economy engrossers were parasites who fattened at the expense of the commonweal. Especially during the Revolution, all citizens had to subordinate their personal appetites, and the economy, like a diet, had to be regulated to attain autonomy for all. Economic gluttony was as debilitating and as unacceptable as personal overindulgence.10 Peale’s radicalism struck at the class on which he depended as an artist. If Peale was a servitor of the wealthy, he now seized the opportunity to assert not just his independence but his superiority to that class. Peale had taken likenesses, bestowing status on his sitters; now he took their houses. Peale was thus able to combine a symbolic and actual reversal of roles that perfectly encapsulated the vicious class politics of revolutionary Philadelphia. In seizing the property of his nominal “betters,” Peale could merge his self-interest with the interest of the radical Whigs, using law and ordinance to further both the personal and the general good. Peale did not permit himself to get carried away by mob rule, but he must have experienced some degree of release in his actions as confiscation agent. Having indulged himself for two years, Peale realized a hangover was inevitable. Even revolutionary Philadelphia’s low level of violence, relative to what came later, raised difficult questions about the boundaries between the individual and the state. In practice, the radical position, especially attempts to regulate the economy, collapsed into rancor and incoherence as the politics of the street and workshop proved difficult to institutionalize in government; the radical constitution enacted by Peale and others was overturned. The year 1779 was the highwater mark for Philadelphia radicalism, and the 1780s would see the reconstitution of conservative power at both the local and state levels. Peale’s season of freedom was over. By 1779 Peale, having served in the state assembly, began to disengage from politics, citing family and financial responsibilities as well as the need to consider “which would be best for him, either to persue Politicks or follow deligently his profession of Portrait painting. The advantages of persueing a profession in which he could not make any Enemies, and which most probable as well as most satisfactory to his feelings, he therefore firmly determined no longer to take any active part in Politicks, which resolution he firmly adhered to ever afterwards.” Peale was attracted to, and yet ultimately repelled by, the breakdown of order. The central lesson that he drew from his revolutionary years was a fear of disorder and chaos; he became wary of uncontrolled passion. Moreover, the collapse of the radical program made him recognize the limits of government to affect human behavior. Finally, there was an opportunistic dimension to Peale’s decision. He had used his politi-

78

•

Part II

cal position to buy houses and lots in Philadelphia, and owning property helped convince him to conserve what he had.11 Peale subsequently presented his decision to withdraw from politics as a rational move, effected seamlessly. In fact, the smooth transition recorded in the autobiography belied Peale’s personal difficulty in coming to grips with the change from public service to private life. The war, both militarily and politically, had provided Peale with his duties. Now he had to construct his own. Not sure of his future, Peale fell into a self-described, and possibly self-induced, state of inactivity similar to that which had afflicted him when he had fled from his creditors to New England. On January 15, 1783, he wrote about his breakdown to his relative by marriage Joseph Brewer: “Something more than two Years past I have been in a kind of lethargy, tho’ at times I have some intervals (but of very short duration) in which I can recollect some past transactions. [A]bout the time above mentioned I took ten pills three of them opperated very violently but Worked off in 3 months and I have only been able to through off the effects [of ] four of them since by reason of certain powders which I have taken of the same stupefying quallity.” Thus Peale described a period of drug addiction in which he alternated opiates with mood elevators. But he does not say what caused him in 1780 or 1781 to first take the “ten pills.” He described his symptoms as “knowing nothing but what is amediately before me”—almost the same terms he had used to describe his state of mind in Newburyport when “[h]e did not seem to regard the future, being wholly occupied with the present.” As examples, he tells how he was unable to recall how many children he had and whether his mother-in-law was dead. His question about his mother-in-law was sparked by seeing her portrait, “which instantly brought fulling into my remembrance her person.”12 Susan Stewart, in a recent and influential explanation of Peale’s fugue state, has argued that Peale’s combat experience disoriented him to the point that it shattered his certainty about knowledge and cognition, especially the key Enlightenment idea that objects exist outside our perception of them. Peale wrote in his autobiography that during the New Jersey campaign he met his brother James after a fighting retreat. James was not wounded but was marked by hardship, “which disfigured him in such a manner that he was not known to me at first sight.” Consequent to the emotional and epistemological crisis brought on by this nonrecognition, Stewart argues, Peale fixated on “derealizations” such as trompe l’oeil and animation as a way of creating artificial worlds with which his ego’s fragmentation could cope; Peale’s art, in other words, was a therapeutic compensation mechanism.13 Whether Peale did not recognize James Peale on the battlefield or made

A Good War and a Troubled Peace

•

79

“nonrecognition” a rhetorical device to emphasize the horror of war is not known. He wrote about the event in his autobiography, fifty years later, in framing himself as a pacifist. In his contemporary diary, Peale says only that he found James’s Maryland battalion in a “Dirty, Rag[g]ed condition” and does not mention James at all. Furthermore, Peale omits any mention of his malaise of 1780–81 from his autobiography to enhance the sense of selfcontrol and teleology that the document was intended to convey. These documentary details aside, Peale actually suffered from the opposite of the malaise attributed to him by Stewart and other cultural historians who have adopted her interpretive framework. Peale’s problem was not that he could not identify what was “amediately before me.” Not only could he identify immediate objects, but he retained enough perception to go from the specific to the general: for instance, he wrote that when he saw the portrait of his mother-in-law, it “instantly brought fulling into my remembrance her person, her amiable manners her parental care of her Children her Godliness and piety, &c.” Peale’s reaction to the portrait of Eleanor Maccubbin Brewer was precisely the response—the realization—that his portraiture was always intended to elicit. The problem, as it had been during his prewar funk in Newburyport, was his sudden inability to generalize about time or conceive of a future. Despite Peale’s written description of his collapse, he continued to function as an artist between 1781 and 1783, the years of his breakdown. Moreover, he worked his way out of the constricted viewpoint of his malaise by experimenting with ways to serve the wider public rather than an individual patron with his art.14 Despite concern that he had made enemies during the Revolution and that his career might suffer, Peale painted as many portraits after the war as before. During the war, moreover, his output barely slackened, and he painted indefatigably even under the most trying conditions, producing thirty-two miniature portraits during the Valley Forge encampment. In 1783, the year the war ended, he painted at least twenty-four portraits, and in 1784 he finished or started another twenty-four. Ideological (or personal ) wounds may have festered, and some Philadelphians may have snubbed Peale, but there was no Thermidorian reaction in postrevolutionary America. Peale resumed artistic service and signaled the restoration of domestic peace by painting portraits of Robert Morris and his wife in 1782 (both in the Independence National Historical Park Collection, Philadelphia) and in 1783 a dual portrait of Gouverneur and Robert Morris (Figure 22). Robert Morris was the most notorious “engrosser” of the Revolution and a particular object of the radicals’ ire. It is doubtful that the Morrises would have sat for Peale, their former enemy, if an ideological litmus test had been im-

80

•

Part II

figure 22. Gouverneur Morris and Robert Morris, 1783. Oil on canvas, 431⁄2 × 513⁄4 in., acc. no. 1969.20.1. Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. Bequest of Richard Ashhurst.

posed. Peale could have been making up to them and their class by requesting that Morris sit for a portrait to be displayed in the public gallery he planned. He had delivered an apology to another former adversary, Samuel Chase, at about the time that he painted the Morrises. He admitted to Chase that “Rash, Violent, and inconsiderately active I have been too often in our times of difficulty” but that after “finding the party desputes of this State intolerable disagreable, four Years past I have laid politicks aside and persued the Brush.” As a result, “I have regained friends where I had lost them, and this I hope and wish to do if I have been so unfortunate as to loose your good oppinion.” No correspondence between Peale and the Morrises exists, but it is not hard to imagine Peale making a similar apology to them.15 Charles Coleman Sellers maintains that Peale, despite his public rapprochement with his old political adversaries, expressed his contempt for and fear of Robert Morris in his “careful, stilted, and colorless” likeness of the man; Sellers says that Peale was “ill at ease, trying too hard to satisfy

A Good War and a Troubled Peace

•

81

these persons of wealth and power.” This reading is difficult to support from the visual evidence, the composition of the Morrises’ portrait not differing appreciably in its blandly ovoid and bulky flatness from Peale’s other portraits of early American heroes. Peale did not use his portraits to settle individual scores, and his approach to portrait painting did not change in the postwar era.16 If we take as accurate Peale’s description of his state of mind, even if he overstated his actual inactivity, his malaise of 1780–83 suggests a career crisis. Peale was hemmed in by the need to reproduce “what is amediately before me” and unable to conceive how he might broaden his vision. Peale’s religious belief, or lack of it, may have exacerbated his depression. Baptized in the Church of England, Peale flirted with membership in several churches, especially Episcopalian and Quaker; attended the services of various denominations; and was married (and, as a widower, remarried) by clergymen of each wife’s faith. Peale’s participation in religion was limited to intellectual interest and a desire not to disturb the proprieties; rather than list his children in the family Bible, he listed them in Pilkington’s Dictionary of Artists. Instead of adopting an institutionalized faith, Peale was a Deist of an almost pure variety in that, having posited the existence of a God whose benevolence was manifest in all the works of nature, he saw no need for further intermediaries between man and God. He sharply criticized ministers who wasted time on petty doctrinal questions and did not just preach God’s benevolence as manifested in nature. Peale’s faith in works was indebted to Protestant thought, but his faith was purely secular: it improved life for man on earth, not in heaven. The afterlife existed only in the minds of those still living, in the form of historical and personal memories of the departed, memories induced by symbolic representations (i.e., portraits), or actual remnants left by the departed. In all Peale’s writings, there is no discussion of any doctrinal questions, and the only mentions of Jesus are art historical. So extreme was Peale’s antinomianism, then, as to place on him alone the heavy burden of discerning God’s immanent purpose.17 With no religious faith, Peale was thrown back on his own resources. First, the social unrest that followed the Revolution confirmed him in his decision to withdraw from politics. Not only did he express virtually no opinions about political issues, in either his private or public writings, but he “firmly determined no longer to take any active part in Politicks, which resolution he firmly adhered to ever afterwards. Although he knows that many men could not believe it possible that he should be so totally inactive as in reality he was.”18 This decision exemplifies Peale’s exclusion of any activity that might harm his livelihood by making him the object of other people’s

82

•

Part II

enmities. Just as he would learn to control his physical appetites, the previously fervent patriot and political activist withdrew from politics and excised it from his life. Perhaps his resort to opiates was a way of medicinally silencing himself as he struggled to reorder himself after the war. But even if Peale no longer had anything to say about politics, he was still political. As we have seen, he succeeded as an artist by putting his painting in the service of the embryonic nation and its citizens. In rebounding from Pitt, Peale had firmly connected his art to the transcendent idea of American nature. Now, to avoid the fractiousness of politics and promote the unity of the new nation, Peale determined to build a deep structure of support for the state-making process of early American history. This was a creative act, which led Peale to refashion his public role, especially as he began to consider opening a museum. John Adams’s view of American cultural evolution—that the arts would follow after political issues had been resolved—ignored the extent to which art, as Peale organized it, contributed to political settlement and national mythmaking. Peale helped form a national culture.19 Peale began to conceive what would prove the prototype for the modern museum, a picture gallery of notable Americans, linking his previously private activity of portrait painting to a public purpose. The absolutist states of Europe had always used the visual arts as a cultural tool, but Peale’s portrait gallery would mix such public purposes with private ones. In place of state-sponsored patronage, Peale depended on a receptive audience that would pay. In this way, he linked self-interest (expanding the market for his art) with service to the national interest.20 “Now is the time,” Edmund Jenings wrote Peale after the war, “for the arts of peace to flourish, yours among the rest will adorn our country with the great events which have happened, and the great men who have been actors in the glorious scenes afford ample subjects for your skill—let your pencil perpetuate everything.” Peale, though temperamentally and artistically unsuited to history painting, especially after Pitt’s failure, nonetheless considered a large historical canvas of Washington presenting his resignation as commander in chief to Congress. Washington’s resignation was a critical moment in postrevolutionary politics, confirming and strengthening his reputation as Cincinnatus while also short-circuiting any possibility that the American Republic would be headed by its own Caesar. The subject also appealed to Peale because Washington’s retirement permitted Americans, including Peale, to place private desires over public duties in a way that did not make them look unpatriotic. In the end, though, Peale de-

A Good War and a Troubled Peace

•

83

cided not to risk painting such a large canvas without having already secured a buyer.21 Instead of history paintings, Peale painted portrait biographies of the revolutionary generation, creating a pantheon that would perpetuate American republicanism. Unlike his privately commissioned portraits, which celebrated an individual in the context of family and class, the revolutionary portraits connected an image with specific events and public service to the nation. Peale’s museum portraits fulfilled essential social and political functions in the early Republic. First, there was the simple matter of recognition. Peale’s gallery put a face to the name, important in a modernizing society where visual images were produced haphazardly and distributed unevenly; people were interested in knowing how Generals Wilkinson and de Kalb looked. In addition, Peale’s gallery unified Americans by helping them think nationally instead of locally or individually (Figures 23–26). The museum paintings were bust portraits, approximately twenty-five by thirty inches, their uniformity heightened by Peale’s device of an oval frame within a frame around each likeness. The aesthetic similarities of Peale’s portraits helped unify his gallery.22 Peale’s gallery offered a visual civics lesson on the founding of the Republic, validating the actions of those whose portraits it included by opening their faces up to the public for physiognomical scrutiny.There the virtues of the revolutionary generation would become known to the citizenry, who, having read each sitter’s physiognomy, could link general characteristics to specific actions by reading the label and other texts. By subordinating actions to character, Peale’s portraits democratized heroism, creating an identity between the hero and the audience. Previously, the heroic portraiture of the absolutist states of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had been designed to overawe the spectator, emphasizing the gulf between figures portrayed as demigods and the ordinary spectator. Peale’s homely portraiture placed subject and audience on a more nearly equal basis, teaching the democratic lesson that anyone could enter the pantheon. Good character would lead to good deeds in the service of the state or society, and good character was attainable for all through right reason and right action. Visually, Peale’s portraits encoded the great American myth that anyone can grow up to be prominent, and perhaps even president.23 Or almost everyone. Peale was creating a visual record of early American nationalism, celebrating the political class of republican men. The collection included no women, African Americans, working people, or “ordinary” Americans, let alone “outcasts” like the poor or criminals. These

84

figure 23. Alexander Hamilton, 1790–95. Oil on canvas, 24 × 20 in. Independence National Historical Park Collection, Philadelphia.

•

Part II

figure 24. James Wilkinson, 1796–97. Oil on canvas, 24 × 20 in. Independence National Historical Park Collection, Philadelphia.

people simply were not “visible.” Bernard Bailyn, in writing his book Voyagers to the West, attempted to reconstruct how one such outcast group, escaped slaves and bond laborers, might have looked. Bailyn had an artist base portraits of runaways on descriptions in newspaper advertisements for their capture. In both their bodies and their social circumstances, they were the antithesis of the individuals in Peale’s portraits. Peale smoothed out the features and bodies of his sitters in celebrating their good character and worthy lives. But the advertisements for runaways identified them by their physical scars (marks of punishment as well as hard living) as well as other deformities, such as badly set broken bones and smallpox scars. As the historian Allan Sekula writes, the portrait gallery distinguished “the stigmata of vice from the shining marks of virtue.”24 The “exclusion” that preoccupied Peale concerned, not race, class, or gender, but politics—the capital crime against the democratic body politic, treason. In his gallery, as in all his portraiture, Peale created the pictorial fiction that the mark of election could be read on an individual’s face and that character led ineluctably to good works. Peale vowed never to paint anyone of whom he disapproved and asserted that “[a]mongst a collection of about 80 Portraits [at the museum] there is none to disgrace the Gallery as yet.” That “as yet” betrays Peale’s uneasiness that history was less certain than his

A Good War and a Troubled Peace

figure 25. Johann, Baron de Kalb, 1781–82. Oil on canvas, 22 × 18 in. Independence National Historical Park Collection, Philadelphia.

•

85

figure 26. Benjamin Franklin, 1785. Oil on canvas, 231⁄8 × 191⁄16 in., acc. no. 1912.14.2. Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. Bequest of Mrs. Sarah Harrison (The Joseph Harrison, Jr., Collection).

paintings rendered it, since the contingencies, large and small, of daily life constantly tested the idea of character as a determinant. Knowing the result, Peale could omit lukewarm patriots and Tories from his gallery and celebrate the victors. But a nightmare case haunted Peale’s gallery of virtuous republicans and revolutionaries: that of Benedict Arnold. Arnold was one of Washington’s favorites, with an estimable war record and undeniable charisma, whose treason shocked and outraged the revolutionaries because of the depth of his apostasy. Up to the moment his betrayal was discovered, Arnold was the glittering beau ideal of the American cause. Arnold was hanged in effigy by a Philadelphia crowd in September 1780 in an elaborate display of street theater, The Devil and General Arnold (Figure 27). Peale did the transparent painting that spelled out Arnold’s crimes and punishment and assisted in constructing the moving parts of the effigy. Arnold was carried in a tumbril, or farm cart, and was represented as having two faces, “emblematical of his traiterous conduct.” The two-faced effigy also carried a black mask to indicate the third deception: that of Arnold by himself. In making a pact with the Devil, Arnold had mistakenly believed that the alliance would not be a lasting one: the Devil was shown as prod-

86

•

Part II

figure 27. Benedict Arnold and the Devil, 1780. Lithograph. The Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.

ding Arnold toward the flames of Hell with the instruction that “he had done all the mischief he could do, and now he must hang himself.” If treason was the ultimate crime against the republican body politic, then it was fitting punishment that Arnold was made to annihilate himself.25 In being driven to suicide, Arnold, Washington’s loyal disciple, was supposed to follow Judas. But self-inflicted death was not sufficient punishment for Peale and his audience. Arnold, through his effigy, was also being transported to an execution site, where he was hanged and burned. The multiple deaths proposed for Arnold’s effigy show how the episode exposed the tensions between theories of character and the workings of events. Peale’s proposal indicated that Arnold, having gone against his innate character with the assistance of the Devil, would suffer guilt and turn on himself to eradicate his shame. Yet the whole point of the public procession was Arnold’s condemnation by the community, his fate determined, not by the outside supernatural force of the Devil, but by the will of the people acting to punish this “Traitor to his native country.” But in judging Arnold’s crimes and hailing his punishment, the procession again betrays confusion about who punished Arnold and why. (The citizens who attended the procession probably took a more linear and cathartic view of proceedings: Arnold had committed treason against the nascent American nation, he had absconded, and he was now punished in absentia in a ritual public execution.) The procession’s narrative, which Peale may have written, elided the painful fact that Arnold’s treachery was discovered only by accident—no one had ever suspected the general’s duplicity.26 The procession narrative saves face by turning an enormous failure of intelligence into a sign of God’s grace. Arnold’s “design to have given up

A Good War and a Troubled Peace

•

87

this fortress to our enemies, has been discovered by the goodness of the Omniscient Creator, who has . . . prevented him carrying it into execution. . . . The treachery of this ungrateful General is held up to public view, for the exposition of infamy; and to proclaim with joyful acclamation, another instance of the interposition of bounteous Providence.” Making the best of a bad situation, the narrative avoided embarrassing questions by identifying America (the soon-to-be United States) as the special recipient of God’s grace. The paean to God’s intercession in American affairs confirmed what was implied in the identification of Arnold with Judas: Arnold had betrayed the redeemer nation just as Judas had betrayed the Redeemer himself.27 Arnold’s betrayal drove home to Peale and others the troubling inadequacy of appearance to indicate either character or future behavior. According to the procession narrative, Arnold had not violated specific statutes of civil and military law but had been “a Traitor to his native country” and a “Betrayer of the laws of honor.” The sweeping vagueness of these charges demonstrates a transitional moment in the revolutionaries’ attempt to enact the idea of America. Although Arnold was charged with betraying a nation not yet in being, to the Philadelphia demonstrators, he had clearly traduced the pure ideal of America and the American character, rooted in the truths of nature and natural law, and violated the unwritten but customary code of honor. Honor was a crucial organizing concept for premodern societies that concentrated power in the individual rather than in governmental institutions and the instrumentalities of the law. Arnold’s false representation of himself in word and appearance was as much a crime as his treason. George Washington went so far as to suggest that only a man who had no personality (and thus no conscience) could have accomplished Arnold’s betrayal. “I am mistaken,” the commander in chief wrote against the view that Arnold suffered even if he escaped the gallows, “if at this time Arnold is undergoing the torments of a mental Hell. He wants feeling!” Arnold’s fellow conspirator, the English spy John Andre, garnered widespread admiration for the fortitude and honesty with which he faced his execution. But the perfidious, endlessly dissembling Arnold, who violated even the laws of human nature, could be understood only by portrayal as a nullity.28 As the Arnold case dramatized, the epistemological problem was not just to discern character through features but to recognize ideological and nationalist identification. Though Peale never gave a reason for his collapse of 1780–83, Arnold’s treason may well have destabilized Peale by challenging his assumption that character was transparent. This supposition is supported by Peale’s determination to reassert his assumption in his portrait gallery

88

•

Part II

and museum. These institutions were bulwarks against deception. Peale created his gallery of worthies in the midst and immediate aftermath of the Revolutionary War. His portrait gallery helped convey how the revolutionary generation had created political order. But its uniformity also suggested how the portraits themselves were created for the market instead of private patrons. Reflecting their production at a transitional moment, Peale’s museum portraits simultaneously celebrated individual achievements and affirmed a uniform order that guided individual effort.29 Yet portraits had their limits. Peale’s paintings were antihistory paintings because they made actions and events appear inevitable and preordained; they stopped time. His gallery homogenized history, creating a necessary myth of national unity by bringing together disparate subjects, such as the radical Tom Paine and the conservative Robert Morris, and by representing a uniform aesthetic. Peale’s portraits gave the Revolution permanence, but as visual display they were too static to accommodate the contingencies and variety of early American history. Portraiture could celebrate and illustrate, but it was too reflective to have more than a subsidiary role in making the American character: it would always be backward looking and memorial and thus inadequate to represent American history in the making. Here again, Peale confronted the problem of going beyond what was immediately before him to create generalized effects for the American public. He found a solution to his personal and artistic dilemma in Philadelphia’s civic celebrations of the 1780s. In these he was able to transcend the limits of portraiture by presenting the myths of the new nation to the people. Having used Arnold as a scapegoat and expelled the toxin from the body politic, Peale, with other citizens of Philadelphia, acknowledged the blessings that united the American people.30 With an artist’s eye for the relationship of the particular to the general, Peale quickly grasped the need to transform the celebration of events and people into general statements of national purpose and virtue. The Pennsylvania Gazette, commenting on Peale’s transparency marking Maryland’s ratification of the Constitution, spoke for all the artist’s civic designs in writing that they counterposed “the horrors of anarchy and confusion” with the “blessings of order.” Peale had a hand in most of Philadelphia’s greater and lesser civic ceremonies of the 1780s and 1790s, which both organized the peace and celebrated it. For instance, in his tour-de-force illumination of his own house in December 1781, when the victorious Washington arrived in the city, the house became a structural index of the history and anticipated future of the United States. The central window showed a “Temple of Independence” whose narrative ascended from the causes of the

A Good War and a Troubled Peace

•

89

Revolution, to the battles, to the inscription “by the voice of the people,” which supported thirteen Ionic columns surmounted by a frieze honoring “illustrious senators” and a pediment, “brave soldiery.” On the pediment were allegorical statues of Justice, Hope, and Industry. Above, a second, Corinthian, level commemorated the revolutionary dead, and a final level, in Attic style, completed the structure with statues of agriculture, arts, and commerce. The anomalous feature of the “Temple” was the placing of the tribute to “brave soldiery” above the Senate, revealing some uneasiness about a military coup after the Revolution.31 The threat of disgruntled “soldiery,” however, did not weaken the solidity of the national structure as Peale represented it in his transparency. The neoclassical architectural details, especially the thirteen Ionic columns of the states, ensured that viewers understood the firm grounding of the American Republic in ancient precedent. Visually, the “Temple of Independence” balanced history and the future, and Peale’s description challenged the Europe of the present and future. So much American iconology points west that it is salutary to be reminded that the eighteenth-century Republic still looked east. It mattered to Peale and the revolutionary generation that “the figure of Fame, blowing her trumpet to the east” should issue the challenge to Europe. The founders believed that “[t]he pursuit of fame . . . was a way of transforming egotism and self-aggrandizing impulses into public service.” Public service was the surest way to build “lasting monuments,” in most cases the histories of great deeds, that would ensure the perpetual remembrance of posterity. Peale (as well as Jefferson, given his interest in architecture) was interested in making those monuments visual. Ovid’s allegory of Fama put her at the center of the world, a position many Americans expected their country to aspire to and attain.32 In Peale’s ordered and harmonious Temple, Fame’s trumpet, her constant attribute, sounded many notes in pleasing concord. Allusions to parts that formed a harmonious whole recurred in other devices in his transparency— for instance, in the equilibrium of the scales of Justice.33 The transparency also shows a female figure representing America. She carries symbols of universal values so self-evident that they need no further definition or elaboration. The only unexpected characteristic among the four that define America’s genius is “Perseverance,” which crowns the figure. While “Equal Rights,” “Universality,” and “Virtue” are general values, “Perseverance” is specific. Through it the transcendental values of universality, virtue, and equal rights are brought to bear on the world. Perseverance is thus the force that propels America forward to triumph. The central position Peale gave perseverance indicates his commitment

90

•

Part II

to the trait as essential to a good character; in his 1788 Annapolis transparency, he again labeled the figure of America “Perseverance.” The word crops up several times in the Peale family’s history. Benjamin Franklin gave the young Rubens Peale an autograph card inscribed with it and urged him to adopt it as his credo. When Peale bought a farm outside Philadelphia, he first named it Farm Persevere since “Perseverances [sic] was his motto.” Although Peale designed the figure of America to imply unity and consensus, “Perseverance” alludes to the secular world and the need for energy and hard work. Politically and visually, it was important that the transparency make the triumph of America seem preordained. The inclusion of “Perseverance” suggests Peale’s own sense that such a triumph would not be automatic. In his triumphal transparency, Peale embedded a cautionary message.34 The sequel to Peale’s initially successful involvement in public celebrations was horrific. In 1783, as part of a “Public Demonstration of Joy” to celebrate the end of the war, Peale was commissioned by the state to build “a Triumphal Arch in transparent Colours. It consisted of three arches, the Center Arch was 20 feet high, and the side arches of each 15 feet high, and the whole length extended nearly to the width of Market Street, and it was 46 feet high, independant of the statues of the 4 cardenal Virtues, larger than human figures.” In addition to its architectural elements (“the whole Edifice is finished in the Style of Architecture proper for such a Building and used by the Romans”), the arch (Figure 28) was decorated with thirteen separate “Devices and Inscriptions.” Over the central arch was depicted “the Temple of Janus shut.” In mythology, the temple was closed when Rome was at peace, as America now was. Janus is defined by his two-facedness. But unlike the traitor Arnold, Janus did not represent duplicity. Rather, the message of Janus was to look to precedent as a guide to the future. The messianic tone of the display was reinforced by its central inscription, “By the Divine Favor / A great and new Order of Ages commences,” written in both Latin and English. The Triumphal Arch was heavily didactic, explaining the moral and political points of each painted scene. Spectators had to read the arch, text and images. But their participation in viewing it was structured as carefully and rigidly as the arch itself. City authorities issued complicated instructions to control foot and horse-borne traffic so that the public could pass through the arch “with the greatest Convenience and Satisfaction to themselves.” Thus, although Peale did not intend it, the arch organized and controlled the public physically as well as ideologically. City officials also clamped down on any frivolous distractions, warning that “Boys or others” who threw fire-

A Good War and a Troubled Peace

•

91

figure 28. Drawing by Lester Hoadley Sellers, “A Reconstruction of Peale’s Transparent Triumphal Arch, 1783–84.” Pen and ink drawing. American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia.

crackers or disturbed the citizenry would “be immediately apprehended and sent to the Work-house.” The workhouse would teach those who would not follow instructions to better regulate their public conduct.35 The authorities had a right to be concerned about “squibs and crackers,” albeit not those thrown by boys. Perhaps because the arch was a rigid model of didactic order, Peale sensationalized its visual interest by loading it with pyrotechnics. It contained over 1,100 interconnected lamps that could “illuminate the whole . . . in a minute.” The lighting of the arch was also accompanied by more than seven hundred fireworks. Ideally, both the intellect and the sensations would be satisfied when the arch was dramatically lighted. But the worst happened. A rocket accidentally went off too close to the heavily oiled and painted arch, igniting it and destroying its display of classical order. The city council’s traffic plan never had to be used. Instead, citizens fled wildly in panic. Peale was caught on the scaffolding when the arch caught fire and narrowly escaped both burning and falling to death; one man was killed in the conflagration. After the destruction of the arch, Peale barely made it home without passing out and spent twenty-one days in bed recovering physically and emotionally from the disaster.36 After recovering, Peale resuscitated the project and rebuilt the arch. But promised funds from a public subscription did not meet his outlay in time and supplies. From the state of Pennsylvania, Peale records that he received only £137.10 and the cost of materials out of a total budget outlay of £600. (He also records having been inadequately compensated for the 1788 Annapolis celebration.) After the display of the rebuilt arch, Peale stored its paintings “in reserve against such time as other rejoicings might be again wanted” but later discovered that the paintings had been destroyed. From

92

•

Part II

all this Peale concluded that “[i]t is much better to trust to the generosity of an Individual than to the public. [S]hame may make an Individual do some justice, but shame divided amongst thousands is lightly bourne.” For Peale, the Triumphal Arch episode was an example of hubris punished. The cultural and civic pretensions of Philadelphians caused them to overreach. The fiery destruction of the arch was a warning not to celebrate a republic not yet created. Moreover, it was a warning that the politics of the constitutional period could not be managed as easily as pedestrian traffic and rowdy boys. Peale also saw a personal message in the arch’s destruction: he needed to establish and maintain control over his artistic and cultural productions. He learned again the lesson that he could rely only on himself.37 Peale’s desire to broaden his audience from portrait patrons to a general public is shown by his rebound from the disaster of the Triumphal Arch and his postrevolutionary fugue state. In 1785, thrown back on his own resources and seeking a combination of culture and public appeal, he built and exhibited a display of moving pictures in a theatrical stage set with spectacular special effects, including the use of smoke, lighting, and sound. In other words, Peale went from creating didactic, patriotic lessons integrated into the structural solidity of the Triumphal Arch, a structure designed to regulate the civic audience both intellectually and physically, to employing an artistic strategy to destabilize the audience’s sensations and preconceptions. Emotionally, he assimilated the spectacular failure of the Triumphal Arch by experimenting with productive (and profitable) new forms that he controlled. In his displays, he attempted to re-create and command nature and time.38 Peale’s moving pictures drew directly on the contemporary work in London exhibited by Phillipe De Loutherbourg in his Eidophusikon (c. 1781). The invented word eidophusikon combined the Greek eidos (“form”) with physikos (“natural”), but “form” had a specific tinge of the spectral. As Matthew Craske has written of De Loutherbourg, his “objectives were certainly not to facilitate his public’s ability to make calm and rational distinctions between illusion and reality. On the contrary, he set out to terrify, bemuse, and disconcert.” De Loutherbourg, therefore, emphasized disorienting and frightening effects similar to those of a carnival funhouse ride. Peale’s moving picture show did not manifest a similar desire to shock. In advertising his performances, Peale wrote that “with great labour and expence, he has prepared a number of perspective views, with changeable effects, imitating nature in various movements. . . . This manner of exhibiting pictures, imitations of choice parts of natural objects, in which motion

A Good War and a Troubled Peace

•

93

and change is given, is entirely new, at least in this part of the world.” Peale, like De Loutherbourg, presented “Pandemonium,” a scene from Milton’s Paradise Lost that used smoke and fire to enhance the apocalyptic verse; the four moving pictures that bracketed this disturbing vision, however, were of peaceful American scenes. They depicted such events as water flowing and the rising and setting of the sun over both country and city scenes. Peale even claimed that his scene from Milton was fundamentally concerned not with rendering Hell but with showing “moving fire in its various forms and colours, with rolling smoke.” With his emphasis on duplicating nature, Peale, unlike De Loutherbourg, sought to preserve the Enlightenment’s harmonies, extending knowledge and reinforcing rather than disrupting the reliability of sense impressions. His exhibition offered a gentle pastoralism and a benign version of the sublime, as in his unfulfilled plan to show a seascape changing from calm to a storm.39 The spectators at Peale’s exhibition of moving pictures were meant to view not only the special effects but also Peale himself. The moving pictures were advertised as a virtuoso mechanical performance by Philadelphia’s “ingenious” Mr. Peale. Peale explicitly noted the artist’s desire for reputation and fame: “A painter, who loves his art, is rather studious of producing pieces that are pleasing to the world, and that give him applause, than of immediately gaining pecuniary advantage.” Fame, as in Peale’s transparency of the “Temple of Independence,” legitimated private gain. The artist, rather than having merely a one-to-one relationship with a patron, could become a cultural impresario, synthesizing many art forms for marketing to a wider public. While Peale did not hide his own profit from his moving pictures’ exhibition, he declared that the profit motive was secondary to his aim of providing civic and public benefits for the citizenry. Attendance at Peale’s exhibition served the civic good, unifying the public and increasing Philadelphia’s attractiveness. “But beyond this [i.e., pecuniary reward], permit him to say he was further moved by the consideration, that as well as citizens, it might also entertain strangers, coming to the city, and add a mite to the agreableness of it, and to their approbation of the place.—This he humbly thinks is an attention becoming every citizen, towards strangers,—and indeed tends to its emolument and character.” If De Loutherbourg wanted to cause “members of the most urbane London audiences to run out of the theater in panic,” Peale wanted to unite a disparate and promiscuous public. Public exhibitions helped maintain tradition even as modernization fragmented old unities. The goal of public unification informed Peale’s general design of benignly harmonious moving pictures. In balancing opposites,

94

•

Part II

Peale used the latest visual technology to present the soothing clockwork order of nature that would link an audience of strangers both to each other and to the artist.40 Peale’s moving pictures did not find an audience, and after a short run he closed the exhibition. Although he blamed an unreceptive public, he may have closed his show because he himself found the effects too disorienting. The exhibition may have been too antithetical to his rationalism for him to continue without asking hard questions about the depiction of nature and reality. In summarizing the failure of his moving pictures, he concluded, “[T]his was his hobby Horse for the time, and he rode him hard.” Peale regularly chastised himself for not sticking with portrait painting, disparaging his other pursuits, such as his mechanical inventions, as “hobby horses.” The term hobby horse in the eighteenth century connoted activity not just trivial but ineffectual, ridiculous, and even impotent. Peale may have concluded that the moving pictures were too trivial and ineffectual to contribute to “rational amusement” or to create the sense of public community that he desired. Successively, Peale had discovered the limits of portraiture, radical politics, civic festivals, and the new visual technology in creating a unifying social order in the new Republic. In a market society, “knowing” people’s characters from appearances was especially problematic (as evidenced by the 1776 meeting in which Adams misjudged Peale). New institutions had to be created through and by which individual Americans could be confident about each other’s morals and characters and thereby act harmoniously.41

chapter 5

“The Medicinal Office of the Mind” The Peale Museum’s Mission of Reform, 1793–1810

~ In the fall of 1793 Philadelphia was struck by a yellow fever epidemic that reshaped the city demographically, physically, and culturally. Before the fever ran its course, between 4,500 and 5,000 people died, a staggering death rate of 22 percent. Physically, the city came to resemble a charnel house as healthy families fled, leaving behind the sick, the dying, and those brave enough to stay and nurse them. Peale, in Delaware with his family when the fever broke out in September 1793, returned to find “[t]he distress . . . here on Account of the prevailing fever was really shocking”: “most of the shops were shut up and up Town scarcely a person could be seen in the streets, that the dead was generally buryed at night. Those who were taken with fever which is called a yellow fever died in about 5 days.” Attempts to fumigate the city’s air, inside and out, by using smoke-pots and firing gunpowder only made the scene more dismal. Peale condemned the panic that caused people to flee; he remained in Philadelphia with his family throughout the contagion, confident that sensible, rational living would keep them all healthy, and criticized the heads of families and the city’s physicians for deserting their responsibilities.1 This dereliction of duties signaled a political and cultural crisis. During the epidemic Philadelphia stopped functioning as institutions collapsed. Charles Brockden Brown wrote in his novel Arthur Mervyn or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 that the miasma of fever destroyed not just the bodies of Philadelphians but their very rationality: “Terror had exterminated all the sentiments of nature. . . . The consternation of others had destroyed their 95

96

•

Part II

understanding.” Arthur Mervyn is a gothic novel in which nothing is what it seems, connections and reconnections occur at random, and every plausible explanation has a sinister underside. All boundaries of certainty, including death itself, are eradicated by the fever: the most chilling scenes in the novel show the hearsemen picking up both the dead and those merely unconscious, whom they bury alive. For Mervyn the fever is palpably evil, a malignant spirit entering men’s bodies and souls. When Mervyn contracts the fever, he describes it as a succubus: As I approached the door of which I was in search, a vapour, both infectious and deadly, assailed my senses. It resembled nothing of which I had ever before been sensible. . . . I seemed not so much to smell as to taste the element that now encompassed me. I felt as if I had inhaled a poisonous and subtle fluid, whose power instantly bereft my stomach of all vigour. Some fatal influence appeared to seize upon my vitals; and the work of corrosion and decomposition to be busily begun.

Brown articulated the “miasma” theory that people breathe in the disease in polluted “air.” Arthur Mervyn is happy to learn that the disease is not carried into the city by foreigners but is due “to a morbid constitution of the atmosphere, owing wholly, or in part to filthy streets, airless habitations and squalid persons.” In rejecting the politically charged nativist argument that slaveholding émigrés brought the disease from Saint-Domingue, Brown espoused a gothic environmentalism in which nature’s malignancy was tied to the corruption of human reason. Given the total breakdown of rationality in the novel, however, Brown seems to have held little hope that reform could be effected by rational means. He reversed the optimistic Deist position, that God’s spirit or energy was immanent in man and the world, and insisted fatalistically that man’s malign unconscious generated the noxious airs that infected the individual body and the body politic. In Arthur Mervyn the plague does not cause but only accelerates the breakdown of the Enlightenment’s belief that we can wholly know the world outside our senses.2 The very irrationality of the disease convinced Peale, in contrast, that a redoubled rationalism, especially personal reform, could defeat the plague. In place of Brown’s deterministic environmentalism, Peale emphasized individual autonomy and the perfectibility of human nature; he argued that if Americans followed his regimen of reforming personal and public health, irrational limits on both health and longevity could be overcome. Peale proposed that government committees investigate environmental conditions (such as those Mervyn mentions) and educate the public about prophylac-

“The Medicinal Office of the Mind”

•

97

tic measures against the disease. These committees would focus not so much on public works projects as on individual reform (better diets, regular bathing, and so on). Peale’s optimism even found a positive message in the severity of the disease. In a remarkable letter to a New York City alderman whom he was advising on public health, Peale concluded that the fever had a salutary effect in forcing people to confront the error of their ways. The cause of the fever was a moral failing, and people had been justly punished, just as God had punished earth with His cleansing flood: “Now my reasons for thinking that these frequent visitations of fever in our Cities may be a blessing are I believe that we eat & drink improperly—. . . . Now if these calamities will induce a thorough reform and our present suffering will be a triffle compared to following benefit: a Reform in our Eating & drinking & practice of Phisick will do good to our bodies — induce our Economy, and mend our morrals.” Peale’s continual crossing out of “Souls” shows his stuttering over the question of how to fulfill God’s plan. Unwilling or unable to face the question of the afterlife, Peale preferred to base his argument on the personal and secular benefits of the plague. He argued that death could be postponed through an exercise of reason; the “Natural life” of man was two hundred years, and while that might be impossible, surely one hundred years was feasible.3 But how to implement that reform remained a question. During the 1790s Peale began to codify and systematize his pragmatic opinions on health and right conduct to present them to the public as manifestos of personal and social reform. Peale’s Philadelphia Museum gave him the audience he had craved since the end of the Revolution. He had confessed his need to control himself; now he felt confident of his ability to control others by offering exemplars in his portraits and his presentation and management of nature. He wrote of his life’s purpose, “I scru[t]inize the actions of Men and know from what impulse they move, and where I can do no good I am silent. But if I could, I have the desire to reform the bulk of my fellow creatures.” Personal reform, dictated by Peale, would lead to social reform and social control.4 During the fever epidemic Benjamin Rush had introduced the concept of the “medical republic” as his solution to the city’s physical and moral collapse. Peale shared Rush’s aim of reforming American society but differed with the doctor on methods. Peale was an environmentalist, Rush an authoritarian. For instance, Rush emphasized that the state owned the citizen. He fought the 1793 epidemic by increasing the rate and number of his “depletions” (bleedings) and purgatives to the point where he was severely criticized for curing patients by murdering them. Peale’s more be-

98

•

Part II

nign governmental solution was the investigatory committee of public health. But he also created his own institution of public health, the Philadelphia Museum, where he represented societal and natural order as a heuristic example and functional equivalent of the good society. Unlike Rush’s proscriptive plan, Peale’s would operate benignly, a noncoercive educational institution. But Peale retained the medical metaphor in his intention, never carried out, to add, under the sign for his museum, “Medicinal Office of the Mind.”5 Peale’s son Rembrandt said of his father’s shift from painting to science, “As soon as my Father commenced [as a] Naturalist he lost all enjoyment in painting.” The son overstated, in part because he accepted Peale’s narrative of his own career. Peale strove in his writings to make the museum, and the idea of serving the “public in general,” seem inevitable. He ascribed his decision to formally establish his Philadelphia Museum to a fortuitous coincidence. In his autobiography Peale wrote that in 1784, while he was drawing fossil bones for a German scientist, his brother-in-law Nathaniel Ramsay found these objects “so interresting that he said ‘he would have gone 20 miles to behold such a collection.’” Ramsay suggested that Peale augment his art exhibition with specimens of natural history. In urging Peale to consider branching out, Ramsay alluded to the limited appetite of citizens of the new Republic for the fine arts: “doubtless there are many men like myself who would prefer seeing such articles of curiosity than any paintings whatever.” Ramsay also suggested a gender division, with men preferring real “curiosities” of the world rather than the artificialities of the arts, which presumably appealed to women.6 By marrying the fine arts to natural and human history in his museum, Peale could combine audiences, expanding the range of his vision and his impact beyond that of a single portrait. Peale writes in the section of his autobiography devoted to 1809 that “the Museum is a benefit to the public in general; but the value of Portraits is only estimable [to] a small number of Individuals.” He recounts that acting on the “hint” provided by his relative, he immediately began soliciting donations and assistance from learned societies and the general public: “This was the beginning of a collection which it is hoped will encrease to a great and highly valuable collection and in process of time to national worth.” Peale’s retrospective account of his founding of America’s first modern museum puts the emphasis on offhand virtuosity.7 In 1794 Peale completed his difficult decade-long transition from artist to naturalist, a move facilitated by his experience running a portrait gallery but fraught nonetheless with setbacks and false starts. The moving pictures

“The Medicinal Office of the Mind”

•

99

exhibition was unprofitable both financially and intellectually; the experiment with the eidophusikon’s changeable effects seems to have destabilized Peale psychologically. Peale was rejected personally and professionally, moreover, when Mary (“Molly”) Tilghman, of the powerful Tilghman family of the Eastern Shore, refused to marry him. As in his marriage to Rachel, Peale sought to move up another rung in the Tidewater aristocracy, but the Tilghman men rejected him as an interloper and an opportunist or, as the Brewer girls had called him, an “Impudent baggage.” Although Peale painted many wonderful portraits during the 1790s, the Tilghmans’ rebuff made it clear to him that as a portraitist he would always be a servant of the wealthy. After the rejection Peale retreated into himself as he had in an earlier crisis, taking opiates. His autobiography shows an eight-month gap in the narrative of events. (I discuss the Tilghman courtship in more detail in the next chapter.) Energized by Philadelphia’s crisis, Peale in 1794 published his official retirement from portrait painting, recommending his sons Raphaelle and Rembrandt as his successors. Even so, he continued to be involved in the arts both personally and institutionally. Responding to the leadership crisis caused by the epidemic of 1793, he helped create institutions to improve the cultural health of Philadelphia, providing a bulwark against the destruction of the city’s confidence in itself. At the time he opened his museum, Peale was also founding the Columbianum (1794) to support art and artists in Philadelphia. Though modeled on the Royal Academy of Art (London), the Columbianum declared its artistic and cultural independence, not least because it was concerned with making art a constituent of the new nation rather than with ratifying or institutionalizing existing aesthetic theories and reputations. The Columbianum was democratic in its focus on drawing classes, whose basic instruction in the arts would inculcate the rudiments of art appreciation in a wide public, thus ensuring great social benefit. Not only would “the taste [be] improved, and a love for the fine arts gradually extended,” but also the Columbianum would function as a socializing instrument for young Americans, since “[i]nstances are very rare of fine taste united to depravity of conduct.” Art was justified not just for its own sake but instrumentally for its public benefits: art and writing provided order.8 The Columbianum had an ambitious mission but served only a small sector of the public and offered little scope for Peale’s plan to reform his fellow citizens. As the art historian Wendy Bellion has convincingly demonstrated, Peale’s Staircase Group (originally titled Portrait of Raphaelle Peale and Titian Ramsay Peale) (Figure 29) was painted for the

figure 29. The Staircase Group (Portrait of Raphaelle Peale and Titian Ramsay Peale), 1795. Oil on canvas, 891⁄2 × 393⁄8 in. Philadelphia Museum of Art: The George W. Elkins Collection.

“The Medicinal Office of the Mind”

•

101

Columbianum as a virtuoso piece of double illusionism to subtly undermine the very arts the institution was intended to promote. First, the figure of Titian, Peale’s helpmate in science, is shown descending the staircase to make his public appearance, while Raphaelle, artist and firstborn, is shown in the character of a painter, taking a last look around before leaving the scene. Bellion’s reconstruction of the geography of the room where the painting was displayed indicates that a line can be traced in the painting from the admission ticket on the step up through Raphaelle to Titian’s index finger, which points out the window of the exhibition room and toward Philosophical Hall, the site of Peale’s museum.9 To shore up the city’s institutions, Philadelphia’s government permitted Peale to move his museum from an outbuilding of his studio into Philosophical Hall in the State House (now Independence Hall ) complex. Peale made the social utility of his museum explicit when he wrote that, once inside, “Persons however estranged by each other, by private piques, by Religion or by Politicks, here meet, as by accident, and have a concordance of sentiment in admiring the wonderful works of creation, viewing her beauties thus cannot restrain their effusions of admiration. . . . [H]ere finding a similarity of Sentiment their prejudices subside and on a better acquaintance [they] find less cause of discention.” Peale decided not to subtitle his museum “Temple of Wisdom” for fear of offending religious institutions. Yet his Deistic intentions were perfectly apparent in his presumption that God was immanent in nature and that he himself was fulfilling God’s work in instructing man in nature’s harmonies to eradicate worldly “discention.”10 Unlike Rush’s “heroic” plan for maintaining republican health, Peale’s methods fit him both temperamentally and ideologically. His “culturalist” program allied him to the Jeffersonian party of Democratic-Republicans. Peale sought to shape health and the environment through a network of institutions, such as the family, the Columbianum, and his museum. In the wake of the yellow fever epidemic he especially advocated good nursing, “best obtained through the ties of consanguity.” As Peale indicated in expressing his wish to reform “the bulk of my fellow creatures,” he presented his reform efforts discreetly, never personally lecturing people about temperance, for example, or even drawing attention to his own teetotalism for fear of seeming holier-than-thou. Peale sought to lead people subtly to change: “[I]t is much better to use a little art than openly to make opposition that would irritate and cause fretfulness, but rather to south [soothe] and comfort by an affectionate procedure.” Peale’s appearance of diffidence was a strategy that should not be misconstrued as self-abnegation or timidity; he conceived of himself as the interpreter of the Almighty’s will. His conception of na-

102

•

Part II

ture was deterministic: social barriers would dissolve for those exposed to the “world in miniature” that Peale created in his museum.11 Consciously or not, Peale sought to reclaim the eighteenth century’s original meaning of sentimentality. For Peale, sentiment was not a trivialized emotion, as it is today, but a product of reason. By the late eighteenth century, nominally sentimental English novels were actually antisentimental satires. For instance, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy is a novel of disconnection and misidentification. So is Fielding’s knockabout comedy Tom Jones, where identities and motivations are continually misread and Tom’s natural grace, manner, and looks fail to save him from abuse. In Laurence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, expressions of feeling are a thin veneer for erotic play. In that novel, men rarely meet women without an exchange of money or goods to seal the profession of “sentimental” feeling that serves as perfunctory foreplay; the cash nexus, rather than feeling, determines human relations.12 In Peale’s view, nature’s harmony would teach humans a lesson in greater harmony between individuals. Learning such a lesson required work. Peale wrote of his museum, “I neglect many little contrivances which might serve to catch the Eye of the gaping multitude; but rather preferrg: a steady perseverance to gain experience to execute such improvements as may tend to give a Scientific cast, as being most effectual to make deep and lasting impressions on those who come to study the subjects of the Museum.” Note the key word, perseverance. As Peale suggests by contrasting the “gaping multitude” and “those who come to study,” perseverance differentiates the enlightened elite from the broader public. He was confident, however, that if he avoided sensational (or even idiosyncratic or quirky) exhibits, people studying nature in his museum would learn sentiment—by which he meant not social frippery but the core values that harmonize individuals and nations. After the war, Peale was intent on forging citizens of character—citizens, in fact, who would resemble Charles Willson Peale himself.13 Peale had to be concerned about the relationship of man generally, and himself specifically, to the apparently autonomous operations of nature. Didier Maleuvre writes about the transcendental purpose of museums: “Art is not the only thing the museum neutralizes: as a powerful propaganda instrument, it also reifies collective identity by confining it to a set of seemingly external traits, thus neutralizing conflicting or errant tendencies. . . . The paradox of museums lies in their representing the progress of history through diversity, yet doing it from the standpoint of a suprahistorical, transcendental notion of what this history is—from a principle of rigid identity above and beyond diversity.”14 Maleuvre’s conclusion accords with Peale’s

“The Medicinal Office of the Mind”

•

103

efforts in his museum but assumes that the “museum” acts autonomously rather than contingently, in response to the historical and personal circumstances that bring it into being. Peale effaced his own role in creating his museum because it was nature that reformed. His situation reversed that in the market, where a “hidden hand” made autonomous, discrete transactions coherent. At the museum, Peale hid his commanding hand to disguise how he constructed and displayed nature to appear “natural.” Reflecting his museum’s, as well as his own, division between service to self and service to the public, Peale tried to reconcile contradictory modes of political economy. His greatest achievement is that he created the republican museum, the precursor to the modern democratic museum. By charging an admission fee, he opened museum access to anyone who could afford it, instead of tying it to class or caste. He broke decisively with the European tradition of the private exhibition, open only to the politically and economically privileged. Thus his museum welcomed to a broad segment of the American population. An admission fee presupposed enough income for entertainment and luxuries, but since the fee (generally 25 cents per admission, with packages for families and special events) was relatively low, the museum’s audience could broadly reflect America’s social structure, with important exceptions: the poor and those held in slavery and servitude. Working backward from the fees charged and yearly income (a method that underrepresents attendance because it ignores group packages, special exhibits, and yearly subscriptions) gives the following attendance figures: 1800 1805 1810 1815

11,620 16,862 33,520 39,620

In 1816, the museum’s peak year, 47,696 entered—this in a city whose population was 69,403 in 1800 and 91,874 in 1810.15 In planning the expansion of his museum in 1800, Peale considered indexing admission fees to “the price of provisions or labor,” an innovation, never put into practice, that reminds one of Peale’s radical artisanal past and the attempt to fix prices during the Revolution. Still, Peale thought that a museum had to depend in part on public fees—they made the museum a republican, not a democratic, institution—because fees were a way of managing the audience: “for if a Museum was free to all to view it without cost it would be over-run & abused—on the other hand, if too difficult of access,

104

•

Part II

it would lose its utility; that of giving information generally.” Peale recognized that people valued what they paid for. Even though attendance would always be skewed toward the middle and upper strata of the population, what Peale did was revolutionary. Peale’s museum opened up the closed cabinets and drawers of premodern society to the general public’s gaze.16 Peale made it possible for Americans to consume culture. Though no doubt unconsciously, his museum exhibitions mirrored entrepreneurial practice, especially in their final form, depicted in The Artist in His Museum, which replicated the commercial displays of retail products in shops. Alexander Nemerov has noted how the ranks and columns of the museum cases resemble the pages of advertisements and commercial notices in nineteenthcentury newspapers. The museum itself was among the advertisers in those newspapers, announcing new exhibits as Peale sought to attract both new and repeat attendance. The museum did more than resemble the symbolic representation of the market in advertisements, however. The museum cases mimicked store windows and the display cases of shops, though the “wares” were for viewing only, cultural artifacts manufactured and displayed by the proprietor himself.17 Having learned his lesson from the Triumphal Arch debacle, Peale refused to cede authority over his museum to anyone; when he finally incorporated it in the 1820s, he made sure he held all the stock. As the museum’s sole proprietor, he understood that to succeed in the market he had to present his Enlightenment-bred worldview so that it would appeal to a wide segment of the public. Rational amusement is the term Peale used to describe his museum’s mission, and the phrase nicely describes his awareness of the gap between his and the public’s worldview. Peale thought that he could bridge it by making the museum an educational institution and an instrument of social reform. In addition to rational amusement, it would offer “useful knowledge” to socialize and improve the population. Peale was able to observe the museum’s impact on visitors: “I often see honest Germans (who have drove their Waggons perhaps one or two hundred mil[e]s) visit the Museum, these gaze and admire the Works of Infinate Wisdom, and I have been much pleased to hear them say that they were well pleased in paying for a pleasure which gave them more knowledge than they had ever received before.” Specifically, a visit to the museum “cured” the German farmers of their superstition against using lightning rods on their barns, a practical example of the effect of “the medicinal office of the mind.”18 In addition to social utility, Peale emphasized how the museum inculcated patriotic and nationalistic feeling among Americans. He implicitly entered the Buffon-Jefferson debate on natural history: whether America had

“The Medicinal Office of the Mind”

•

105

a distinctly original flora and fauna or a “degenerate” version of Europe’s. A 1794 newspaper commentary on the museum’s collection by a “Lover of nature” made an issue of national pride and independence: “How many thousand pounds do we throw away upon foreign gew gaws: Let ladies and gentlemen who admire true elegance, view the Summer Duck, the Humming Bird, the Scarlet Sparrow, the Brazilian Creeper, the Gold Finch, the Poweese, the ruby Crested Ren, &c. they will be charmed at a very small expence.” The trope of juxtaposing “foreign gew gaws” (fripperies, baubles, vanities) with America’s “true elegance” was the familiar one of American cultural nationalism, which contrasted corrupt Europe with honest America, whose citizens’ virtue derived from American nature. The simulacrum of nature that was Peale’s museum would, like a hothouse, force American culture and nationalism to grow. When “A.R.” wrote to Dunlap and Claypoole’s American Advertiser in 1794 that “[a]n European naturalist would not have thought a voyage across the Atlantic too great a price for this sight [of Peale’s museum],” his conclusion uncannily echoed Jefferson’s declaration, in his Notes on the State of Virginia, that anyone would cross the Atlantic to view the sublime natural site at Harper’s Ferry. In these two echoing remarks, natural aesthetics merged with the institutionalized nature to create a uniquely American culture.19 Peale’s inclusion of portraits in his museum’s collection explicitly confirmed that American nature created a “new American man”: “By good and faithful paintings, the likeness of man is perhaps with the greatest precision handed down to posterity; and I think myself highly favored in having the opportunity . . . in forming a collection of portraits of many . . . who have been highly distinguished by their exertions, in the late glorious revolution.”20 Peale planned to continue adding distinguished “characters”—he meant the term in both senses—so that his gallery would exhibit living history instead of the antiquarian. Peale ranged his portraits over the natural history cabinets to signify man’s position above the animal kingdom and the natural world. The portraits’ position, moreover, showed how men’s characters and actions derived from the natural context. The order of nature—and Peale’s was very much an ordered rather than a wild, romantic nature—created the political class and thus political order; institutionalizing nature created Americans who built the institutions, cultural as well as political, of the United States. In the modern museum, the tension between man’s simultaneous domination of and subordination to nature was both expressed and contained; the museum encouraged optimism while suppressing fear, not least because it gave a plausible interpretation of what was not yet known. Bernard Bai-

106

•

Part II

figure 30. Titian Ramsay Peale, Missouri Bears, c. 1819–22. Watercolor, 71⁄8 × 97⁄16 in. American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia.

lyn beautifully evokes the antinomies of early America in The Peopling of British North America in a question and answer: “What did it mean to Jefferson, slave owner and philosophe, that he grew up in this far western borderland world of Britain, looking out from Queen Anne rooms of spare elegance onto a wild, uncultivated land? We can only grope to understand.”21 But our attempts to understand can only chart the “groping” efforts of people like Peale and Jefferson to comprehend and reconcile their own conflicted position. The episode of Jefferson and the grizzly bears illustrates the contradictory attitude of Americans to their “wild, uncultivated land” (Figure 30). The bears were trophies of American exploration and conquest of the West. They had been captured by Zebulon Pike’s government expedition in 1806 to the southwestern borderlands. Jefferson then transferred them to Peale as part of his practice of making Peale’s museum the semiofficial repository of specimens and artifacts collected by official explorations; items came from the Lewis and Clark expedition as well as from subsequent nineteenth-century missions. The bears would be displayed—like the wolves who “raised” Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome—at the site where America declared independence. There they were part of a menagerie that included a bald eagle and an American elk, uniquely American emblems. The menagerie displayed them, and newspaper advertisements described them, as wild beasts: “These shaggy tyrants of the woods, with tremendous paws, are fierce combatants.”22 Yet although Peale played up their wild nature to attract crowds, he believed, with Jefferson, that the bears would be domesticated and socialized once they had been taken from the wilderness and brought into civilization. Like an asylum or a prison, the zoo would gentle its inmates. Jefferson wrote

“The Medicinal Office of the Mind”

•

107

in one of his more optimistic expressions of Enlightenment meliorism that the bears were “perfectly gentle, knowing no other benefactor than man from the time of their birth.” Animals could be reformed under enlightened management, just like man.The bears embodied both the sublime thrill of dangerous nature and the confidence that man could tame nature, bringing it further under his dominion. To be fair to Peale and Jefferson, the initial period of continental exploration was characterized by ignorance of what lay beyond the eastern seaboard. For instance, Lewis and Clark knew that there was a mountain range out west but assumed that the Rocky Mountains were like the Appalachians. Similarly, they gave no credence to Native American reports about the power of the grizzly bear and were astonished (and terrified) when the animals withstood multiple shots from their firearms. Despite initial optimism, Peale eventually had to kill the bears when they terrorized the other animals and escaped from their cage.23 This combination of naïveté and violence would eventually become a mawkish anthropomorphizing of nature (as in Disney films) and despoliation of nature (as in the extinction of the carrier pigeon and the clear-cutting of forests); kitsch seems a precondition for massive violence against nature in modern societies. Despite the violent demise of the bears (and a later failure to train an elk for farmwork), however, Peale persisted in describing the natural world as analogous to human society—and vice versa. Wanting to revise the old idea of a “great chain of being”—a static, hierarchical ranking from the lowest to the highest degree of perfection, in which lower beings depended on higher ones—Peale created a two-part framework that retained the placement of man above nature but also incorporated new scientific discoveries to portray nature as mutable and its creatures as more complexly interdependent. In his “Lecture on Natural History” Peale asserted that in nature, “[w]e can trace the modifications of life and structure, which distinguish them [creatures] from one another & from our own race, while, throughout we perceive the links of connection which pervade the whole.”24 Peale described the order of nature by implicitly comparing it to that of the market. It is not known whether Peale read The Wealth of Nations, but he sounded uncannily like Adam Smith when he generalized that “if we reflect on all this beautiful economy [of the natural order] nothing can furnish a stronger proof of this, that an unseen hand holds the reins, now permitting one to prevail, and now another.” Conflating the hand of God with the hidden hand of the market sanctified the political economy of market capitalism while also establishing it as an immutable part of the divinity’s perfect world order. Peale went on to reinforce the connection between na-

108

•

Part II

ture and America’s political institutions. Through the study of nature, he wrote, man will “discover that, what at first sight appeared unnecessary or injurious, is really of the greatest utility. We shall find that the very discords tend to preserve the harmony of the System, and that throughout, the order of nature, is, the order, of unerring, and unchanging wisdom.” Just as nature, having been set in motion by God (or the “Godhead” or “Creator”), was a self-regulating body, so was the political economy. Peale alludes in this passage to the constitutional debates over checks and balances as well as to Madison’s “Federalist #10,” in which competing “factions” ensure America’s liberties by precluding the development of a tyranny of the majority. Writing about insects, Peale concludes in Madisonian terms “[t]hat, if one species for a while preponderates, and instead of preserving seems to distroy, yet counter-checks should at the same time be provided to reduce it within its due limits.” Because Peale’s was a closed system, he in no way anticipated—or even considered—a process of natural selection or evolution; neither did he admit the possibility that species might become extinct. Nature to Peale was a “book” (or a “book of knowledge”) and therefore complete in itself. Its finite dimensions, “from the Elephant and Whale, down to . . . a single blade, of grass,” would be revealed by study. By knowing the world, man would know himself. Peale wanted his museum to duplicate the “book of nature” and contain all of natural history (including man), a hubristic goal that was impossible to fulfill.25 By ascribing the inception of nature, including man, to a nebulous God, Peale provided a first cause for his system while denying any role to established religious doctrine or involving himself in sectarian disputes. But once the natural universe had been created, Peale relegated God to the background. The system was kept in motion by two related forces, Peale’s central organizing principles of work and family. In Peale’s cosmology, man and the lesser animals alike shared in the performance of labor. Peale first became fascinated with insects because of their intricate design and function. Their design was not decorative or superfluous but utilitarian, permitting them to do stupendous amounts of labor to support themselves and their tribe: “No circumstance connected with the Storge (or natural affection) of Insects, is more striking that [than] the herculean and incessant labour which it leads them to undergo. Some of these exertions are so disproportionate, to the size, of the insect, that nothing short of ocular conviction, would attribute them to such an agent.” The portraits arrayed above the natural history cabinets in Peale’s museum that indicated man’s position atop the natural world also gave a privileged position to Peale’s de facto “hall of fame,” honoring those who had internalized the

“The Medicinal Office of the Mind”

•

109

virtues of the natural world. The audience for Peale’s portraits was intended to emulate the example set by the sitters in matters both public and private. Visitors to Peale’s natural history exhibits took away the message that hard work, good in its own right, would also produce worldly success.26 Man differed from animals in that he functioned consciously, his faculties and organs stronger and more perfect than those of other creatures. Man thus had “more mental energy”—which, if not fully used and discharged from the system, would inevitably lead to a “listless and uncomfortable state of idleness, or else our minds will be turned towards vice.” Insects labored continually, but men did not; thus their mental overcapacity threatened the economy of nature and had to be monitored as stringently as the body’s health. The museum, the “medicinal office of the mind,” would assist in this monitoring, looking out to the farthest reaches of the natural world to prompt men to look inward: “We are all liable to error; therefore it becomes our particular duty to examine ourselves. . . . [W]e must scrutenize ourselves in every case. . . . The inward examination, if frequently practiced, will ever have a Salutary effect.” This inward scrutiny of the mind and character went hand in hand with Peale’s scrutiny of the body.27 Men did not live in a state of nature but in a civilization that, according to Peale, created material and other desires, which they undertook labor to satisfy: “But then imaginary wants are to be satisfied, which would turn the scale against civilization, did not these wants excite a love of industry and labour, which are productive of the best effects, by keeping up that anticipation of happiness, frequently productive of more enjoyment, that [than] the actual attainment of the end desired.” By focusing on production rather than consumption, Peale justified the market economy on the moral grounds of utilitarianism: by ceaselessly producing new goods it created new needs.Work purged man so that he could consume again and again. The ever-evolving, socially defined sense of what constituted happiness kept expanding the areas in which humankind would find productive employment. Peale, in his own life fixated on production, as a proselytizer for a new American society generalized beyond himself, interpreting the modernizing economy by focusing on consumption. In fact, in his concentration on labor in his own life, Peale anticipated a later stage of capitalism in which labor becomes alienated from its products and work becomes divorced from consumption.28 Once grounded in work, true sentiment among people would flourish. The ineffectual gentlefolk who populated the eighteenth-century English literary culture had debased sentiment because they had no jobs. They were

110

•

Part II

at best amiable rentiers consumed by private “hobby horses” and at worst con men and rapists. For Peale, work and the exchange of goods in the marketplace would reestablish true sentiment. In this reconstituted world, portrait painting was not a frivolous luxury but an item of production and exchange around which a constellation of emotions could cluster. “The magic pencil can represent the beauty of virtue, the horrors of vice, the torments of a bad conscience in colours and light and shade, so strong, as to convict the evil-doer, and fill him with shame and remorse, and thus, bring him to repentance.” But “the faithful portrait of a lost friend will constantly remind us of the amiable qualities, endearing friendship, and filial or parental affection, so consolatory to the feeling of an affectionate heart.” Peale here confirmed the didactic, even tautological, nature of his portraiture. More widely, he argued that culture enforces the normative values of a society and the virtues of labor and expands the world of exchange, making the political economy a continually self-re-creating machine. To Peale, the political results were twofold. An ever-expanding market of interdependent producers and consumers (the two roles continually interchanging) created a broadly middle-class society, and individual participation in the market created a mutuality of interest across the society in which sensibility and the emotions could flourish: “And although riches will have their influence, yet this is not too great, if the people are industrous and virtuous, as they are equally dependant of each other.” Peale judged the “respectability of persons in proportion to their moral character for honesty, sobriety, industry, and strict virtue.”29 While Peale was laying down a general theory about the economy and society, he brought in the nationalistic argument to confirm the United States’ status as most favored nation: “It is to be ranked among the choicest blessings of this country that these qualifications are the only requisites to respect.” In the space of a few pages in what was ostensibly a lecture on natural history, Peale achieved the considerable feat of tying together, in a neat, self-reinforcing package, a justification for modernization and its expansion, bourgeois civil society and culture, and a democratic politics based on individual autonomy and achievement, as well as an argument for American exceptionalism, grounded in a belief in the nation’s divinely sponsored natural laws.30

chapter 6

“The Hygiene of the Self” Work, Writing, and the Enlightened Body

~ Peale’s museum was designed to improve the manners and morals of America by encouraging the expression of true sentiment among the strangers who visited the site. Peale proudly noted that he met his second wife, Elizabeth DePeyster, while she was visiting the museum from New York City, and he attributed their mutual attraction and quick marriage to its harmonious atmosphere. The museum united people in a way not physically possible in a large metropolis or socially possible in small communities dominated by a local ruling caste. Peale never lost sight of the need to base the community created in his museum on individuals perfecting themselves in both body and mind. Peale’s museum could re-create the lessons of nature, but they also had to be internalized by each individual. Bodies harmonized in the museum, but they also had to be tamed and regulated to fully absorb the harmony and order Peale created there. Concerned with respectable bodies in both his portraiture and his life, Peale developed a fixation on personal and social hygiene to reconcile individuals with the body politic, each acting in the service of the other. The exercise and proper channeling of bodily energy would yield optimal physical and mental health. Peale had learned in life that he could rely only on himself and his own energy; as we have seen, he worked his way out of his identity crises. To keep from falling into the lethargy that had afflicted him in Newburyport, after England, and in the early 1780s, he had to regulate and train his body. Most of all, he had to keep it active. In the summer of 1824 Peale decided that his health was not what it 111

112

•

Part II

should be. Wanting to throw off his lethargy with strenuous exercise, he took the stage from central Philadelphia to the village of Frankford, nine miles northeast of the city. There he began a three-day walk, during which he ate mostly wild berries gathered from roadside bushes. The distance Peale covered in his “Blackberry Ramble” is unknown, since it was “emmaterial to him which way he went,” but it must have been more than thirty miles. Having walked in an arc from the Delaware River to the Germantown Road paralleling the Schuylkill River, Peale turned east, moving “like the Tortoise in steady course.” He “arrived in the City when watchmen were beginning to light their lamps. Not in the least fateaged but hungry.” Peale set out on his ramble when he was eighty-three. Though he lacked the brute strength of, say, Washington, he had tremendous stamina; as always, perseverance was his watchword. His physical energy cannot be separated from the stream of projects, tasks, and events with which he filled his adult life. His body was always purposeful. After his “Blackberry Ramble,” Peale went back to work with renewed energy.1 Peale’s powerful physical engine was married to a restless, impatient temperament, constitutionally incapable, to the point of compulsion, of inactivity. He married Betsey DePeyster within a month of meeting her; his museum induced energy, not indolence. With his urge to be up and doing, Peale sometimes got up in the middle of the night while traveling, convinced that it was morning, ready to move on at an hour when “none [of ] the drivers or stage men was stiring.” Once Peale tried to persuade his fellow stagecoach passengers to leave ahead of time and was miffed when no one shared his sense of urgency. He wondered why “he should very sildom on the various Journeys and Voaiges he has made, find very few men who have been equally anxious to rise early and push forward.” At a time when speed had natural limits, Peale knew he could reach his destination as soon as possible only by traveling longer days; hence the importance of his constitution.2 Valuing greater speed, Peale focused much of his mechanical work on more efficient, hence faster, designs. The Germantown farm to which he retired in 1810, living there until 1819, became a laboratory for his experiments in scientific agriculture, especially the development of new machinery. While in his portraits Peale used garden imagery to suggest rustic retirement and ease, at his farm he worked unceasingly to improve agricultural methods and machinery. For instance, he adapted a European design for a windmill so that the sails rotated faster and the operator had more control. He also designed an unspillable milk cart that could travel faster and improved seed drills to make planting more efficient. He patented a lightweight wooden bridge for streams and small rivers. His copying machine,

“The Hygiene of the Self”

•

113

the polygraph, produced two originals simultaneously. Peale’s concern for speed carried over into his art.Virtually the only advice he gave his son Rembrandt on painting portraits was to be agreeable to his sitters and paint them quickly. Since Peale spent most of his painting career as an itinerant, to maintain his income he had to pack as many commissions as he could into each painting trip, a necessity that kept him on the move. His prototypically American need for constant movement, from the tips of his fingers on up, suggests his fear of falling into the torpor and indolence that had afflicted him before he got his career off the ground.3 Even when he was forced to wait for a patron or a slow-moving boat, Peale kept busy. “In our commerce with the world we must often remain in a state of expectation, therefore to have some convenient mode in such time of waiting, the least irksome possible, is certainly worth Mans invention, not as we usily say to kill time, but rather too improove our time.” Peale believed optimistically that time could now be used, not just endured. Dead time could be enlivened, and death itself denied, or at least put off, by man’s self-bettering activities.4 Peale’s sense of the need for continual self-scrutiny and self-improvement is evidence of an important change in mentality that occurred during the transition to modern society. In traditional societies, the appeal to past or to precedent, backed by the powerful forces of both popular superstition and the absolutist state, was an obstacle to change. As we have seen Peale’s father, fatalistic about his social position in Maryland society, hoped only to catch the eye of a patron as a way of improving himself. Peale himself, however, grasping the tenets of modernization, had the intellectual tools to improve himself and thereby the world.5 As Peale expressed this goal, he was “accustomed to observe the manners of man; to divine the causes of his actions; to trace the motives that have led many to contract habits that had nothing solid or reasonable to recommend them. . . . I am far from believing that we are naturally prone to evil, but that all the errors we commit, arise from a want of consideration.” Accordingly, Peale’s “whole life has afforded nothing but a series of experiments” to avoid “dead” time. After the passivity and depression that marked his early career, Peale had come to terms with his need for self-scrutiny and activity, a program he prescribed not only for himself but for all Americans.6 Peale’s hands, given the physical evidence of his creativity, must have moved ceaselessly during his adult life; he gave them a central position in his late self-portraits. During the delay that prompted his remark on “killing” time, Peale seized the opportunity to lengthen the handles of his paintbrushes. He always made sure he had some similar small task to busy

114

•

Part II

him and kept “pen and Ink and some paper in his pocket. [H]ere a man may collect his thoughts and thus pened down, will very often be found beneficial to him, and subjects are always at hand of one kind or other. [N]otes of useful customs and manners; improvements in Science &c. and in want of any of those subjects, simply the business we have on hand, the reflections thereon may become an important lesson for our future conduct, or a directory to some of our friends.” Note the double meaning of pened down. Peale wrote his thoughts down but the act of writing helped pen him in (or pin him down) so that he could focus his attention on what he intended to do; as the poet and classicist Anne Carson has observed, the act of writing disciplines and controls the body and the mind. Peale’s letters and diaries were hortatory and mnemonic devices for him and, secondarily, for his readers. Although Peale paid lip service to observation as the purpose of his writing, his primary subject was himself. His writings are the unmediated records—raw data—of his activities. Peale was not so much a sponge—his vision was selective—as a recording eye.7 For example, Peale described the day before his second wedding as he, his bride-to-be, and members of her family picnicked on the banks of the Hudson River, where “their eyes feasted with this pleasing prospective views of great distances, and near to him the lovely fair, his Betsey looked charmingly, and also delighted his ears with her melodious voice in several songs, they strumed the Guitar and talked of love. A large raft of timbers at least 200 feet long came down with the stream, a pleasing sight. . . . [It] had come some hundreds of miles, from amidst the mountains, shortly to be divided for the benefits of an encreasing city.” Stylistically and emotionally, Peale made no attempt to differentiate in his account between a picturesque landscape, the appeal of his fiancée, and the impact of waterborne commerce on New York City circa 1791. Furthermore, once the company left him alone with Betsey, Peale seized the moment not to woo his bride but to write her brother a letter describing the scene to him. Peale was writing his life as he lived it. (The letter to his brother-in-law is unlocated, so it is not known whether his description of the day in it differs from that in the autobiography, but given Peale’s practice, it is likely that the two texts were identical.) Peale’s writing is an empirical stream of description, not a stream of consciousness.8 In writing on his life Peale accepted the Enlightenment’s commitment to observe and categorize nature and the world to gain mastery over them. Peale turned himself into his own subject of scientific analysis as exhaustive description,9 monitoring himself and recording his observations both contemporaneously and retrospectively. Peale’s use of the third person in

“The Hygiene of the Self”

•

115

his autobiography emphasizes his treatment of himself as his subject. His commitment to writing his life, however, took root well before he evinced any specific interest in natural history and science. Only later did Peale justify his archive as instructive and educational for posterity. He first began to write about his life (and to save his writings) when he fled to Boston to escape his creditors and the sheriff. In this time of emotional and physical crisis, writing gave him a way to exercise control over his precarious circumstances. Peale’s writing, neither reflective nor analytical, tracks his life so closely that it flattens the account to a repetition of day-to-day detail. In the first section of the autobiography, where he lacks documentary materials on which to base his narrative, Peale develops a novelistic rhythm of repeated dangers and escapes. Each gives Peale the opportunity to stop and deliver a homiletic set-piece on a wider topic—child discipline, parental responsibility, or the delights of free labor. In this section of the document Peale describes a life governed by providence. In contrast, when he can begin to draw on his letters and diaries, he pares down the text to a recital of names and events, with rare instances of wider reflection or perspective. Peale wrote the autobiography very quickly and composed its later sections by copying his diaries word for word and stringing together his letters with only minimal editorial bridges for continuity. In the autobiography Peale achieved the third version of his life, the first being his life as he lived it, the second as he wrote about it in letters and diaries. There was even a fourth version: because Peale used letterbooks and then the more efficient polygraph, most of his letters had sender and recipient copies. Peale wrapped his life in words.10 His primary purpose in writing was instrumental—to convey information. But writing was also necessary to Peale as a way to signpost his progress, record his activities, and affirm his very existence. The writings prove that Peale did not “kill” time. Here, for instance, is Peale’s summary of a trip to New York City in 1798: “Peale finished 6 fire places in the Alms House, and gave orders to the blacksmith to make the work for 40 fireplaces ordered by the Corporation, and having been absent from home 5 months besides doing the fire-places, and one for Mr. Wm. DePeyster and painted 14 Portraits & 5 miniatures, preserved near 30 Animals of different sorts besides his labours with the sick, he leaves New York with saying that he has not been a lazy man.” Peale constantly recorded the evidence that he had fulfilled the requirements of the Protestant ethic, revealing his eager (or anxious) ambition to live a life of substance. His crabbed penmanship suggests haste. He intended to present himself to the public, not in the appearance of individ-

116

•

Part II

figure 31. Mary (“Molly”) Tilghman, 1790. Oil on canvas, 36 × 27 in. The Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore.

ual letters, but in his archive as a whole. He collected and preserved that archive from its beginnings, helping to invent and improve the polygraph so that he would have a reliable instrument for duplication. The creation, collection, and preservation of Peale’s archive argue for the pervasiveness of the Enlightenment ethos in personal as well as public lives.11 At the most mysterious personal level, Peale’s dialogue with himself in his writings was a means to prove to himself that he had not disappeared. Writing, as in the case of the “Digby letter,” made Peale visible to others and, more important, to himself. When, after the death of Rachel Brewer in April 1790, he courted Molly Tilghman (Figure 31), her powerful family scotched the courtship, deciding that Peale was an unsuitable match. (Peale’s previous indebtedness to Molly’s father did not help his prospects.) The family had heard reports unfavorable to Peale, including a rumor, source unknown, that he had married while in London and thus was a bigamist as well as a fraud and probable adulterer. Unwilling to abandon his suit, Peale (pictured in Figure 32 a year later, at age fifty) wrote out a third-person narrative of his life. It is a singular and curious document.12 It opens with the story of Peale’s rejection and humiliation at the hands of the Brewer girls, who berated him as an “Impudent baggage” and told

“The Hygiene of the Self”

•

117

figure 32. Charles Willson Peale, c. 1791. Oil on canvas, 253⁄4 × 201⁄2 in. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington.

him to go around to the back of the house. Peale recounted the episode to Molly and her family, employing the strategy that had worked for him before. Ultimately the Brewers had recognized Peale and admitted him to their household. Peale hoped the Tilghmans, persuaded by his written “proof,” would recognize his worthiness to join their family. He assumed that his transparency would convince them. The narrative that begins with his courtship of Rachel ends with her death. It is a straightforward empirical account that expresses little emotion, offers no romantic flourishes, and makes no attempt to argue Peale’s case by summing up his character and personal attributes for his skeptical audience. Although Peale underscores the Tilghman family’s aid to him as a young artisan, he neither makes light of his early financial setbacks nor draws attention to his laudable service in the American Revolution or his success as a portraitist; he never mentions his income. The tone throughout is detached. Written into a five-by-threeinch notebook (Figure 33), the fragment’s crowded script ranges from serviceable to barely readable. There is no evidence that Peale wrote a fair copy for the Tilghmans to read.13 The Tilghmans, presented with Peale’s testimony, ignored it. James Tilghman refused to read it. Richard Tilghman was shown the manuscript but made no comment. But even if this audience failed to respond to what

118

•

Part II

figure 33. Page, autobiographical fragment, 1790. American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia.

Peale wrote, I would argue that the narrative succeeded with another: Peale himself. Rachel’s death had taken from him the supportive structure of family life. Personally adrift, he sought to regain it by quickly finding a new wife. The Tilghmans’ rejection placed him low in the pecking order of the Eastern Shore. When that family questioned his honor and word and brushed aside his reassurances, they in effect denied his significance as an individual. The charge of bigamy would have struck Peale with special force because a similar rumor had circulated about his father. Charles Willson Peale seemed again to repeat his father’s failings.14 In the midst of this crisis, Peale took “20 Drops of Laudanum, yet this did not make me sleep. I went to bed at 9 O clock and awaked at 11 and scarcely closed my Eyes the whole night afterwards.” Peale reports using narcotics only at times of extreme physical and emotional distress.15 After this agitated night and during the fruitless negotiations with the Tilghmans that followed, Peale wrote his autobiographical fragment, recapitulating his life, as an anodyne, to reestablish his sense of worthiness. The act of writ-

“The Hygiene of the Self”

•

119

ing reaffirmed his identity. The busyness of his hands pulled him out of despair, and recording his life helped him to get on with it. Peale’s self-control and self-presentation can be documented in his several writings on the Tilghman courtship. Peale recorded in his diary the daily back-and-forth of negotiations. He began the courtship with his characteristic impatience: “In my situation I think it necessary to make what speed I can to know what I may expect from this lady.” But in his haste he overreached. After beginning his suit, he discovered from John Beale Bordley that “the family was proud and always was opposed to any marriage from out of their family.” On hearing this, Peale must have realized that his attempt to penetrate the closed circle of the Eastern Shore aristocracy would be futile, but he could not or would not withdraw his suit, although he did make inquiries about other prospective brides and immersed himself in work and activity as a way of getting past his disappointment.16 Yet his attraction to Molly lingered. When Peale dreamed one night that Richard Tilghman “was not averse to my having his Sister,” he resumed communication with Molly and her family. It was then that the Tilghmans laid “a charge against [Peale’s] character”—that he had married in London. Peale’s diary provides his only explanation: that he had delivered mail from Philadelphia to a woman in London who had made advances to him. Subsequently a garbled account of that episode, reporting the success of her seduction, reached Philadelphia. Peale alleged that the woman had had many lovers (and more than one illegitimate child) and claimed that the Tilghmans had tainted him with her bad reputation. But his explanation is hard to follow because large sections of this page of the diary have been erased.17 The erasure indicates Peale’s desire to expunge this episode from the record. Peale subsequently deleted the incident from the autobiographical fragment and the autobiography itself. In the fragment, Peale addressed the charge of bigamy in a roundabout way. He described his stay in England as all work: “the amusements of London did not make him loose much of his time, he went to only 7 plays in the whole of his stay in that City. . . . [W]ithin a very few exceptions these were the whole of his wanderings from close study.” Unable to disprove the accusation, Peale wrote that he had neither the time nor the inclination to engage in dissolute activities. He repeated this basic response, adding further details, in the London section of his complete autobiography.The Tilghman courtship itself never appears in that narrative, however. There Peale reduced a complex narrative to bland summary: “His next business was to paint the Portraits of Major Tilghman Miss Mary Tilghman & her niece Miss Tilghman the daughter of Mr. Richd. Tilghman

120

•

Part II

of Chester town. This was [the] work of some [days].” These terse statements conclude the section of the autobiography for fall 1790. Peale picked up his story again only in May 1791. He had written in the diary after his initial rejection by the Tilghmans, “I took my leave of him but was so much conflicted in my feeling that I could not speak. My suffering in this occasion was greater than ever I felt in all the transactions of my life.” Peale elaborated his momentary speechlessness at the time of the event into a complete silence in writing the autobiography. The blank page and the eightmonth break in Peale’s narrative ultimately obliterated the event for him more effectively than a dose of laudanum.18 In his autobiography, Peale drew a curtain of silence over other issues as well. He made a point of excluding the details of his family life. Peale’s letters reveal that he loathed his son-in-law Alexander Robinson (the feeling was mutual ); he made only bare, polite mention of the man in the autobiography. Similarly, he never discussed there his son Benjamin Franklin Peale’s first marriage, its annulment, and his former daughter-in-law’s confinement to an asylum. Closer to home, Peale recorded only a brief obituary of his son Raphaelle, suppressing their contentious history. Peale’s strategy was to omit from the autobiography any mention of difficult issues, events, or individuals. (I have already noted that Peale’s father seldom appears in any of Peale’s writings.)19 Peale disguised the selectivity of his revelations with volubility. By writing about what his hands were ceaselessly doing, he led his biographers, and even some of his contemporaries, to see him as credulous, sanguine, and childlike in his response to the world. Peale’s essential passivity, his benign acceptance of events, is the thesis of many early scholarly writings. To see him thus, however, misreads his ceaseless activity and misses his penetrating insight into his own character. In one of his few revelations about himself, Peale wrote his daughter Angelica, “I have a colorick disposition and therefore I am obliged to keep a bridle constantly tight-reined to stay my tongue and hands from mauling everyone that approaches me.” Peale acknowledged a violent natural disposition. To govern it, he had to keep his hands continually occupied lest he inflict harm on those around him.20 Peale knew that to succeed (or even function) in early America he had to control and mask his will. He would use the energy produced by suppressing the rage within him to shape and socialize the countenance he presented to the world. He had to forge—to make and, if need be, to counterfeit—both his appearance and his character. He wrote in his published Essay to Promote Domestic Happiness that “[a] cheerful manner, a look of attention, at times put on perforce enables the party at least to continue in a mood not

“The Hygiene of the Self”

•

121

less salutary to the one than necessary for the other. . . . This cheerful manner, this habit of attention, communicates its sweet contagion. This was the conduct of the sage Franklin, much of whose good sense is displayed in his ‘Way to Wealth.’” Both Franklin and Peale were aware that appearance and behavior not only reflected character but actually became character and personality. When Peale rebuked Raphaelle for the lax and feckless way he pursued his career and headed his family, he told his son to “act the Man.” The theatrical allusion was not misplaced: continually acting a role would transform one’s character, matching it to one’s appearance. Or rather, and as important, observers would take appearance for character. Peale “never loved the characters of witty Persons,” not just because “Witt” could inflict hurt, but also because cutting aperçus could lay bare character and motivation. Wit surprised. Peale wanted no surprises.21 In support of his effort to keep busy, Peale simplified the relationship between the outer and the inner man, both practically and philosophically. By the end of the 1790s, Peale had given up alcohol and adopted an abstemious diet. He did not smoke. He exercised regularly and vigorously. His commitment to his body was part of the great revolution in mores during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Peale advocated regular habits that reflected the bourgeois virtues of order, regularity, and discipline, virtues essential for the smooth functioning of a modern capitalist economy. Bodily health was associated with the health of the body politic, and both were associated with a skeptical rather than a blindly obedient attitude toward authority, tradition, precedent, and received opinion: “To combat fashion; to disregard opinions founded on error, when sanctioned by persons in high stations; by the learned; aged; and by those possessing our esteem, requires great energy of mind. . . . Can the struggle be too great for this end?” The pursuit of good health—defined as the state of nature intended by the Creator—kept at bay the destructive elements of untrammeled individualism.22 Peale assigned the family an important role in socializing individuals. But he also extolled the family because marriage regulated the sex drive. Though Peale disdained false modesty, he did not write directly about sex in any of his publications on health or marriage and the family; he mentioned, in a preview of modern attitudes toward sex education, that he feared writing about sex might encourage early exploration by the unmarried. But in a letter to Dr. Caspar Wistar he wrote of his own sexual activity as a medical and mechanical matter. Suffering from a “hydrocele,” a swelling of the scrotum thought to be caused by a buildup of fluids when sexual activity did not occur regularly, Peale hoped to interest Wistar in his treatment: he applied ice (“Six times yesterday and twice last night”) to his scrotum to reduce the

122

•

Part II

pain (and lessen desire?). He wrote of masturbation as a surrogate or substitute for sexual intercourse: “The practice of onism is too frequently a great distraction of the constitutions of Youth,” yet an adult, unmarried man could resort to it in order to maintain the body’s balance, since “an accumulation of the serum, if not discharged produces at times such a tention of the spermatic cord as to cause extreme pain.” As with his dietary strictures, Peale believed the body’s sexual appetite had to be regulated and kept in balance— a balance that could be achieved only in the socializing structure of bourgeois marriage: “Cohabitation with women without the sanction of Law & where customs forbid it, ought to [be] avoided by every prudent man & those who reguard the reputation of their family.” But regular sexual relations in marriage were the foundation for sentiment, custom, and the law.23 I have already explored the importance of marriage for Peale. In all, he had three wives, marrying, at the ages of twenty-one, fifty, and sixty-four, women who were eighteen, twenty-six, and fifty; none had previously been married. The marriages lasted, respectively, twenty-eight, fourteen, and sixteen years and produced seventeen children: twelve from the first marriage and five from the second; the third was childless. Peale would have had more children by his first wife, Rachel Brewer Peale, had he not been absent from home for nearly four years (in Virginia and London) and away for significant periods during the Revolution. Four of his children with her and one of his children with Elizabeth DePeyster died in infancy; there are no genealogical records and only occasional written traces of pregnancies that did not come to term. The rates of both live births and infant deaths were slightly above the norm for premodern American families. (White women during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had an average of seven children.)24 In the period between the death of Elizabeth and his marriage to Hannah Moore (February 1804 to August 1805), Peale complained, “My [sexual] feeling’s I can assure you is great for a man of 63&4—It is a misfortune to me to be a Widower.” Peale’s habit of precipitous courtship meant that he never remained a widower long: the two gaps between his marriages were twenty and nineteen months respectively. Only in the final six years of his life did Peale spend significant time alone, and, “Long habituated to pay attentions to a bosom friend, I now feel as is commonly said, like a fish out of water.” Peale died at age eighty-six, in part from overexerting himself in bad weather after a trip to New York to court a prospective fourth wife; she turned him down, having “determined to live single.”25 Care of one’s health, for Peale, meant the care and feeding of the bodily “machine.” His metaphor, which reflected the shift in the economy from

“The Hygiene of the Self”

•

123

handiwork to machine production, defused the dangers of individualism by making the body, not a site of individual will, but an automatic mechanism. The body as machine required only proper maintenance to reclaim the state of nature before man’s fall (brought about by uncontrollable appetites). There is virtually no appreciation of sensual pleasure in Peale’s writing, which, as I have mentioned, represented the sex act as medicinal and mechanical. So, too, eating and drinking. Peale, by conceiving of the body as a machine, could focus on maintaining the system by temperance, moderation, and the avoidance of all stimulants. The regimen of self-control that sustained the body also disciplined the mind, helping Peale to avoid the anger and willfulness that, if unchecked, he feared could destroy him. Peale, in his Epistle to a Friend on Preserving Health, implicitly links health to the maintenance of physical equilibrium; the body, like a flywheel or gears, must not be thrown off kilter, or the resultant friction will prematurely wear it down. For the individual, the consequences of mistreating the machine are painful both in life and death: “What is the cause of those violent struggles in death, but a premature exit, hastened by an improper mode of living? Whereas by a prudent conduct, they might have lived so long, as insensibly to wear out the machine, and then depart quietly, without a pang?” But the consequences of improper maintenance are not just physical. Neglecting the “machine” has dire consequences for the individual’s reasoning powers: “So intimately are the powers of the mind connected with the strength of the constitution, that the body cannot be deranged without weakening the mental powers [emphasis in original].” Or as Peale wrote dramatically in the preface to his Epistle: “The preservation of health is so very important, that we might suppose that no well-disposed person could be led into any kind of excess or intemperance, knowing the natural consequences to be not only debility of the body but also of the mind. Wantonly to destroy our intellects (the only superior quality we possess above the brute creation,) is a crime, perhaps of a blacker dye than even suicide.”26 A correct diet was essential for proper bodily and hence mental health. Peale focuses on what foods to avoid. Disdaining spices, which he recommends “be dispensed with, or used very sparingly,” and pickles, “not the least of useless articles that garnish our tables,” Peale counsels that “every thing should be preferred which best contributes to strengthen the system; the food should be simple; avoiding every stimulant to create an appetite; more especially such as are of an indigestible nature; since they only create a false appetite.” Peale’s special bête noire was alcohol, which he condemned for its double “surcharge,” on body and mind. Although he liked the taste of wine, he refused to imbibe. (He called water “Adam’s ale.”) Alcohol for

124

•

Part II

figure 34. Thomas Jefferson, 1791–92. Oil on canvas, 24 × 20 in. Independence National Historical Park Collection, Philadelphia.

Peale was neither an aesthetic choice, as it was for his friend Jefferson (Figure 34), with his love of fine wine, nor a staple, as it was for many early modern laborers. Alcohol consumption was extremely high in America until the 1820s, and Peale’s stance against spirits made him a forerunner of nineteenth-century temperance reformers. Peale believed that avoiding alcohol and practicing moderation in dining could gradually restore to health even the worst reprobate.27 Peale was especially concerned about digestion and evacuation. Just as regular sexual discharge was necessary for bodily and social health, so was the digestive flow. Peale advocated steaming or boiling food to make it soft and digestible; fruit was to be eaten only at its ripest. Water was to lubricate the passage of food through the body. Peale cautioned his readers to chew thoroughly and carefully and to drink water as they ate so that they would eat less, obtain more nourishment from what they did eat, and digest more completely. Throughout his life he was interested in dentistry and dentures for mechanical, not aesthetic, reasons: food could not be digested if one had no teeth to chew it.28 Despite all dietary precautions, the body would inevitably become deranged from time to time. To normalize the body’s functioning would then require extraordinary means. Peale was not a believer in the “heroic” med-

“The Hygiene of the Self”

•

125

icine advanced by Benjamin Rush, massive invasions of the body with drugs and a scalpel. Rush as a physician believed in imposing himself on the body (he advocated copious bloodletting);29 Peale believed that the individual, by internalizing values of health and morals, could train his internal organs. He preferred cures that unobtrusively restored the body’s smooth-running, natural equilibrium. Peale acquired his medical knowledge pragmatically. He supplemented his own experience by reading texts from different schools of classical and early modern medicine. He accepted some of the humoral theory of the body and temperament. To assist the natural processes and restore the balance of bodily fluids, he advocated sweat baths and enemas; he also accepted a limited recourse to bleeding and cupping, a procedure whereby the skin was lacerated and a vacuum cup applied to draw out the blood from the affected area. He recommended bodily cleanliness and clean clothing at a time when washing was at best erratic. But internal cleanliness preoccupied him most. Given the time and difficulty of drawing water for a hot bath, Peale followed the example of Dr. Joseph Priestley in adopting the “vapour bath,” a steam bath that used only a small amount of boiling water and a box with an oilcloth hood in which the patient sweated out his illness; the artificially generated sweat of the vapor bath was the equivalent of the natural perspiration created by work.30 Peale, associating disease with a physical blockage, advocated enemas when the vapor bath alone was unsuccessful; at times he seems to have thought of enemas almost as a universal cure, reestablishing hydraulic health when sweating did not suffice. Peale brushed aside any reticence to discuss or use enemas, since “[i]t is a ridiculous and foolish modesty which can blush at the mention of a remedy of such important use. Is there any means yet discovered which can so speedily give relief, and not derange the stomach as a Glyster [clyster, or enema]? Can any one know its use and call it nasty? In fact, it is the most ready and effectual means to cleanse away filth.” To flush a system “severely bound up,” Peale prescribed the repeated use of enemas made of natural substances in solution; flaxseed was a favorite. His hydraulic flushing, which at least did no harm for most minor ailments, also did nothing to alleviate serious illnesses, like yellow fever. Peale claimed to know of successful cures of the fever using flaxseed injections. He noted that he had cured his own son of yellow fever in 1798, failing to add that the son had died soon thereafter. Peale nevertheless maintained his faith in bodily flushing as a cure-all. In his final illness, he found temporary relief with “a powerful glister of salts.”31

126

•

Part II

Peale used purgatives as both cures and prophylactics to ensure that his system was always in good order. If the system became clogged, the accumulated residue in the pores and bowels would putrefy, infecting the blood and ultimately the whole body. James C. Whorton, in Inner Hygiene, summarizes the eighteenth-century understanding of the digestive system: “The first passages [of the intestine], then, constituted a physiological highway from mouth to anus that, in a state of constipation, was transformed into a pathological cul de sac (a ‘sewer,’ Lieutaud called it) from which the depraved remains of concoction could pass into the arterials of the blood vessels and overrun the system.” Many of Peale’s strictures on a proper diet were based on watching how various foodstuffs discolored or corroded cooking and serving vessels if they were allowed to steep without regular cleaning. (The reverse was also true: care needed to be taken so that food was not corrupted by the pots and pans in which it was kept and cooked.) Since even the best food left its traces, Peale’s purgatives scoured the system clean.32 Bodily health for Peale and other reformers was not just a matter of personal hygiene; approaches to it reflected and supported political and economic ideas in the larger culture. Thus the fixation on constipation, its consequences, and its cure was only one aspect of an obsession with inculcating regularity of habits and conduct as a bourgeois virtue. But the focus on constipation revealed a struggle for self-definition as individuals like Peale tried to attain it. For one thing, the eradication of impurities in the body was a struggle: organs had to be made to function smoothly. Peale, as an Enlightenment optimist, was confident that by the exercise of reason and its instruments an individual could reestablish natural equilibrium. But to prevent the onset and spread of corruption required ceaseless hard work.33 Peale’s fear that the corruption of internal organs would seep out through the skin, collapsing the whole bodily edifice, touches on primal fears about identity in the modernizing economy. Bodily pollutants threatened the individual’s moral and intellectual fitness. As identities became fluid, changeable, and indeterminate, it was incumbent on each individual to ensure that his or her personality was of a piece and that motivations were transparent. To remain upright, both physically and morally, men and women had to engage in continual self-policing and self-regulation. The control of the body through temperance, dietary regimens, and rules of good posture would eventually become habitual. Peale’s purgatives, however, signaled a fear that the conscious mind could do and control only so much. Appearances were fragile, and great individual effort was needed to maintain them. The “natural” body had to be tamed so that neither body nor mind would

“The Hygiene of the Self”

•

127

weaken. After linking the strength of the mind to that of the body (see p. 123), Peale goes on to note that “a complacency of mind contributes much to the health of the body; nay, the mind has such an amazing influence on the external form, that even the fashion of our faces are determined by our passions.” Such belief in the unity of mind and body constituted the ideal— but one that could always break down in practice if vigilance faltered and the practice of proper habits slackened. Because for Peale a person’s appearance affected mental and bodily health, he prescribed proper methods of walking, sitting, and lying down. In walking, he wrote, “we ought to hold ourselves upright; keeping the shoulders back, and the breast forward, so as to give the lungs room to play, and all the vital parts free action.” When the body is at rest, moreover, people who sit correctly “will find to their astonishment, not only ability of body, but even their mind enlarged; their thinking faculties will have liberty for improvement.” If an upright posture supported mental and physical health, so did emotional equanimity support the body: “Serenity of mind goes a great way to overcome casual disease; therefore, the effect of good actions amply reward men independent of other duties.” Peale’s strictures on bodily and political health held a desire for openness in tension with the need for order. Order was maintained more easily in correct posture than in the operations of the organs. Most problematical was the contest between order and openness in the mind because the liberating potential of openness always threatened license or anarchy. What was ineffectively controlled could always fly completely out of control—recall that Peale feared his own loss of discipline might lead him to “maul” another. Physiologically, purging, like bloodletting, acted as a sedative, slowing and calming the system, making it less susceptible to choler. Lionel Trilling caught the irony of the self-denial needed for the individual to flourish when he wrote that “the self may destroy the self by the very energies that define its being. . . . Much of the nineteenth-century preoccupation with law was not a love of law for its own sake, but rather a concern with the hygiene of the self.” To reach its full bourgeois potential, the natural body had to be denied.34 For Peale, the ultimate purgative was work, and Peale’s self-denying ordinances were directed at enhancing work. A program of self-hygiene was to make the individual independent of anything or anyone that blocked autonomy, activity, and improvement. Peale intended his Epistle on Health, through its “strong, yet simple language, drawn from facts,” to help his friends to be “led to the manly resolution of governing their conduct by reason, and to act independent of fashion or custom.” “Fashion,” with its ephemerality and its dependence on the opinions of others, continually

128

•

Part II

threatened autonomy. Entertainments, “often too ostentatious, therefore expensive,” were also corrupting since “[w]ith weak minds, fashion has too fascinating charms.” Peale advised that “neither fashion, custom, nor temptation, however pleasing to the taste, should induce us to an improper indulgence.” Individuals could shore up their strength of mind with continual work. Peale exclaimed, “[W]hat a blessing it is to be obliged to labour for our living.”35 In 1821 Peale fell from a ladder while working on his large painting Our Saviour Healing the Sick at the Pool of Bethesda (unlocated). Stretching to reach the top of the canvas, he lost his balance, hitting a wooden stool as he fell and severely bruising his side and arm. He first treated himself with a vapor bath and a massage of vinegar and alcohol. Still hurting the next day, he decided that he needed to be bled but was unable to find anyone with leeches either in the country or back in Philadelphia, “the severity of the Winter in a great measure [having] destroyed them.” He therefore had himself “cupped.” Although Peale “found benefit from the cupping, yet too little blood was drawn off” to improve his condition. Thereupon “I determined to take salts, live on light food &c.” Peale’s wife had to dress and undress him, and whenever he “laughed, sneezed, or blowed my nose hard, the pain was very severe, like cutting my heart.” Yet throughout Peale continued to work on the big painting, but not while standing on a ladder. Instead, his wife moved the canvas so he could paint while sitting still. He credited his recovery, after all his purging, to working through the pain so that he “suffered less while imployed than while Idle. This is therefore a striking instance how much people suffer from an Idle habbit, and I hold it as a divine favour that we are required to gain our support by the sweat of the brow, and I do solemnly aver that no man can enjoy happiness without he practices some useful imployment, and manual Labour is most condusive to health. [T]herefore those who do not exercise their hands as well as their mind, find trouble from the most triffling occurances.” Work cured the body and cleansed the mind, leaving it free to enjoy a dreamless or nightmareless sleep. After a heavy bout of labor, Peale sermonized, “There is no true happiness without having imployment. The Idle suffer more than those who work at hard labour!” Peale made the Deistic defense of work explicit when he wrote that “Divine wisdom has assuredly decree’d that we should labor for our support, as we cannot, without exertions of the body & the mind, either obtain health or hope for happiness.”36 Work was good for both mental and physical health, but Peale also gave a class dimension to his paeans to labor. After curing himself of rheuma-

“The Hygiene of the Self”

•

129

tism by working hard, he concluded that “if I was rich and not obliged to work, and to indulge without working, in all probability I should have to suffer for at least six months before getting clear of this Rhumatic complaint!” Peale based his defense of labor on the need to maintain autonomy. As I have noted, he had indicted southerners for having others do their work for them. Peale stressed the medical benefits of labor in his version of the labor theory of value to avoid raising class issues directly. Peale linked debt in the body politic to his theory of health when he portrayed debt as the ultimate blockage of autonomy. Debt seduced the unwary, the weak, and the greedy; Peale’s own indebtedness was that of an innocent youth manipulated by a wily older exploiter. The debtor, like the tippler, the glutton, and the libertine, alienated and weakened his authority when he gave in to temptation. Debt violated the rule of frugality, and living beyond one’s means led to a downward spiral to poverty. In making money the basis of relationships, debt violated the natural sympathy that should exist between people. As personal relationships became exchange relationships, neither trust nor transparency could be taken for granted: “if [the indebted merchant’s friends] happen to be suspicious that all is not secure, of course they form excuses—then the Merchant learns that the dependance on friends, is like leaning on a weak staff.” Further, as Peale lectured his daughter Angelica, “Wealth to provide for our necessary wants, is good, but it is very often a curse to those who possess it. Good employment, that makes the body healthy and the mind chearful is realy more valueable than Millions.” He rehearsed the cliché that money could not buy happiness partly out of resentment—here he was making a thinly veiled attack on Alexander Robinson, Angelica’s husband, a wealthy merchant and landowner who had disparaged Peale as a “showman”—but also from a sincere belief in the primacy of work over capital.37 Though Peale considered the debtor complicit in his own downfall, he called those who made their living on capital instead of productive labor parasites. They obstructed the natural operation of the economy by offering easy money to those seeking to avoid work. Loan brokers were “leeches,” according to Peale, who used the word here in its late-eighteenth-century pejorative sense rather than its medicinal sense. Loans, and the resulting defaults and foreclosures, were a form of theft, as “the lender of the money knows that the person that borrows cannot repay the loan, and after a time he is pressed for payment, and not complying, the property is forfeited, can this be a pleasant gain?” Peale’s vehemence against creditors was strong in part because he was never entirely free of debt and financial worry. In 1814,

130

•

Part II

unable to run his farm profitably, Peale borrowed against his crops. He lamented the burden of the debt, writing, “I have sometimes almost determined to let it [the farm] go into ruin rather than to pay so dear for its support, and then to try and work it myself.” Although he could give up alcohol, he could not give up cash. Peale, enmeshed in a commercial economy, was unable to follow his own advice: “I still look forward for the time when I may make my aluction [election] of exercising labour.” Using the vocabulary of Calvinism, Peale acknowledged that when it came to work, he was a sinner whose impurities needed purging.38 Underlying all his self-policing—his commitment to the “hygiene of the self”—was not just his determination to maintain his individuality but his fear that others in society might not be what they appeared: a seemingly open and honest countenance might hide a Benedict Arnold, a forger, or a “Turd.” Johann Kaspar Lavater’s theory of personality and physiognomy helped to assuage Peale’s fears about character. That theory, a precursor of phrenology, was a scientific, or at least rationalist, attempt to relate physical features to personal characteristics. It held out the promise of certainty about individuals in a society whose dominant theologies, reform Protestantism and Deism, made the individual responsible for his salvation. Physiognomy for Peale was predictive but not deterministic, at least in practice. If “the fashion of our faces are determined by our passions,” the converse also held true: by controlling the expression of our faces, we can shape (or reshape) our passions. Peale posited a reciprocal relationship between body and character, so that bland food led to a bland countenance, sympathy for others calmed the inner organs, and an upright carriage freed the lungs, allowing the body to perform at optimal capacity while also indicating an upstanding individual.39 Peale followed his self-denying regimen to still his own antisocial tendencies (his “colorick” disposition) and accept the order of things with equanimity. This regimen replaced the opiates with which he dosed himself at moments of crisis. Having found a way to meet his inner needs, he also needed a way to regularize or rationalize his encounters with others in his daily life. To do that, he had to have a way to read their character. Peale became an adherent of the “science” of physiognomy because it seemed to offer an empirical means to such an assessment. But even if he shared the Enlightenment’s confidence that the world could be wholly known and comprehended, he was also prey to its pervasive anxiety, that a society of atomistic individuals would collapse, individually and collectively, into anarchy. Physiognomy, which decoded signs of character in the face, features, and body, bridged the gap between the individual and others. It ensured a

“The Hygiene of the Self”

•

131

smooth-functioning body politic by providing a constant sense of identity. At least that was its promise. As Peale’s own case shows, however, the body politic could function only if citizens continually scrutinized themselves, eradicating any signs of physical and moral weakness and presenting to others a self kept under control.40

part iii

“It Would Seem a Second Creation”

~ Having subsumed himself to his patrons and having hidden his role in the construction of his museum, Peale late in life steps from behind the curtain of his own making to reveal himself in a remarkable series of self-portraits. But in revealing himself he conceals as much as he reveals, concerned to the last with the construction of the image of himself he presents to the public and to history.

chapter 7

The Struggle against Dispersal Work, Family, and Order in Peale’s Family Portraits

~ Peale had to work hard to create an individual identity that could thrive in the larger context of a democratic republic. Public institutions, such as his museum, helped by harmonizing individuals in a noncoercive, naturalized model of enlightened society. In private life the key institution for him was the family. In natural history Peale found an organizing model for humans in the larger social context. He became fascinated by the efforts of animals to reproduce their species and to work collectively. Noting the ability of insects to accomplish prodigious work relative to their minute size, Peale drew a point about work and family: At the first view I dare say you feel almost inclined to pity the little animals doomed to exertions apparently so disproportioned to their size. You are ready to exclaim that the pains of so short an existence, engrossed with such arduous and incessant toil, must outweigh the pleasures. Yet the inference would be altogether erroneous. What strikes us as wearisome toil, is to these little agents a delightful occupation. The kind author of their being has associated the performance of an essential duty to feelings evidently of the most pleasurable description: and like the affectionate father whose love for his children, sweetens the most painful labours, these little insects are never more happy than when thus actively engaged.

Writing about birds, he made the point more precisely: “the variety of expedients to propogate and protect their species are wonderful, & the affection of the feathered tribe for their young, truely great and pleasing.” 135

136

•

Part III

Natural history led him to state of mankind’s duty: “The more we see and know of these things, the greater and more energetic ought to be our exertions to render ourselves worthy of our station here.” The political economy of the animal kingdom, which formed an interlocking, complex whole, offered humans an exemplary lesson: to work harder so as to be better. The natural world, in short, confirmed the relation between the “Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism.” Peale’s pantheism, his utopian perfectionism (at times Peale’s writing on God sounds a little like that of William Blake in a benign mood), mitigated the implicit conflict, which would widen during the industrial nineteenth century, between egoism and society or between omnivorous appetite and order.1 Social critics such as Jürgen Habermas and Christopher Lasch have argued that the privatizing of the family was a concomitant of the bourgeois revolution, as both an economic site for private enterprise and a sphere, separate from public life, in which “common humanity” defined relationships. For Peale, the economic and emotional functions of the family were interdependent: creative labor tied the family to persons outside it, helping to perpetuate the economic system, while the family itself preserved the realm of sentiment. In the family children were socialized to become productive and happy adults. Peale’s own family was the setting where he imparted his hard-earned lessons about the hygiene of the self.2 Peale’s paintings of family groups combine the realms of worldly, domestic, and familial success, representing the family as the center of society. When John Cadwalader of Philadelphia lovingly hands his daughter a peach (see Figure 4), he demonstrates his affection for her and also indicates how an agricultural product creates the basis for both that affection and other sentiments. As Charles Coleman Sellers reads the scene, Cadwalader the farmer has come in from his orchard bearing a single piece of fruit.3 Though he and his extended family had estates in Maryland, Cadwalader was an urbane Philadelphian, and Peale painted him in the city, not at one of his properties on the Eastern Shore. Peale represents the peach, a product of the land sold at urban markets, as the sign of Cadwalader’s wealth, borne out in the richness of his and his family’s attire. The fruit lets him make a gesture of love that binds his family together with ties of sentiment. That loving gesture of connection softens the effect of Cadwalader’s patriarchal pose, as he looms over his subordinate family. Cadwalader’s pose is unusual in Peale family groups. Peale espoused the new model of marriage that was based on love and mutuality of interests, if not absolute equality, of husband and wife. He usually places family members on the same plane in these portraits: see, for instance, The Goldsbor-

The Struggle against Dispersal

•

137

figure 35. The Goldsborough Family, 1789. Oil on canvas, 403⁄4 × 63 in. Private collection.

ough Family (Figure 35). In The Elie Valette Family husband and wife are on the same plane even as Peale suggests their separate roles: the son stands, like a miniature image of the father, while the daughter and wife/mother sit together facing the males. Even children occupy the same plane as their parents, especially their fathers, and thus are not distanced from them except by their smaller size. In Thomas McKean and His Son (Figure 36) the pair are set on the same level, and while the father may be instructing the son, they are connected by the sheaf of papers the father holds, which overlaps his son’s book. Moreover, the official-looking papers scattered around the desk indicate McKean’s public life as chief justice of Pennsylvania. The painting does not divide private sentiment from the father’s public role. The literary artifacts, official and not, create the conditions that allow sentiment to develop and prosper, just as the legal code permitted economic transactions and thereby exchanges of affection to occur between father and son. Peale, unlike novelists Sterne and Fielding, who foretold a future in which exchange would corrupt feelings, created the foundation for a rich emotional life in the family and in all of human society.4 These interconnections can be found throughout Peale’s family portraits, but his only portrait of the Peale family best articulates his ideal vision of family life (Figure 37). It shows Peale amid his extended family, including

138

•

Part III

figure 36. Thomas McKean and His Son, 1787. Oil on canvas, 505⁄8 × 411⁄8 in. Philadelphia Museum of Art: Bequest of Phebe Warren McKean Downs.

a servant, Peggy Durgan, who stands slightly to the right, in but not of the biological family. John Adams articulated the immediate message of the picture when he wrote of his famous visit to Peale’s studio in August 1776: “There was a pleasant, a happy cheerfulness, in their countenances, and a familiarity in their air towards each other.” Underneath its “pleasant” surface, the painting’s true subject is the controlling hand of Charles Willson Peale. He both idealizes and reconstitutes the family, himself taking the place of his absent father. The family is united by sentiment, though its functional parts are divided. At the left are Peale and his two brothers, whom he is teaching to draw. (Art and its commissions permitted the family to prosper financially and thereby emotionally.) Peale subsumes himself within the group and the portrait by placing himself on roughly the same horizontal plane as his brothers and depicting himself with a modestly lowered head, yet his superior place is confirmed by the palette and brushes in his right hand and his overseeing of his brothers’ work. He has turned from his easel to check on St. George’s progress in drawing a head. James Peale smiles like one who knows the mysteries of the art and recognizes a fellow initiate.5 As in other Peale portraits, the exchange of paper represents economic and emotional exchange. Mary Jane Peale, Charles Willson’s sister, holds a drawing she has received from one of her brothers and literally leans on

The Struggle against Dispersal

•

139

figure 37. The Peale Family, 1773, 1809. Oil on canvas, 56 1⁄2 × 891⁄2 in., acc. no.1867.298. The New-York Historical Society, New York City.

Peale for support. Art would maintain and support the family, even help it to prosper. James passes a folded sheet to one of his two nieces, who will understand the lesson of exchange once they reach adult consciousness. While the men work at the material reproduction of the family, the women tend to its natural reproduction. The bowl of fruit—Peale painted still life only as a part of a portrait, never as a distinct genre—testifies to the family’s fecundity. The fruit “peels” on the table are a punning signature that also indicates the grounding of family relationships in nature. Nature is represented at the bottom of the picture, in both the fruit and the dog, while art and learning are at the top, depicted in the (apparently) classical busts and an unidentifiable painting over the shelf or mantel to the right. These visual references to classical learning connect Peale, an artist in a society that disparaged art, with antique authority. The painting, from bottom to top, represents a hierarchy from nature, family, and economy to the arts and society. But the busts on the shelf overlooking the contemporary scene, ostensibly classical figures, are, as a closer examination of their labels reveals (from left to right), Benjamin West, Peale himself, and his patron Edmund Jenings. Peale refers not to classical exemplars, but to his own history. The sculptural busts heroicize him, his teacher, and his patron. But they also represent the past that Peale rejected after the failure of the Pitt por-

140

•

Part III

trait, commissioned by Jenings. The vibrant picture of Peale with his easel symbolizes his control over his own life. Audaciously, he created a monument to himself as his own precedent.6 The painting that Peale is painting within The Peale Family is dimly visible; Lance Humphries has deciphered its subject as a clothed version of the usually nude sisters called the Three Graces in Roman mythology and the Three Charities in Greek. The sisters, daughters of Zeus and Hera, embodied grace and dispensed the beauties of nature, including its representation in works of art. The painting alludes to Peale as the spiritual descendant of the Graces, continuing their duties in America. If the Graces fulfilled social and cultural duties by bestowing nature’s bounties, other mythological trios of sisters suggest additional layers of meaning for both the painting on the easel and The Peale Family itself—the Horae, for example, who began as vegetation goddesses and then became divine representations of the seasons (their number was expanded to four with the recognition of autumn by the Romans). Eventually, the division of their labor led to their reign over the units of time: Horae = hour, heure, ora. The Horae, as Freud writes, “became the guardians of natural law and the divine Order which causes the same thing to recur in Nature as in unalterable sequence.” While the Horae govern nature, the Morae (or Fates), a complementary trio, govern human life and death according to laws derived from nature; they enforce linear time while the Horae guide circular time. Peale, who made the painting on the easel, is emphasizing his control of time and nature in representing natural time, human time, and benevolent human society. His gesture in the painting, which can also be read as self-effacing, I have read as a symbol of his control, acknowledging the artist as having created both secular and natural worlds. Peale’s preeminence is also reiterated if we remember that the Horae revolve around the Sun King.7 The Graces, both in subject and as a painting-within-a-painting, complete The Peale Family’s circular movement from nature (the fruit and dog) to nature (the trio on the easel ) and back again in a revivifying cycle transmitted through and by the family. Leon Battista Alberti, in his Treatise on Painting, points out that when the Graces are shown clothed they embody social relations as well as their traditional role as bestowers of gifts. When shown as givers of blessings, they are naked. Alberti wrote that the painter who intertwines the clothed sisters wishes to “signify liberality, for one of the sisters gives, another receives and the third returns the favour, all of which degrees should be present in every act of perfect liberality.” In painting the Graces, Peale reemphasizes the mutuality of his depiction of his family. (Peale never did a stand-alone painting of the Three Graces, so the in-

The Struggle against Dispersal

•

141

clusion of the painting in The Peale Family is not an archival reference.) Like the three intertwining Graces, members of the Peale family in the portrait interlock with and reinforce one another. Their intertwined arms and bodies complement the symmetry and order suggested by their oval heads; individual autonomy is framed by familial connection and an implied social role. The artist’s social function is more than decorative. In his work he articulates the ideals of family harmony and economic stability. In Peale’s depiction the family is a well-regulated mechanism with the artist/paterfamilias as both its maker and its regulator. While Peale modestly denied his authority by placing himself as primus inter pares he is still the focal point of the painting and central to the family enterprise.8 It is not certain that Peale knew much about art history. His own writings, except those from his sojourn in London, do not cite, let alone discuss, either writings on art or art itself. But as in The Peale Family and the double portrait of the Lamings, he occasionally hints at greater knowledge than his homespun image would suggest. For instance, on a Renaissance medal that shows the Three Graces, the motto “Concordia” below the figures reiterates the theme of harmony. Peale originally placed the phrase “Concordia Animae” in the foreground of The Peale Family. Although his source is unknown, he must at some point have absorbed Renaissance precedents for coupling the Graces with the word “Concordia.” Peale did not let the motto stand, however, altering classical precedent to his own purposes. Sometime between 1773 and 1809 he painted out the label he now thought redundant and added the subtler visual message conveyed by the painting of the harmonious sisters. Where the motto itself has been he painted a portrait of the family dog Argus, named after the faithful hound of Odysseus, who, unlike the voyager’s household, instantly recognized his master on his return. Putting a dog named Argus into the picture allowed Peale to encircle his family with classical allusions to fidelity, learning, and grace. Moreover, in naming a dog Argus, Peale, as with his children, used a name to create an outcome. Argus, the faithful, vigilant watchdog of mythology, exemplified what Peale wanted to find in nature: loyalty that served mankind both literally and figuratively. For Peale nature was always human society writ small: “The numerous instances of their [dogs’] fidelity, and sagacity, amounts to something more than mere instinct, and surely may be called reason.” Peale went on to enumerate cases in which his dog (possibly Argus himself ) acted both faithfully and sagaciously to protect the Peales and their property.9 Peale added Argus in 1808, at least thirty-five years after he began The Peale Family, making the extraordinary claim that in the repainting he had

142

•

Part III

“made some progress towards finishing it.” It is not known when and why Peale decided that the original painting was unfinished, although he indicated that he had not worked on it in the intervening years. In reworking the painting, he brought it up to date, encapsulating the evolution of his thought and career during the intervening thirty-five years and recording his progress and evolution as an artist, a natural historian, and a man. He worked on the picture at the same time that he retouched and repaired other museum pictures. He pointed out that it might seem that he was preparing for death (he would live for another nineteen years) by tidying up unfinished tasks. But since he was not finishing The Peale Family but altering it, he was, arguably, ensuring the perseverance of his life in his art. In the repainting, he added the palette and brushes in his right hand as well as the work in progress on the easel, confirming his status as an artist while emphasizing the ideas about nature and family he had developed since 1773. Similarly, he added the dog as both a sentimental tribute and an allusion to his belief that animals evidenced (estimable) human qualities. In expunging “Concordia Animae,” moreover, Peale expressed his confidence that the picture needed no verbal cues.10 Into The Peale Family the artist compressed numerous elements of his career at midlife. He also indicated his need to comment, as in his compulsive writing, on his own history to make it tangible, to confirm or validate it for himself and his audience: to realize it. With the changes of 1808, Peale transformed a painting constructed along two stable axes—one ascending from nature to the classicizing busts, the other extending horizontally along the figures—into a dynamic painting of public life. Peale was not just teaching his brothers anymore but demonstrating his power and autonomy over his actual family. The year following his completion of the first version of the painting Peale inaugurated a new naming pattern in his family. The infants shown in The Peale Family are Eleanor and Margaret Van Bordley; both died about 1773 but were alive when Peale started on the work, possibly as early as 1771. Peale’s first four children died in infancy. All were named after family members, including Peale’s mother and his brother James, but not Peale’s father. In 1774, with the birth of his fifth child, the first who would live to maturity, Peale made a dramatic change, naming him Raphaelle. After Raphaelle, he named subsequent sons Rembrandt, Rubens, Titian (two sons), and Vandyke (an infant who died). Daughters were named after the female artists Angelica Kauffmann, Sophonisba Anguiscola, and Rosalba Carriera. When Peale shifted from art to natural history, he named sons Charles Linnaeus and Benjamin Franklin. In the naming pattern Peale referred to and celebrated himself and established aspirations for his children.11

The Struggle against Dispersal

•

143

Walter Benjamin writes that one of the aspects of the collector is “that he takes up the struggle against dispersal.” Peale did this for Americans in his portrait gallery and for nature in his museum. His naming (“classifying”) of his children springs from this same drive to control. Peale would control his family line as he controlled the line of his portraits. The children’s names indicate Peale’s absolute commitment to succeed as an artist and as a public figure. Moreover, they point to Peale’s desire to replicate his family as an economic unit that would ensure his and their continued success. Peale’s intentions in his familial “struggle against dispersal” were dynastic and public. When the first Titian Ramsay died at age eighteen in 1798, his name did not die with him. Instead, following the premodern pattern in which names belonged to the family, the Peales reused his name when they had another son in November 1799. Although those who have written about the Peale family names frequently treat them as simply the good-humored whim of an enthusiastic man, they were rather, the confident self-assertion of a man wholly committed to his own success. A curious feature of Peale’s painting career confirms their self-referential aspect. Peale, who painted eighteen self-portraits, painted only one portrait of each of his sons as a figure separate from the family context. For someone whose paintings and writing celebrated the family in the abstract, Peale spent remarkably little space in his autobiography on his own family. Indeed, wives and children tend to appear only on their death beds and in their obituaries.12 Peale’s control of his children was not limited to naming them. His determination to exercise patriarchal authority over them continued well into their adulthood. The clockwork universe of The Peale Family was predicated on Peale’s dual role as both the painting’s and his family’s creator and regulator; unlike the Deistic God of a clockwork universe, Peale did not step aside from his creation. His exercise of authority caused continual friction as his children tested the limits of their self-assertion and their father’s tolerance of their independence. Sophonisba Peale gives a sense of her father’s intrusions into his children’s lives—from Polonius-like lectures on behavior to attempts to manage their marriages and control the extended family’s finances—in a note to her brother in the summer of 1819, in which she complained about her trouble finding time to write, because “I am Stationed at Bellfield fort commandent C W Peale, Esq[.]” As committed as Peale was to the new methods of teaching and parenting, he never confused that sensibility with license or doubted the necessity for the parent and teacher to be firmly in control of those whom he sought to socialize and educate. The first audience for the figures in his Staircase Group was not necessarily the spectators at the Columbianum but Charles Willson Peale himself. Unseen,

144

•

Part III

he speaks authoritatively to his two sons, so that they stop in their tracks. Sophonisba’s description of him as a military commandant (in would be equally apt to describe him as a penitentiary warden, as we will see) probably exaggerates for effect, but she catches something of Peale’s forbidding aspect as he controlled his children.13 The sons feared their father’s reactions to the point that they avoided telling him about their marriages, each of which threatened the patriarchal household.Their fears were warranted. Peale disapproved of most of his children’s marriages and/or their marriage partners. He had continual trouble with Raphaelle’s wife, Martha McGlathery, and her family. He could not stand Alexander Robinson, Angelica’s husband, although he did his best to be civil. And he described the family of Titian’s prospective bride, Eliza LaForgue, as “bigoted low bred Roman Catholicks.” Only after the wedding was the patriarch presented with a fait accompli, a bride to whom he would have to reconcile himself. To give Peale credit, he came to reconcile himself with Eliza and wrote a tribute to her for her care of him in his old age. This, of course, may have been the point: If each new daughter-in-law threatened Peale’s patriarchal authority over his sons, he was happy when those wives did their familial duty to him or at least did not take his sons away from a family that was always his.14 Peale’s scrutiny of his children’s lives was doubtless occasionally oppressive to them, and they frequently resisted it. But however angry they became, their rebellion was sporadic and short-lived—moreover, they spoke it rather than acted it—and was followed by their return to the father’s orbit. However much they grumbled, the sons relied on their father for support throughout their lives. They acquiesced in his plans for them because Peale found jobs for them through his museums, his art, or his other enterprises. Peale supported Rembrandt on the artist’s two trips to Paris, providing money for travel; arranging for letters of introduction, including one from Jefferson; booking the passage on a government vessel to avoid travel restrictions; and lining up potential sitters for his son. When the trip was over, Charles Willson Peale wrote the thank-you notes to his son’s sitters. Other sons received their father’s aid, though perhaps not to the same extent. Titian Ramsay Peale permitted his father to find places for him on government expeditions, worked in his museums, and became an artistnaturalist whose aesthetic was identical to the elder Peale’s. Rubens Peale was given managerial positions in all the Peale family’s museums. In other words, Peale’s naming strategy, backed by his psychological and material control of his children’s lives, worked. The male children largely took the paths set for them; the daughters, following Peale’s sense of gender appro-

The Struggle against Dispersal

•

145

priateness, married and ran their husbands’ households. The Peale children usually eventually bent to the father’s will, though at what cost to their own ego development cannot be calculated.15 Peale’s control over his family was based on his ability to keep it intact as an economic unit, one in which his sons supported the family’s cultural enterprise in return for money and nonpecuniary rewards. Peale chose his sons’ careers and gave them money. To Rubens, for instance, he gave the job of running the Philadelphia Museum from 1810 to 1820; from the money Rubens earned, he agreed to pay his father $4,000 per annum. Between August 1805 and August 1807 Peale loaned Raphaelle $1,013.18, in sums ranging from $0.50 to $70.00; included was Peale’s payment of $362.01 toward repayment of his son’s debt to William Sansom, from whom Raphaelle had bought property in 1804. And as I have already mentioned, Peale subsidized Rembrandt’s trip to Paris in 1808. He supported Rembrandt by contracting with him to paint portraits of eminent Europeans for the museum, ultimately paying his son $2,200 for twenty-two portraits. At the same time, Peale advanced Rembrandt money for his expenses in France, paying him $500 when he left in April and transferring more during his stay, and supported his wife, Eleanor, and their six children, who had stayed home in Philadelphia, advancing them $449.74 from April to October 1808. This and other money he lent Rembrandt, who, Peale notes, paid off the debt on May 20, 1823. Given Peale’s own experience with debt and his strictures against it, it is ironic that he used his children’s indebtedness to bind them to the patriarchal family and further his ambitions for it. Peale did not charge his children interest, however; it was the circulation of money within the family that tied it together. For instance, Peale, despite his railing against Raphaelle’s fecklessness and irresponsibility in failing to make a living, always supported his eldest son’s family.16 So important was marriage and the family for Peale that, contrary to the historical trend, he wrote: “I am a strong advocate not merely for matrimony, but for early marriage . . . some few years after [husband and wife] arrive at the age of puberty, and when they have acquired a steady habit of thinking.” Because the negative social consequences of failing to find a partner or maintain a happy marriage were so self-evident to him, Peale left them unspoken. Such a failing would bring unhappiness to a woman, leaving her unfulfilled, without a social role. Peale emphasized the gender division of labor in the household. The woman’s role was to maintain the marital relationship and the domestic space of the home: “It is the province of woman to govern small things; but by the aggregation of these, great things are accomplished.” If society could not tolerate the existence of large num-

146

•

Part III

bers of unsocialized young men, it was unthinkable for women not to marry. Peale wrote positively of “the immense influence the women may exercise in the social compact. In fact, amongst civilized nations, their influence governs with almost unlimited sway.” Take away that influence, and the social compact itself would be destroyed.17 By his control over his adult children, Peale attempted to reconcile the traditional economic functions of the premodern family with a developing modern and commercial society. His desire to maintain control limited his sons’ assertion of individuality, but Peale himself considered that the emotional connections of the family would override any feelings of economic or personal exploitation; they would also compensate for the bruised egos resulting from the subordination of the individual to the biological group. The point was that society had to be based on the family, instead of the instrumentalities of the market, if a culture of sensibility and moral value was to be preserved against the pressures imposed by work and the economy. In controlling his progeny, Peale reiterated how the family was important not only for men and women personally but also for society. “Marriage is a social bond,” he wrote, “contracted as well for the benefit of society in general, as the parties in particular, who have not only an obligation to conduct themselves well towards each other, but to maintain the reputation of the sacred law, and by a good example to induce others to marry; by which harmony, industry, and the wealth of the nation are promoted.” The connections Peale draws here reveal the sense of the passage I quoted in the preceding chapter about his courtship of Betsey DePeyster on the banks of the Hudson. Peale’s description went from an appreciation of his wife’s appeal and the beauty of the landscape to an observation about cargo traveling down the river. Peale’s mind’s eye ordered his perceptions according to the rising order of causality—from the personal, to the natural, to the national— through which the pursuit of happiness would be fulfilled.18 For contemporaries who only saw Peale’s appearance, and did not know his drives and wider ambitions, his marital history occasioned bemusement. In a wry letter, the architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe wrote to Thomas Jefferson about Peale’s marriage to Hannah Moore: “Peale, is again married I find. This is his third ticket in the lottery of marriage. Prudence, would not have advised this risk, for DeMoivre is clearly against him. . . . However he is a boy in many respects.” Abraham DeMoivre was the Anglo-French mathematician who did pioneering work in probability theory. (It is possible that Latrobe was flattering Jefferson with an implied comparison to Peale, given the president’s well-known rejection of remarriage after his wife’s death.) Latrobe undercut his compliment, that Peale’s wives were all prizes in the

The Struggle against Dispersal

•

147

lottery of marriage, by assuming that Peale was simply lucky in love—and possibly in life too. Peale’s many and varied pursuits, his receptivity and openness to everything around him, gave him an aura of disingenuousness and transparency that even an observer as astute as Latrobe could confuse with childishness. The exterior Peale presented to the world obscured the assertiveness he only partially revealed in his self-portraits. Chance or probability did not enter into Peale’s calculations about his life choices. Latrobe had no idea how rationally Peale approached the question of marriage or what his rationalism was designed to control but assumed that Peale, like an unformed boy, was led by his appetites and whims instead of controlling them by “act[ing] the Man.”19 For Peale, “act[ing] the Man” meant balancing appetites (especially carnality) with order imposed from within and without. Through the family individuality could be controlled and directed to a productive use, one that permitted the individual, the family, and the society to reproduce themselves. Peale showed the ideal side of this sense of order in The Peale Family. If he has been criticized as a hypocrite by historians who find his family practice did not live up to his ideals, he himself feared that individuals and society would not live up to the premises of an enlightened society— thus the constant need for self and societal scrutiny; and thus his own concern with internal and external discipline. Peale recognized the fragile balance of this enterprise. Just as in practice he would not allow himself to backslide, neither would he allow others to fail. Even as he revised and updated The Peale Family as his ideal, he was painting Exhuming the First American Mastodon (Figure 38), a painting fraught with tension, alienation, and danger.20 Exhuming the First American Mastodon shows Peale’s 1801 expedition to recover, and eventually reconstruct, the skeletons of two “mammoths,” remnants of which had been uncovered in the marshes of Orange County, New York (near Newburgh). On one level, the painting is a documentary record of Peale’s tour de force direction and improvisation of a way to unearth the bones. The mastodon is not visible, except in a fragment held up by a laborer and in the sketch Peale unrolls. Its presence is indicated and mirrored in the skeleton framework of wood holding the chain of buckets dredging the morass. The chain of buckets inevitably alludes to the great chain of being. Peale’s ever-ascending chain, by draining the swamp, would fill in a blank spot in the order of nature. His ad hoc solution to the drainage problem exemplifies American can-do pragmatism along with an Enlightenment confidence that man can master nature. The revolving chain and treadmill emphasize the routinized work of the laborers and show how in-

148

•

Part III

figure 38. Exhuming the First American Mastodon, 1806–8. Oil on canvas, 50 × 601⁄2 in. The Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore.

dustrial organization facilitates human progress. This progress occurs under the commanding eye and directing gesture of Charles Willson Peale— anticipating his magisterial position in The Artist in His Museum. Illuminated by the band of light bisecting the painting’s middle ground, Peale navigates his family through the dangers of the approaching thunderstorm and the morass. I would argue, contrary to Alexander Nemerov, that Peale is not working “desperately” to empty the morass. Instead, he drains the painting of suspense by commanding nature and imposing logic. The waters of the flood are drained, this time by man, not God. The “great incognitum” will be constructed as a subject.21 Yet this picture of order and mastery is balanced on an edge as thin as the lighted precipice on which Peale stands. First, Peale originally titled the painting Exhuming the Mammoth, a misnomer resulting from a case of mistaken identity. In 1801 Peale went in search of the American “mammoth,” a variant of the European animal. Only after Peale reconstructed and described the bones he had discovered could the French paleontologist Georges Cuvier, in 1806, classify them as belonging to the mastodon, an

The Struggle against Dispersal

•

149

extinct, previously unknown animal. Peale did not learn of Cuvier’s classification until 1809 (when the painting could be definitively retitled), but the conviction that the “mammoth” was an extinct, heretofore unknown animal circulated widely when Peale painted the picture. Against this knowledge that nature was mutable and not necessarily knowable, the painting reverses ominously to threaten the order Peale prized. The lightning in the background signals a storm and, like the flash outside the window in Jacques-Louis David’s Tennis Court Oath, a revolution—not just in aesthetics (David’s work evokes the sublime and anticipates romanticism) but in an ever-expanding society continually confronting its limits. Unlike The Peale Family, which shows the Three Graces dispensing benign nature, Exhuming the First American Mastodon depicts the figure of the wood chopper (at the right of the painting). As Robert Hughes points out, the “man with the axe” ( like the stumps of the trees he cuts down) is a standard trope in American landscape painting. He personifies improvement but at the cost of despoiled nature and, as Barbara Novak points out, the uncertainty of Americans facing destabilizing social change and geographical expansion.22 In Exhuming the First American Mastodon, this undermining is literal. The jagged pilings in the left foreground, a reference to the animal’s jaw, heighten the danger of the yawning pit. Peale originally thought the “mammoth” was carnivorous, and his son Rembrandt, in classifying it, dubbed it a “beast of prey.” Against this threatening natural world, Peale’s scaffolding and bucket-and-wheel machinery seem rickety and ineffectual. Physically, they tremble in the wind of the approaching storm and their wooden technology and human power are soon to be superseded by iron and steam. Socially, the painting portrays, not a vision of harmony, but a division: the line of light and the wall of the pit that separates the workers from the managerial Peale and the middle-class spectators. The machinery here, unlike the interlocking, watchlike mechanism of The Peale Family, is not only explicit but also monotonously repetitive in making its circle. The routinization of the economy has implications for the spectators. Laura Rigal, analyzing Peale’s depiction of Elizabeth in Exhuming the First American Mastodon, has connected her birth labor with the work of the men excavating the bones, concluding that “the laboring body not only produces but also threatens fixity and independence.” But what “threatens” is not the body itself. Forces act upon it—the work of the laboring men makes physical demands on them and economy keeps them dependent; “laboring” women experience the danger of childbirth and endure their implicitly inferior position as sexual subjects. In Elizabeth DePeyster’s case, her nearly

150

•

Part III

biyearly cycle of birth and subsequent nursing resembled a maternity assembly line. Her breaking was as wrenchingly literal as the mangling of a worker’s body in the machinery he attended. Peale recorded Elizabeth’s nearlast words: “Ah Charles if I live I will be a better wife to you then I have ever been.” She could have been making a pathetic plea to live, but the words also suggest that Betsey had not lived up to her husband’s standards and that in her death she was further failing in the duties in which Peale had directed her. Peale professed to bewilderment about Elizabeth’s meaning, but in choosing to record this as her final scene he clearly indicates the extent to which wives served their husbands even unto death.23 In the Mastodon, Peale, instead of portraying his family as a selfcontained family unit united physically and by consanguinity and sentiment, scattered them and showed them unconnected to one another except through the work they are overseeing. None of the family members look at each other. As the economy evolved, so did the division of labor, leaving the family behind as the center of production. For the workers, the ingenious human wheel with which Peale powered the bucket chain was adapted from eighteenth-century workhouses, which used the wheel to discipline and punish violators of the social order. Right conduct, when the light did not come from within, would have to be directed from without and from above. In the painting Peale reconstructs not the mastodon (which is not even visible) but his family.24 Peale’s family portraits show Peale fully in charge of the little world of his patriarchal society. But the Mastodon painting reveals levels of tension and schism that he could suggest but not examine too closely. Peale corrected the title of his painting and assimilated—or ignored or repressed—any awareness that the ledge on which he stood was narrowing, if not crumbling. He reacted, as he always did, by reapplying himself to his greatest work, the forging and projection of his own identity. The Mastodon painting pushed the limits of how accurately Peale could depict the world without confronting the conflict between his universalistic ideology and the reality of social life. Consequently, in 1819 Peale painted two canvases that allegorized the family while suggesting an even more grandiose conception of his role in the world. These two paintings, which are a significant visual episode in Peale’s explanation of his founding of his museum, are The Retreat across the Delaware (unlocated) and his copy after Charles Catton of Noah and His Ark (Figure 39). Although he declared during the war that he could not record it with his pencil, he did later complete a painting of Washington’s retreat across the Delaware. It took two years to finish, and he abandoned his ini-

The Struggle against Dispersal

•

151

figure 39. After Charles Catton, Noah and His Ark, 1819. Oil on canvas, 401⁄4 × 501⁄4 in., acc. no. 1951.22. Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. Collections Fund.

tial plans for it, indicating, perhaps, the unpalatability of the subject for him or his difficulty conceptualizing a painting from memory. The loss of The Retreat across the Delaware is especially unfortunate because it was one of Peale’s few paintings of a pessimistic subject.25 The painting showed Washington’s retreat into Pennsylvania in December 1776, an action that occurred immediately after Peale’s failure to recognize his own brother on the battlefield. Peale painted a small canvas of the retreat as a preparatory version, which he planned to transfer to a larger canvas (probably 28 inches by 36 inches) for museum exhibition. His initial version of the painting was a realistic record of the night retreat, and he spent much time working on “all those small figures with great care.” Far from ignoring the consequences of war, Peale showed them in all their crippling physical and cultural disfigurements. His intention was polemical: “And, as I hate Wars, I take this occasion to represent some of the horrors of it.” Peale subsequently decided that these horrors could not stand on their own and, perhaps sensing that the scene needed a stronger visual focus, added an al-

152

•

Part III

legorical gloss. Four days after finishing the canvas he revised it, writing that “[i]t is improved by adding an additional group in the front, a female figure with two children following the man carried in a litter. She is crying, her daughter points to the father as consoling her while she leads her son who is young and thoughtless dressed in a hunting shirt with liberty or Death on his cap, in his hand his wooden gun.” War’s unreason destroys society by incapacitating the patriarch, leaving the family without a guide to educate the “young and thoughtless” next generation of men; Peale may have been bemoaning the absence of his own father here. The son, who will trade his wooden gun for the real thing when he comes of age, threatens to repeat the mistakes of his forbears who permitted war to occur.26 With The Retreat, Peale reversed the patriotic iconology of one of America’s most famous images, Washington Crossing the Delaware, a subject done by numerous artists, from Thomas Sully to Red Grooms; Emmanuel Leutze’s version, with Washington standing tall in the longboat, is the most familiar. At the time Peale was painting his Retreat, Thomas Sully painted an idealized Crossing of the Delaware (1819; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), with Washington mastering his fractious stallion as easily as he commanded the orderly disembarkation of his troops on the banks of New Jersey. In The Retreat, Peale depicted a calamitously disorganized, “hellish” scene that captured the true “face of battle.” Conventional scenes of Washington crossing the Delaware occur at dawn, The Retreat at night. Amid the darkness, the central figures were not heroic, world-historical individuals but a wounded common soldier and anonymous refugees. In painting the son, Peale undermined two other iconic symbols of early American nationalism. The slogan on the boy’s cap, “liberty or Death,” refers to Patrick Henry’s flamboyant statement of revolutionary determination to the Virginia House of Burgesses. The leather hunting shirt references the War of 1812 and the “Hunters of Kentucky,” the backwoodsmen whose legendary marksmanship decimated the British ranks at the Battle of New Orleans—a triumph of American individualism over English conformity. Peale subverted these heroic references when he described the boy as immature. Yet a viewer of the painting might see them instead as indicating the readiness of the next generation to pick up the fallen father’s heroic mission. This reverential interpretation would have been the preferred reading for an audience already imbuing the events and relics of American history with a symbolic power crucial to the construction of American nationalism. Peale’s private dismissal of the child as thoughtless suggests his uneasiness about those symbols. If the son is “young and thoughtless,” he can still be educated, and instead of liberty or death there could be liberty and life—but only if individualism

The Struggle against Dispersal

•

153

is socialized to a higher purpose through private (the family) and public (Peale’s museum) institutions.27 The Retreat across the Delaware is the antonym of Peale’s copy of Catton’s Noah and His Ark. Peale’s concentration on the latter painting contributed to his taking two years to complete the preliminary study of The Retreat. Peale altered Catton’s design only in the details, as when he substituted an American buffalo for a European elk and added a mule. Describing Catton’s original painting, Peale extolled the rendering of the animals, but he was more interested in the figures of Noah and his family. The biblical family group contrasts with the war-torn refugees of The Retreat: “Then the family composed of an antient Woman, affectionally led by a strong young man and young woman, I suppose her daughter, gives a sweet Idea of parental love, assending to the entrance of the Ark.” Noah the patriarch presides over an intact family, bathed in the light of divine blessing. Peale concludes his summary description by saying that “further particulars” are unnecessary since the message of the painting is obvious, “that it is a Museum in itself, and a subject in the line of the fine arts, the most appropriate to a Museum.”28 Noah and His Ark celebrates the patriarchal figure as the strength of his family and their dominion over a peaceable and harmonious natural world. Besides establishing the genealogy of his modern museum in the Old Testament, Peale made the point that nature was a deep structure, adherence to whose precepts freed mankind from the contingencies and chaos of life lived superficially. Although the painting depicts the ark before the Flood, its tranquillity and order anticipate the conclusion of Noah’s test after God has reconstituted the world he has cleansed. By collapsing the narrative of the Flood, Peale, in copying Catton, painted the reestablishment of the timeless harmony of the Garden of Eden.29 Peale’s Noah is shown as a benign, sainted elder who kneels to receive God’s grace. Peale described the patriarch in “a ray of light coming from a cloud, forming an illumed circle round the devoutly kneeling Noah, with a new born lamb by his side, emblem of the inocense of the venerable old man.” The depiction of Noah fits the painting’s general theme of a benign natural order, like the similar harmony in Peale’s arrangement of his political portraits. Theologically, the painting anticipates a deracinated nineteenth-century American Protestantism’s sentimentalization of the New Testament. The text of Genesis reveals a significant tension between the visual and the verbal, one that provides insight into Peale himself. In Genesis, not only is God intending an apocalypse, one not even hinted at in the painting, but He announces Himself to Noah so as to leave no doubt that

154

•

Part III

Noah is the vessel of the world. “Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his generation; Noah walked with God,” and thus God chooses Noah, since “I have seen that you alone are righteous in this generation.” Noah’s reward for fulfilling God’s edict and reanimating a cleansed world is nothing less than dominion over nature and the legitimation of conquest: “The fear and dread of you shall rest on every animal of the earth, and on every bird of the air, on everything that creeps on the ground, and on all the fish of the sea; into your hand they are delivered. Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you; and just as I gave you the green plants, I give you everything.” Recognizing the immutability of man’s violence, “for the inclination of the human heart is evil from youth,” God redirects it from other men to nature. The biblical Noah, therefore, is not a sentimentalized pietistic and passive figure but a protean figure, legitimating conquest and ordering the natural world both in his ark and for the future.30 The message Peale conveyed in 1820 is easy to read: the disorder of temporal history in The Retreat across the Delaware would be set to rights if man turned his attention to ordering and controlling the natural world. But the contrast of the two paintings complemented Peale’s autobiographical project. In pairing The Retreat with Noah and His Ark, and moving between them as he painted from 1818 to 1820, Peale offered a visual retrospective of the reorientation of his life in the early 1780s. Through natural history and the museum he would order his own life. The usual identification of Peale with the Noah of Noah and His Ark has acquiesced to the painter’s self-presentation as a pacific, avuncular, gently patriarchal figure who reflected the will of others and of society, if not of God Himself. But undergirding the painting with the text from Genesis imbues the seemingly benign patriarch with a steely sense of mission to control and order the world around him.31

chapter 8

“I Bring Forth into Public View” Peale’s Secular Apotheosis in The Artist in His Museum

~ Noah in Noah and His Ark was Peale’s allegorical self-portrait by which he eradicated the tensions he had exposed in Exhuming the First American Mastodon. But allegory was too indirect a method to satisfy Peale’s desire for pictorial and actual self-assertion. Consequently, during the 1820s he stripped away the Noah’s allegorical trappings, fully and fiercely revealing himself to the American public in a remarkable series of self-portraits. Peale solved the problems of uncertainty that he created in the Mastodon painting by narrowing the focus of his self-portraits to his body alone, posing with the attributes of his life in the nature he constructed in his museum. In focusing on his own body, Peale fused his private and his public lives, balancing the antinomies that had driven him and showing himself at last to the American public. Charles Willson Peale painted six self-portraits between 1821 and 1824; three were commissioned by cultural organizations, and the others were byproducts of this public portraiture. Peale had painted self-portraits throughout his career (like the one shown in Figure 40) to index his development as an artist and a man; in all he painted eighteen self-portraits, not counting pictures that showed him in a group. But in the 1820s Peale concentrated on self-portraiture for the public. His autobiographical project of the 1820s arose from a mixture of impulses in which his own need to sum up his life dovetailed with the public’s desire to honor the aged artist. Yet Peale also took advantage of his position to create a demand that he be honored. For instance, The Artist in His Museum was painted at the request of the 155

156

•

Part III

figure 40. Self-Portrait with Spectacles, 1804. Oil on canvas, mounted on wood; 263⁄16 × 225⁄16 in., acc. no. 1939.18. Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. Henry D. Gilpin Fund.

Philadelphia Museum’s trustees, a body Peale controlled. He painted a second self-portrait (now lost) for Rubens Peale, who was operating the Baltimore Museum and was hardly a disinterested party when it came to his father. A third painting, called Self-Portrait, “In the Character of a Painter” (Figure 41), was commissioned by the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, of which Peale was a founding member. Peale also addressed the public at large with Self-Portrait, “For the Multitude” (Figure 42), and he ex-

“I Bring Forth into Public View”

•

157

figure 41. Self-Portrait, “In the Character of a Painter,” 1824. Oil on canvas, 261⁄4 × 221⁄8 in., acc. no. 1845.5. Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. Gift of the artist.

plicitly advertised his continued acuity with Self-Portrait, “Painted in the Eighty-First Year of His Age without Spectacles” (Figure 43). Many of the Peales had poor eyesight, and Peale, as part of his general inventiveness and interest in bodily improvement, became involved in the problems of lenses and the making of eyeglasses. It would be interesting to know when Peale started wearing glasses. He never showed himself actually wearing them, for to do so would suggest that his natural powers were weak.1 What lay behind Peale’s heightened desire to immortalize himself during the 1820s? In 1821, Peale was eighty years old, and despite his optimistic calculation of his own and his species’s potential longevity, he recognized he was moving to his life’s close. He survived a near-fatal bout of yellow fever in 1821, but his third wife, Hannah Moore, died on October 21. Her death heightened Peale’s sense of his own mortality. Familially, Peale grew concerned with simplifying his living arrangements, putting his finances in order, establishing his museum on a permanent basis, and finding stable careers for his younger children. Because he had long ago learned disciplined application, the death of Hannah, his own illness, and familial problems did not cause him now to grapple uncertainly with his life’s direction. Peale had already started to emerge from his decade of rural “retirement” in 1818 with a trip to Washington, where he mixed family business—settling his brother James’s Revolutionary War pension and obtaining a place on the Western Exploring Expedition for Titian—with a return to painting. He completed

158

•

Part III

figure 42. Self-Portrait, “For the Multitude,” 1824. Oil on canvas, 26 1⁄4 × 22 in., acc. no. 1940.202. The New-York Historical Society, New York City.

a series of portraits of the second generation of America’s political class, immortalizing them as he had the nation’s founders; among his subjects were John C. Calhoun, Andrew Jackson, and Henry Clay. Concentrating on his public career, Peale put his farm, “Belfield,” outside Philadelphia, on the market and returned to the city center, determined to reassert his influence, if not outright control, not only over his family but over American culture itself.2 In reclaiming his public role, Peale responded to the economic crisis of the early 1820s and the politics of a decade in which Americans became aware of the growing distance between themselves and the revolutionary era. For one thing, as the heroes of the Revolution began to die off, their loss occasioned a national mood of reflection on the gains and losses since independence. Many Americans felt a decline had occurred from the ideological, even spiritual, purity of the struggle to establish the Republic. The Panic of 1819 had more than a strictly economic impact, for it was ascribed to rampant land speculation and an unstable monetary policy, especially in the western territories. Greed seemed to have infected the body politic as the heroic revolutionary generation disappeared. The simultaneous deaths of Adams and Jefferson on July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, were taken as a sign of America’s decline and a portent of the need for institutional and personal reform.3 In this atmosphere of instability, Peale demonstrated his continued, vi-

“I Bring Forth into Public View”

•

159

figure 43. Self-Portrait, “Painted in the Eighty-First Year of His Age without Spectacles,” 1822. Oil on canvas, 291⁄4 × 241⁄8 in. Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller 3rd, 1993.35.22.

tal presence as a living exemplar of the republicanism and Deism of the revolutionary period. Peale justified this assertion of his ego by identifying himself as someone who worked for the public good. As in the revolutionary era, personal ambition was permissible when linked to public purposes. This is why Peale identified his last self-portraits with public organizations even though he stage-managed the demand for them. Previously Peale had been more reticent in his appeal to “fama,” hiding himself behind his art and cultural productions and revealing his agency in his works. His stepping forward now, wrapped in the mantle of his public service, indicated his sense that he could regenerate his generation’s civic and political activism. His selfportraits also asserted his strong sense that he was not yesterday’s man, irrelevant, or a spent force in his age. Just as he had taken renewed charge of his family, he would lay claim to his role as a living exemplar and an organizer of American culture. Moreover, in the expression of his ego, Peale was identifying himself with American culture and with American history. He was not just looking backward in an attempt to hang on to his fame; his art in the 1820s was motivated by his sense that he could guide and reorient an American society that many feared had lost its bearings. Peale demonstrates his orientation to the future in a letter to Dr. Richard Bradford, written in February 1818, about the recent death of his colleague

160

•

Part III

Dr. Caspar Wistar, who passed away before Peale could complete a portrait of the physician. Wistar’s death causes Peale to nostalgically remember his many sitters—“about 3⁄4 of them are now laid in the dust!”—and the conversations he had with them while they sat for their portraits. But having indulged himself in thoughts about mortality, Peale abruptly shifts the tenor and subject of his letter from the past to the future, wrenching himself from the temptations of reverie. He writes imperatively, “[H]ush these mementoes, and let us look forward to the enlightening of Mankind.” He then goes into a lengthy encomium on internal improvements: “And when our Cannals shall connect our numerous lakes and lenthy Rivers, and the crossing passages filled with Steam-boats with Visitors from North to South, interchanging the Mechanic Arts and riches of the various Soils, when bigotry shall cease, and brotherly love be the test of holiness—when enlightened minds shall acknowledge no preemanancy but that of Virtue—Is not this a Rapsody?” Peale’s impulse is not to wallow in the memory of past conversations, but to use history and biography as guides to right conduct in the future. Moreover, there is an element of callousness in Peale’s sudden shift in tone. While he avoids pathos, he also reburies the dead by silencing them in memory. As we have seen, he censored himself, neither recording nor even characterizing his talks with his sitters. They exist now only as Peale painted them, as public icons. Peale is interested in conversations with the living, conversations that occur, flourish, and expand through America’s ever-growing conquest of space through the nation’s network of trade and communication. Just as Peale’s regimen of opening up bodily passages permits sociability and harmony to flourish among individuals, so the opening up of America’s waterways and highways will result in a harmonious body politic.4 In sloughing off the memory of past conversations, Peale signals that he, having outlived his heroic contemporaries, is a guide to the future. It is he who will speak now. This self-assertion lies behind the most extraordinary event of his last years: his decision to write his autobiography. Peale had always intended that his correspondence and diaries (which he meticulously began saving long before he became a figure of note) would provide a rough draft of his life for his descendants, friends, and selected other readers. But the decision to write an autobiography required a higher level of self-consciousness and expression. It was a decision that indicated Peale’s need to reflect on his life and put it in order. Peale also had a public purpose in mind, a plan, cut short by death, that indicated his sense of an elder’s duty to give the community a narrative autobiography as a lesson and an example for posterity. And Peale, like Benjamin Franklin in his autobiography, was motivated to fashion and control the image he presented to the public.

“I Bring Forth into Public View”

•

161

Obsessed with longevity, he also undertook his written and artistic projects to keep his own image and work alive.5 He stepped from behind the curtain of his productions to present himself to the public in his autobiography as an extremely self-confident man, secure in his achievements and eager that the public celebrate them. Writing an autobiography in a period when autobiography was an embryonic literary genre was also a critical act in the history of American individualism. While the eighteenth-century novel, especially in England, had introduced the bourgeoisie as the subject for literature, autobiography took the next step by celebrating the autonomous individual on whom market capitalism and democratic government were predicated. Both Franklin’s and Peale’s autobiographies are indicators of what has become the preoccupation of writers throughout the history of the United States: the American success story. Both Peale and Franklin laid down the basic contours of the story of the self-made man as one who succeeded by hard work, good fortune, and artful self-presentation. As a public document, autobiography recognized and reflected the development of a public sphere in which the market economy influenced the form and content of literary works. Peale’s plans for his autobiography were not wholly altruistic: he would publish the manuscript if “money may be made by the publication,” since he saw “no reason why I should not be benefited by the work.” An autobiography commodified a personality, displaying it and offering it for purchase, both literally and figuratively, since readers could appropriate the writer’s example as a model for their own success.6 Although writing itself was essential to Peale, writing an autobiography was exceptional. He knew he had good material to work with but, doubting his skill as a literary stylist, also contemplated hiring a “good penman” to make it “very interesting.” Just as he wrote his autobiography to commemorate a life and record a self-portrait in words, he turned to self-portraiture in painting as the final motif of his artistic life. At no other point in his artistic career did Charles Willson Peale concentrate on a subject as he did on these self-portraits. They mark the pinnacle of his artistic talent. He indicates his determination to project his authority on early American culture, claiming many of its achievements as his own, by painting two preliminary versions of The Artist in His Museum; for an artist concerned with producing likenesses quickly and without preliminaries, this was nearly unprecedented. Moreover, unlike virtually all of his other portraits, the selfportraits were titled or captioned with more than the name of the sitter: The Artist in His Museum, “In the Character of a Painter,” “For the Multitude,” and “Painted in the Eighty-First Year of His Age without Spectacles.” Titles

162

•

Part III

and captions emphasize Peale’s person, his figurative representation, but also stamp the portraits with his status, his attainments, and even his animal vitality.7 Peale wrote about The Artist in His Museum, “I wish it may excite some admiration, otherwise my labor is lost, except that it is a good likeness.” While the sentence refers specifically to his progress on the one self-portrait, it reveals his motivation in executing all of them. For once in Peale’s painting career, “a good likeness” was not enough; the portraits were the summation of his life. The Artist in His Museum is Peale’s largest painting (see Figure 2), 1033⁄4 inches by 797⁄8 inches, a size that matches his ambition and his achievements. The largest in Peale’s series of ceremonial portraits of George Washington, in contrast, is 951⁄4 inches by 633⁄4 inches; it may be no accident that Peale depicted himself larger than the “Father of His Country.”8 The Artist in His Museum is one of the best-known American paintings of the nineteenth century. Its iconographic elements, along with their associations with Peale’s life and American culture, have been examined in a number of studies and described in Peale’s own commentary. In a letter Peale described the painting as he was working on it: My dress a suit of Black Breeches and silk Stockings—holding up with my right hand a crimson Curtain, to give a view of the Museum from the end of the long room, thus shewing the range of Birds, the revolutionary Characters, and instead of the projecting casses behind me, I contemplate as much & as conspicuous as possible the Skeleton of the Mamoth & perhaps some of the quadrupeds more distant, I may have some Mamoth bones &c at my feet, My Pallet & Pencils near at hand.

Other writings identify more details: the woman in the background is a “quaker lady”; the fabric on the table is baize; the wild turkey on the taxidermist’s toolbox came from one of Titian Peale’s scientific expeditions. These details support Peale’s magisterial self-presentation as he invited his audience into the world he had made in his museum.9 Peale divides the space in The Artist in His Museum along the plane of the draped curtain so that the artist/creator is projected out into space, heightening Peale’s presence and agency. This positioning has the effect of creating a dialectic between life and art, painter and audience, the individual and the whole of American culture, and, finally, past and present. Peale’s figure bridges these realms, thereby drawing attention to and heightening the impact of his creative power. Peale paints the Long Room in cross section, with the curtain as fictitious entryway to the exhibition space. There were two doors in the actual Long Room (Peale left the far door indistinct

“I Bring Forth into Public View”

•

163

so as not to break the recessional grid of the specimen cases) through which the public entered the exhibition area. To position himself as a cultural gatekeeper, Peale had to create a fictitious entryway. In other words, there is no way through the curtain except as Peale directs one into the painting. Such pictorial gatekeeping contradicted the mission and operation of the Philadelphia Museum, whose space was open to all and whose exhibitions were selfguided. Peale the impresario raises the curtain theatrically to show what is behind it, but he also steps out from behind it to advertise his role in creating all that his audience sees, his gesture like the flourish of the magician completing a trick. In a showpiece of a painting, as David Lubin has argued, Peale is the showman putting on his production. But in his own time, Peale’s pose was associated not just with popular entertainments but also with the depiction of the sovereign. Peale recorded Washington, in his own full-length portraits of him, in a similar stance, as did Gilbert Stuart in his “Lansdowne” Washington. And the figure in Herman van der Myn’s Charles Calvert, Fifth Lord Baltimore, a painting Peale knew from childhood, also resembles these (Figure 44). Baltimore is particularly apropos because Peale acquired it in 1823 from the city of Annapolis, by painting portraits, mostly copies, of six of Maryland’s colonial governors, in exchange. The arrangement with the city elicited complaints from Annapolis residents that it bartered away its history to a private citizen. Peale may have commercialized culture by obtaining the Van der Myn, but he was also appropriating history to his own purposes, a fact that Annapolis’s residents immediately recognized.The point of Peale’s portraits throughout his career was to depict the personal autonomy of his subjects; now he showed himself as a figure of public authority over America’s history. Peale was not indulging in political lèse-majesté. He did not aim to replace the statesmen whose poses he appropriated. Instead, he positioned himself as the sovereign arbiter of culture.10 Although Peale used the curtain for dramatic effect, it also had an art historical meaning. With it, Peale referenced the famous trompe l’oeil stilllife competition between Zeuxis and Parrhasius. While Zeuxis’s fruit piece deceived birds into pecking the canvas, Parrhasius trumped him and won the prize by covering his fruit with a delicate cloth, deceiving not the birds but the judges, who urged him to remove the covering. Here Peale lifts the curtain to reveal the fruits of knowledge arrayed in his museum. Didactic to a fault, he never allows an illusion to speak for itself in his paintings. Instead, he reveals his agency by presenting himself as our guide through the curtain of illusion into his simulacrum of the world of nature and history. The raised curtain reveals a museum and not the world itself; Peale conflates

164

•

Part III

figure 44. Herman van der Myn, Charles Calvert, Fifth Lord Baltimore, c. 1730. Oil on canvas, 106 × 671⁄8 in. The Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore.

the two. Moving up a step in the hierarchy of authority, he suggests an equation of the artist with the Divinity, since one of his subtitles for the museum was “The World in Miniature.” It is not too great a conceit to see Peale’s allusion to himself as the Creator’s agent, especially since as a freethinker and Deist he viewed man as fulfilling God’s plan.11 But Peale’s reference to the competition between Parrhasius and Zeuxis also had a personal, familial context for him. In 1822 Peale was involved in his own artistic competition, one that had ramifications for his worldview. The Artist in His Museum was not the only Peale family masterpiece painted in 1822 that used a curtain as its central organizing device. That year Raphaelle Peale (Figure 45) painted his Venus Rising from the Sea: A Deception (After the Bath) (Figure 46). The chronology of these two paintings is suggestive. Raphaelle exhibited the Venus at the annual exhibition of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) held in May 1822; the painting was sold to the Baltimorean William Gilmor in December for $25. Charles Willson was working on The Artist in His Museum by August 1822.

“I Bring Forth into Public View”

•

165

figure 45. Raphaelle Peale, 1822. Oil on canvas, 29 × 24 in. Private collection.

The paintings are dueling images, and Charles Willson Peale was firing back at Raphaelle in an attack on his eldest son’s nihilism.12 The “deception” in the Venus’s title is Raphaelle’s hiding the goddess’s figure behind a crisply painted white cloth, which appears to be pinned to a length of cloth tape hanging from the top of the painting. Unlike the curtain in The Artist in His Museum, Raphaelle’s cloth curtain blocks access to the work of art and to the artist himself. In this gesture he seems to say that art and the career of the artist are impossible. He hinted at this conclusion a decade earlier in his deception A Catalogue for the Use of the Room (unlocated), a trompe l’oeil depiction of a guidebook hanging from a hook that in effect kept the visitor from understanding the works in the exhibition. Art, in other words, is a perpetually closed book, impossible to comprehend or even to open. Raphaelle used the effect to make the subject not only distant but totally inaccessible, while Charles Willson Peale adapted illusionism to emphasize the creative agency of his subjects, especially himself. Where Raphaelle lowered the curtain/shroud, Charles Willson raised it, rebuking his son as he celebrated himself. In place of Raphaelle’s “feminine” aesthetic and extreme hermeticism, Charles Willson painted himself as a dominating masculine and public figure. Where his son flirted with death, Peale erected a portrait that asserts his eternal presence. Finally, where Raphaelle suggests that knowledge is a closed book, his father opens “the

figure 46. Raphaelle Peale, Venus Rising from the Sea: A Deception (After the Bath), c. 1822. Oil on canvas, 291⁄4 × 241⁄8 in. The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri (Purchase: Nelson Trust), 34-147.

“I Bring Forth into Public View”

•

167

great book of nature” that he created in his museum. To do this, Peale, rather than recede into the background, projects himself forward, toward his audience; as Walter Benjamin writes about the collector, “The true method of making things present is to represent them in our space.”13 Peale made the same point, absent the drama of the curtain’s rise, about his self-creation and the creation of culture in the self-portrait painted for Rubens Peale and the Baltimore Museum. In this companion piece to The Artist in His Museum, amply documented in Peale’s writing, Peale broke the proscenium to achieve a full illusionistic effect through his handling of the painting’s recessional and projecting elements. Another monumental effort at 102 by 78 inches, this Staircase Self-Portrait (1823; unlocated) fabricated the illusion that the artist has moved away from his easel and is about to step down into the exhibition viewer’s space; Peale heightened the effect by placing real steps at the foot of the painting, continuing the painted steps and breaking the picture plane. Again he rendered himself lifesize, which, since he is in motion, required more complicated positioning than the static pose of The Artist in His Museum: “I shall be descending the steps; my right foot on the first step in the picture, my left on the upper step, with a foreshortened leg. A front face, the head alittle inclined to make a gentle curve of my figure[.] By this I give my exact higth.” Peale carries a palette and “Moll-stick,” arrays the saddler’s tools of his artisan origins at his feet, and again represents the Long Room of his museum behind him. The prominence of the maulstick is important because in his 1794 showpiece “retirement” painting (he did not actually retire from painting), The Staircase Group, Peale made a special point that Raphaelle was climbing the stairs supported by his maulstick. But Raphaelle was shown disappearing from view. Now Peale uses his maulstick like a staff, to stride into his audience’s space. This projection by Peale of his figure, like that in The Artist in His Museum, is a reminder that the old artist is still present, still vital, still not ready for retirement even as he memorializes a life nearing its end. This and the other self-portraits represent Peale’s regulation of himself to achieve a maximum longevity. Rising from the material to the spiritual, Peale includes his earlier (ca. 1782–85) painting of his wife and daughter, with Angelica pointing skyward in a Deistic gesture crediting the Almighty, to emphasize the larger harmonies enacted by the divinely sponsored painter.14 The artist was delighted when at a special showing of The Staircase SelfPortrait to thirteen (mostly unidentified) Philadelphia artists, “every one of them pronounced it to be the best picture which they had ever seen from my pencil.” The artists, Peale wrote, signaled their approval by remarking on their having been taken in by the illusionistic elements of the painting:

168

•

Part III

every one of them “is deceived by some part of the picture. The truth is that I had determined from the commencement of it to make as much as I could in it to deceive the eye of a critical observer.” At the reception, Thomas Sully reportedly exclaimed, “Bless me, I am completely deceived!” The connoisseur’s profession of deception rhetorically signals the exact opposite: he recognized the artist’s virtuosity by feigning an inability to distinguish between art and life. For Peale this was the perfect response, since his intention was to subsume his life into his self-portraits. If the audience was “deceived,” it meant he still lived.15 This sense that Peale felt himself fully in control of his powers is shown again by the circumstances in which he painted the last two of his selfportraits. The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts commissioned Peale to paint his portrait to honor his founding role in, and long service to, the organization. The lay president of the academy, the lawyer Joseph Hopkinson, viewed the work in progress and criticized Peale’s execution of some technical elements of the portrait that became “In the Character of a Painter.” Peale responded to this challenge quickly and with some asperity by immediately painting a portrait whose title, “For the Multitude,” suggests Peale’s sense that his life’s work has a larger audience than an elite group of art patrons. It is not known if the members of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts noted or commented on the mastodon bone that Peale holds in it rather than the more predictable artist’s tools that figured in “In the Character of a Painter.” Peale was not only or always an artist, and he broke his patrons’ expectations to remind the academy of this fact. In pointing to the mastodon bone and emphasizing his role as naturalist, lecturer, and museum keeper, Peale implicitly celebrated himself as separate from the organization that honored him. The museum’s mastodon skeleton helped make the institution profitable and Peale well-known among scholars in America and Europe. It helped create an audience for Peale beyond the circle of his patrons and art connoisseurs.16 This assertion of individualism is also central to Peale’s depiction of himself in the self-portraits. Cutting through the clutter of signs, symbols, and meanings that reference Peale’s career—artist, naturalist, inventor, impresario, creator—is the sharp-edged figure of the artist himself. Peale’s figure in the late self-portraits is monochromatic, overwhelmingly black with a leavening of ruddy flesh tints; the only other color is in the daubs of paint on the palette of the 1821 Self-Portrait. Peale presents himself as stripped down to his essential being. The severe, indeed forbidding, facial expressions combine with the black clothing and dark backgrounds of the bust portraits to suggest an almost priestly seriousness of purpose and commitment. In

“I Bring Forth into Public View”

•

169

figure 47. Charles Willson Peale and Titian Ramsay Peale, The Long Room, Interior of the Front Room in Peale’s Museum, 1822.Watercolor over graphite pencil, 14 × 203⁄4 in. Detroit Institute of Arts, Founders Society Purchase, Director’s Discretionary Fund. Photograph © 1997 The Detroit Institute of Arts.

each painting the eye is drawn to Peale’s bald pate, on which light concentrates, and thus to Peale’s mind as the seat of reason and self-mastery.17 Peale took great pains with the lighting in all his self-portraits. In The Artist in His Museum, he had to come up with a way of keeping his face unshadowed as he stood in front of the curtain. The curtain blocks the natural light of the Long Room from the windows that face north on the second floor of the State House Building (now Independence Hall ). The watercolor study (Figure 47) that Peale did with Titian Ramsay Peale—the elder Peale lined out the perspective and the son filled in the colors—gives a view of the Long Room as it was, complete with cabinets and pedestals that Peale removed from the right side of The Artist in His Museum. The study has a light, welcoming airiness that Peale drains away in the staged and shadowed drama of the finished painting. Peale described his solution to the lighting problem in a letter to Rembrandt: “I make a bold attempt by the light behind me, and all my features lit up by a reflected light, beautifully given by the mirror, the top of my head on the bald part a bright light, also the hair on each side. That you may understand me, place yourself between a look-

170

•

Part III

ing glass and the window. Your features will be well-defined by that reflected light.” There was no reason why Peale’s figure had to be illuminated by natural light. The argand lamps hung in the Long Room could have done the job while testifying to the Peale family’s role in early American experiments in illumination. Peale conceptualized the mirror in writing to his son only to account for the intense glow of his face and head. It is not painted into the picture as part of the Long Room’s fittings; the lintel on the left wall is a doorway, not a mirror frame. Peale’s “solution” has an element of ex post facto justification to it. The viewer sees light coming logically from behind Peale and, with no evident source, natural or artificial, from in front. The dual direction of light violates natural law, but Peale’s point is that unlike the sun itself, the light of the Enlightenment never dims. To borrow Philip Larkin’s phrase from a poem about founding a new religion, on Peale’s head and through his agency “many-angled light congregates endlessly.”18 Besides the self-portraits’ dominating heads, the only other bodily features lit up in the paintings are the hands. Against the blackness of Peale’s clothes, they are huge. The left hand of The Artist in His Museum signals us to enter, but it also fulfills the larger symbolic and actual function of enacting Peale’s lesson. Peale wrote to his son Rembrandt of “My left hand in form & view of expaciating & being open & turned alittle back to express as I conceive fullness.” Note that Peale wrote “expatiate,” not “explicate,” as one might expect. Peale’s conception was that the painting’s meaning would be plain and immediately understandable to the rational viewer whose eyes roamed the space created by the gatekeeping artist. The fullness of Peale’s hand, its “expaciating” qualities, symbolically represent the completeness of the scene beyond the curtain, Peale’s encapsulation of the “world in miniature.” And that hand held the palette and the paints (they are on the table on the same plane as the left hand) by which Peale created the world he now presented to his audience. If Peale’s hand is now empty, it has been the source of gifts. Peale made the same point more didactically in the 1821 Self-Portrait, where his outsize, redly calloused thumb jammed through the hole in the pallet, making the tools of his art a part of his body.19 Finally, in all these paintings there is Peale’s powerful, commanding gaze. This is Peale chastened, stripped for action, as direct as a gun. The Artist in His Museum gives a literal dimension to the idea of Peale as a killer: the crumpled turkey at his feet. For the art historian Roger Stein, Peale’s swelling figure is that of a raptor strutting over his prey and even the triumph of the bald eagle over the turkey, which Franklin proposed as the national bird. A bald eagle is the topmost specimen in the first tier of cases at the left of the painting. In contrast to the full-faced eagles of the Long Room watercolor,

“I Bring Forth into Public View”

•

171

this eagle faces away from any museum viewer, its body on roughly the same angle as Peale’s.20 Natural history was a bloody business in the nineteenth century. The turkey was brought back to Philadelphia from the Missouri expedition by Titian Ramsay, and Peale or his workers killed and preserved many of the specimens arrayed along the museum’s walls. Bloodshed at Peale’s museum was not just an abstract question, what with Peale’s having had to shoot Jefferson’s bears when they escaped from his zoo. Peale always had weapons on hand and for harvesting specimens used a variety of firearms as well as a blowpipe, for taking hummingbirds undamaged. Here his eyes are doublebarreled. The allusion to a gun in that hooded gaze represents his career as a naturalist as well as a deeper layer of his character. But if natural history was basically bloody, its violence was intended to create the order that Peale presented in his museum. If violence was necessary, it was justified because it confirmed man’s mastery over nature and his analytical ability to create order from nature’s seeming chaos. In the entry on the bald eagle in his American Ornithology (1807), Wilson included his poem on the bird in flight: “Glides the Bald Eagle, gazing, calm and slow / O’er all the horrors of the scene below.” Peale resembles the raptor, with the difference that the scene he introduces is as calm as his ordering gaze can render it. Notice also that the raptors are on the top rank of the bird cases, lording it over the domestic and decorative birds on the bottom, such as the penguins and the swans.21 Peale expunged the hard and bloody work of collecting specimens and conquering the western lands in the order he created in his museum; the turkey is draped over the taxidermy kit whose tools the naturalist will use to make the dead bird lifelike. Blood is hinted at only in Peale’s sharpshooting gaze. Similarly, his actual labors, those that permitted him to indulge in selfcelebration, are revealed only in the details of his face and hands. Peale’s body is completely wrapped up, an indication of his self-control, but his character is revealed in the weathering of his flesh. I have already remarked on the reddened thumb of the 1821 Self-Portrait, a workingman’s thumb. The shadows on the hands in The Artist in His Museum can be read as cakedon dirt or the grime of hard work, and the facial lines, including the darker flesh under the figure’s eyes, bespeak the severity of the painter’s effort. That late self-portrait was the template from which Peale derived the others. In it, the lines march up the forehead from the top of the upraised brows into the white glare of the skull. The downturned line of the eye socket mirrors the thin downturn of the pursed, nearly lipless mouth. By 1821 Peale had few teeth remaining, and his chin and jaw are supported by the bulge

172

•

Part III

of muscle in his left cheek. The face is aged and worn but not, even in its eighties, collapsed or sunken. All around Peale’s eyes are crosshatched crow’s-feet, and the groove on the bridge of his nose may be the effect of years of wearing spectacles. The groove is there but the glasses are missing to remind the viewer that although Peale is worn and experienced, his faculties are still strong. He neither depicted nor used glasses in painting this portrait, as the label for it claimed when it was shown at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. There is a reddish tinge to the eyes, matching the mottled flush in the cheeks. The hair is thin and negligently cut. In contrast, Rembrandt Peale’s 1811 portrait of his father (Figure 48), also fullfaced, duplicates the facial geography of Charles Willson’s self-portraits (the wrinkles are almost exactly the same, down to the groove in the nose) but softens and idealizes the elder artist to create a picture of artistic achievement; the hand holding the palette and cluster of brushes is huge. The head glows rather than glares. But in his own self-portraits, Peale shows himself looking impatient, severe, and more than a little angry; his is a compelling image. In August 1776, after a visit to Peale’s Philadelphia studio, John Adams described “Peele” to his wife, Abigail, as “a tender, soft, affectionate Creature.” Scholars frequently cite this quotation as complimentary to Peale. It is not. Adams was the author of the most famous statement about the arts in American history: that he “must study war and politics that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy,” and only the generation after could have “a right to study painting, poetry, music.” The Spartan revolutionary generation could not expend energy on inessentials like the arts; American art would come from those who had the privilege of living in the Republic.This was the most Adams would allow, and he begrudged culture to posterity only fatalistically, seeing in it the inevitable decline of society into wealth, luxury, and complacency.22 In the year of independence, Adams’s description of the thirty-five-yearold “Peele” was no compliment. All of Adams’s adjectives describing Peale were insults. At best, he was describing an effeminate man, at worst a woman, and “Creature” unmanned Peale altogether. Creature and create, words with the same root, originally had a meaning in a theology that derived from their opposition; Raymond Williams explains that “the ‘creature’—who has been created,—cannot himself create.” The creature, like a mule, was defined by its sterility. Moreover, in the derogatory political usage of the eighteenth century, creature alluded to a placeman, a patronage appointee whose parasitism was anathema to revolutionary republicanism based on individual talent. Peale, Adams intimated, was a “creature” (slave would be a slightly

“I Bring Forth into Public View”

•

173

figure 48. Rembrandt Peale, Charles Willson Peale, 1811. Oil on canvas, 293⁄4 × 241⁄2 in. The Historical Society of Pennsylvania Collection, Atwater Kent Museum of Philadelphia, Bequest of Mrs. John J. Henry. Courtesy of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.

stronger equivalent) of the arts and fashion. I have already cited Adams’s further description of Peale in his 1776 letter to Abigail, which nonetheless bears repeating: Peale “has Vanity—loves Finery—Wears a sword—gold Lace—speaks French.” He was wasting republican capital, both actual and intellectual, in spending money on such aristocratic frivolities. In the vocabulary of Anglo-American revolutionary opprobrium, he was dependent, lacking autonomy and the power of reason on which it was based. Furthermore, his activities bore no relation to the public good; soft descends through its opprobrious meanings to finally signal Peale’s basic impotence.23 It is not known if Adams’s comments got back to Peale, since they were written in a family letter. Peale did not mention Adams’s visit either in his contemporaneous diary or later autobiography, perhaps because he was aware of Adams’s condescension, and omitted him from his record. (Peale painted Adams sometime in 1791–94 but made no comments about his sitter.) Had he known of it, Peale, making his way as an artist and a naturalist amid the politics of the early Republic, would have recognized the seriousness of that attack and have suspected the aesthetic terms of Adams’s polemic. The politics of the early Republic, personified by the split between Adams and Jefferson, was frequently fought out on the terrain of culture and science. Science became politicized to the point that Jeffersonians and

174

•

Part III

Federalists conducted a lengthy and acrimonious debate about the utility of natural history, with reference to such specific episodes as Peale’s exhumation of the mastodon in 1801. In 1804 Raphaelle Peale met John Adams in Quincy, Massachusetts, and discussed his theories of the mammoth’s evolution with the former president. Adams responded that “my Mind is too anxious for the precarious State of my Country and for the afflicted and distressed State of my family, to be enough at Ease for Speculations about Mammoths . . . or fossils[,] Statues or Coins—These are all pitifull Bagatelles, when the Morals and Liberties of the Nation are at hazard.” This is a concise statement of the sharp distinction Adams drew between the state and culture, with the state as the exclusive organizer of civic life; on the left, Rush conceived of a similarly “statist” solution with his “republican machine.” Raphaelle may have recognized Adams’s impatience and reported on it to his father after he had visited Massachusetts.24 Adams, framing his attack in aesthetic terms, was able both to laugh at Peale and to signal that the expression of his very person violated normative behavior. As Terry Eagleton has written, “If politics and aesthetics, virtue and beauty [in the eighteenth century], are deeply at one, it is because pleasurable conduct is the true index of successful hegemony. . . . The maladroit or aesthetically disproportioned thus signals in its modest way a certain crisis of political power.” Peale, however, realized that the aesthetic was fluid, historicized, and contested terrain; the appearance of the subject could always be re-formed aesthetically, just as it could be reformed hygienically.25 The artist’s late self-portraits uncannily argue back across the gap of nearly fifty years, refuting Adams point by point. Peale maximizes his size by using tight close-ups in the bust portraits and angling his shoulders and torso so that they appear larger. In The Artist in His Museum he swells his stature with the ballooning drape of his coat as it curves open from his upraised right arm down to the swallowtail. In each portrait, the head is dominant. Peale’s clothes, neither foppish, luxurious, nor effeminate fancy dress, are so severe that they barely exist at all: they are simply black cloth pedestals supporting that mighty head. They enlarge his size while also emphasizing the self-discipline that allows Peale to claim such a commanding position. Finally, Peale’s militant aspect is matched by the direct, conquering intelligence and energy of his gaze. Peale is not hidden like some freak of nature; he himself triumphantly raises the curtain to reveal the world he has made. Nothing in any of these self-portraits is tender, soft, uxorious, or recessive. If Adams’s description feminized and emasculated Peale, Peale projected himself as heroically masculine. Here was one revolutionary hero who had not left his post. He was an eagle, not a swan.

“I Bring Forth into Public View”

•

175

All portraits exclude as much as they reveal. Peale’s late self-portraits obliterate the historicity of their subject by dramatically changing the terms by which Peale conceptualized portraiture. Stylistically, the self-portraits are markedly different from his commissioned portraits of this time. Those of the Clerc family (1822) and Joseph Bonaparte (1824) are as amiably bland and as agreeably pleasing as most of his colonial portraiture, done sixty years earlier. Indeed, Peale cannot be said to have evolved as a stylist over his career. While he improved with practice, what distinguished one portrait from the other, other than time and subject, was the quantity of effort and attention that he put into them. The hands whose work brings into being Peale’s conceptualization of himself are linked to the severity of his mien in the late self-portraits. Contra Lubin, those hands are not instruments for solipsistic sexual gratification but the enabling mechanisms for Peale’s consciousness: they brought into existence the things we see, and the world itself.26 The emphasis on the hands also points us to what Peale omits from these portraits. The famous duality of eighteenth-century morals and aesthetics is the head and the heart. By twinning heads with hands in these late selfportraits, Peale emphasizes that he is leaving out the heart. In his famous “Head and Heart” letter of October 1786 to Maria Cosway, Thomas Jefferson wrote, as part of the head’s argument, “This is not a world to live at random in as you [the heart] do. . . . [Y]ou must look forward before you take a step which may interest our peace. Everything in this world is a matter of calculation.” And Jefferson continues in a way that anticipates the representation of his ideas by Peale in The Artist in His Museum: The most effectual means of being secure against pain is to retire within ourselves, and to suffice for our own happiness.Those, which depend on ourselves, are the only pleasures a wise man will count on: for nothing is ours which another may deprive us of. Hence the inestimable value of intellectual pleasures. Ever in our power, always leading us to something new, never cloying, we ride, serene and sublime, above the concerns of this mortal world, contemplating truth and nature, matter and motion, the laws which bind up their existence, and that eternal being who made and bound them up by these laws. Let this be our employ. Leave the bustle and tumult of society.

Jefferson was breaking off his relationship with Maria Cosway after his love affair with her in Paris. In posing the solitariness of the head against the sociability of the heart, he engaged in special pleading to convince Maria (and himself ) that he was rejecting her only for the purity of the mind. As we have seen, Peale, in his courtships, did not see marriage in sentimentalized

176

•

Part III

and romantic terms. Marriage served a function for him in which the head and heart did not have to be separated because the primacy of the head was never questioned. The heart had a mechanical function: it always supported the head.27 In Jefferson’s argument in favor of the head, note the throwaway confidence of his “Ever in our power,” redolent of Enlightenment mastery and the rationalist’s sense that nature does not exist until man interrogates it. The basis of that power is the self-containment and autonomy in which the mind operates, an autonomy suggested in Peale’s late self-portraits by those spotlighted heads and that severe, black garb within which the body disappears. It is established and heightened in The Artist in His Museum by Peale’s liminal distance from the social scene he lifts the curtain to reveal. Yet Peale’s pose is not as antisocially self-contained as Jefferson suggested when he advocated that we retire within ourselves. Instead, Peale’s head and hands created the “world in miniature” that he presents to his audience and to posterity. His creation moves from the empirically specific to a lofty ideological statement about American nature and the government of man. Peale’s conception of nature and its display was in the details. He fabricated the cases that held the museum’s specimens, and he created the diorama scenes in which the preserved animals were seen in simulacra of their native habitats. In The Artist in His Museum, Peale turns his back to the painting materials laid on the table, symbolizing his 1794 retirement as a professional portraitist. Instead, he faces the wild turkey and box of taxidermist’s implements with which he built his museum’s collection and thus his own roles as a conqueror of nature (like the bald eagle) and an interpreter of America. Peale’s pose in The Artist in His Museum echoes that in his failed portrait of William Pitt. In Pitt the statesman gestured to arcane and concrete symbols of English liberty. In The Artist Peale replaces dead precedent with the living lessons of natural history, as organized and presented by Peale himself. In the harmony of the museum, the visitor found a laboratory of good society and values, especially harmony—values the museum would transmit to the society at large, for it was both a model and a school.28 But the stability of the collection, mirroring the situation of American society at large, was constantly at war with the chronology of geographical and intellectual expansion in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Assumptions that the museum promised “totality” or stopped time deny the historicity of Peale’s museum, whose conception of American society, both quantitative and qualitative, was an ongoing process; the museum expressed a dialectic between stasis and change that represented order and con-

“I Bring Forth into Public View”

•

177

trol. If the museum was a static picture of classification—a haven in a world of bewildering change—it also was a picture of the continuing conquest of hearts, minds, and land during the United States’ early period. Simultaneously, it managed the terms and justifications by which those multiple conquests were carried out, creating intellectual and physical order out of randomness and chaos. As we have seen, at the most literal level, the violence of nature and natural history was elided by the presentation of expertly preserved specimens according to the scientific system of Linnaeus. Socially, the fractious political history of the Republic was subsumed by the “natural” harmonies created by Peale’s organization of the museum’s space.29 Depicting the Long Room in The Artist in His Museum, Peale cleared the floor of exhibits and exhibit cases to emphasize the recessional gridwork of the bird cases. Peale sacrificed literal accuracy (excluding, for example, his waxwork figures of various indigenous races and peoples as well as his collection of sculpture) to make the bird cases the visual metonym of American expansion. An account in the Port Folio, a Federalist journal, indicates that once Peale moved to the Long Room and organized his collection systematically, he was able to achieve the effect of clarity and order he wanted to convey to his audience. The Port Folio had previously criticized the museum for its “deplorable want of scientifick arrangement, and occasionally, perhaps a sort of carelessness or childishness in the choice of many of the articles.” Notice how disorder is associated with childishness, while adulthood necessitates order and rationality. The clergyman Manasseh Cutler, in a visit to the museum when it was on Lombard Street, left a description that echoes the Port Folio’s account of the museum’s cluttered early years. The room, he wrote in his journal, “was very long, but not very wide”; it had “no windows, nor floor [ceiling] over it, but is open to the roof which is two or three stories.” He went on to list Peale’s specimens in the haphazard order in which they were displayed. But over time, and especially with the move to the Long Room in the State House, Peale organized the museum both physically and intellectually, following the natural history texts of Linnaeus and Alexander Wilson. In 1807 the Port Folio was happy to change its opinion and credit Peale with his scientific and social achievement: “But every Opinion or Prejudice of this sort has long since vanished away. The Museum now is entitled, not merely to the candid, but careful attention of every friend to Genius, and every lover of nature. A visit to this interesting collection of curiosities will amply reward the inquisitive stranger, and will detain awhile, from other joys, even the vacant city lounger.” Peale altered his depiction of the Long Room only slightly for vi-

178

•

Part III

sual effect; the Federalist Port Folio would have been happy to criticize him had he not succeeded in creating an organized and visually stimulating museum at the State House.30 In The Artist in His Museum, the curtain is again central to Peale’s presentation of order. By democratizing the collection, placing the presentation of nature and science on a modern footing in which attendance was open to the public and responsive to the market, Peale was in a sense removing the damask curtain, an expensive fabric redolent of aristocratic privilege and exclusion. In the painting, the curtain’s luxurious cloth contrasts with the cloth of common and utilitarian baize that Peale has laid on the table; from its use in offices the term bureaucracy ultimately derives.31 In his museum, Peale was bureaucratizing and rationalizing the natural world along the same organizational precepts that were emerging in the modern economy. He depended on admission fees and thus the market for his museum’s day-today support. He presented individual items for visual sale, but the point of the museum was to collate the disparate into a collective. Peale, hidden in plain sight, provided the “hidden hand” that organized culture for the early Republic and a modernizing America. The ranks of cases contain and organize even as they expand infinitely along the axes of their right-angled triangle. The cases present nature to the viewer with the same chaotic rationality—the ordering of the unorderable— that the capitalist market imposed on society in the production and consumption of goods and services. A metaphor of the market, the museum’s cases most literally resemble the famous gridwork street pattern that nineteenthcentury American city planners imposed on urban centers to rationalize urban space; New York imposed the grid north of Washington Square in its urban plan of 1808, and Philadelphia was rebuilt according to the grid after 1816. Projected westward, frequently ignoring local topography, the grid became the model by which the infinite space of America was organized and controlled, made fit for habitation and commerce. Peale’s museum was the repository for the trophies, objects, and specimens that derived from and celebrated western expansionism. It became the semiofficial recorder of American expansionism, receiving the specimens and artifacts collected by the U.S. government’s first official explorations: the Lewis and Clark expedition, Zebulon Pike’s survey of the Southwest, the Stephen A. Long expedition, and the South Seas exploring (Wilkes) expedition. In The Artist in His Museum Peale faces what would be the west, signaling his role in controlling America’s twin tendencies toward “boundlessness and consolidation.”32 The grid, the impulse to order space and thereby to order human nature,

“I Bring Forth into Public View”

•

179

runs throughout modernizing societies. Nothing in nature is straight. Straight lines and right angles became the way for modern man to impress himself on the landscape and order it. The grid is the organizing precept of the public sphere because it appears to be neutral, just as the market is supposedly neutral. Yet the imposition of the street grid on older cities like Philadelphia meant the eradication of existing patterns of culture and economy as well as the changing of traffic patterns. The link between city planning, moral reform, and social control was a constant in nineteenth-century Western culture, culminating in the great modernist rebuilding programs such as Haussmann’s Paris. The plan for order promised by the grid was crucial to structuring other institutions in modernizing societies, from economic entities such as the first factories to cultural institutions such as Peale’s museum. There was another pictorial and cultural dimension to Peale’s presentation of the museum’s space as a grid, one that received its fullest development in the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s new model prison, the Panopticon. Bentham’s panoptic prison was designed to inculcate right reason, thereby instilling correct patterns of behavior, not just because it was predicated on an omniscient observer. Rather, the omniscient observer worked in conjunction with a floor plan that kept inmates isolated in ranks and rows of cells. This isolation broke the recalcitrant, the irresponsible, and the criminal; it constituted “a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example.” Bentham’s utopian scheme “worked” only because of the physical structure in which the inmates were kept under the all-seeing yet invisible eyes of wardens. The system created the illusion that there was a one-to-one relationship (“mind over mind”) between the hidden jailer and the inmate, who, feeling shame, would resolve to accord with the mores of his unseen supervisor. Like most totalizing utopian schemes, its main effect was to gratify the hearts and minds of its operators, not least because it maintained their illusion that they were benevolently treating a mass population as autonomous individuals and that they were in control of the world’s anomalies.33 In The Artist in His Museum, Peale created the landscape that utilitarianism desired. The cell-like specimen cases, with their unseeing “inmates” fully open to view, allowed his museum’s audience the spectacle of wild and chaotic nature deracinated and ordered into comprehensible, manageable categories. Nature once possessed, and man’s mastery of it was confirmed by the Long Room’s visual display, the rows of human images surmounting the natural history specimens, could assume its social purpose. As Peale stated in his 1823 “Lectures on Natural History”: “The study of Natural His-

180

•

Part III

tory will aid us to escape from the prejudices of ignorance, and convince us that nothing was made in vain. We shall discover that, what at first sight appeared unnecessary or injurious is really of the greatest utility. We shall find that the very discords tend to preserve the harmony of the System, and that throughout, the order of nature, is, the order of unerring, and unchanging wisdom.” Domesticated nature, as Peale exhibited and depicted it, became intellectual use value, ideological capital expended in creating the hegemonic apparatus of the new nation. The harmony exhibited by the museum’s natural history specimens was a heuristic device for interpreting and normalizing human behavior and social institutions, just as gridwork streets imposed order on traffic and building. Natural history colonized the social world. Since civil society was simply a component of the natural world, social and political conflict dissolved in a conception of nature as benign, harmonious, rational, and ordered.34 The naturalizing tendency implicit in The Artist in His Museum also had universalist political implications. The portraits hanging above the exhibition cases in the picture that celebrated man’s power to order nature also represented man’s position as part, the superior part, to be sure, of the natural world. The double row of portraits on the upper left was Peale’s “Collection of Great Men,” his portrait series of eminent Americans and especially of the Founders, most of them painted shortly after the ratification of the Constitution from 1791 to 1794 (now at the Second Bank of the United States, Independence National Historical Park Collection, Philadelphia). Although indistinct and unidentifiable (the portraits are clearer in Figure 45), the subjects in this series were the political and military leaders of the Revolution and the constitutional period, including John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and Benjamin Franklin as well as lesser lights such as Generals Knox and de Kalb. Despite Peale’s politics as a nonactivist Democratic-Republican, his gallery was ecumenical and nonpartisan. As Marcia Pointon has written, the public or quasi-public portrait gallery, besides its other functions, “deployed portraits in the interests of marking continuity in a world of discontinuities.” Portraits mark continuity but also exclude and eradicate discontinuity. For instance, in the watercolor of the Long Room, the last portrait on the far wall is of “Miss Harvey” an albino entertainer, “a wonderful production of nature.” While Harvey was not quite a freak of nature, she was close enough to a lusus naturae to be excluded from the finished painting’s “official” version of the Long Room. Discontinuities between men were also erased in the Long Room. The spiky personal and political relationships of Adams, Jefferson, and Hamilton were transcended by the placement of their portraits in the harmonious atmo-

“I Bring Forth into Public View”

•

181

sphere of Peale’s museum. The uniform format and framing of Peale’s “worthies” as well as their arrangement in two long unbroken ranks further systematized the images to strengthen the political point. Peale’s museum as a whole, and the “Gallery of Famous Men” as part of it, made a metapolitical statement, in which faction disappeared and politics was first sacralized into the national myth and then naturalized so that the Republic appeared inevitable and inviolate. To reinforce this sense of uniformity, Peale adopted the bust portrait in oval that Hogarth had devised to synthesize sculpture and painting.35 An exact analogy of the museum to the Panopticon fails because this asylum had no inmates; nature had already been broken down to serve society’s needs, not the least of which was the desire to display the trophies of conquest. With these trophies mutely displayed, there was no “mind to mind” dialectic at the museum such as Bentham envisioned between warders and inmates. Indeed, Peale’s version of the Panopticon reversed the relationship Bentham envisioned. In Bentham’s plan, individual inmates confronted the normative values of society and right reason embodied in the figure of the invisible, hence omnipresent, warder. In his museum, Peale abstracted nature, displaying it openly to the anonymous, hence invisible, crowds that thronged his exhibition rooms. That confrontation would improve viewers. But artistically, Peale’s portrayal of himself in The Artist in His Museum adds another level to his panoptic desires. In the painting, Peale is the omniscient warden who demonstrates the order and harmony of the world to viewers who need his civilizing gaze. Besides the Long Room, Peale’s picture extends the framed space forward, makes us its inmates. When Peale considered subtitling his museum “The Medicinal Office of the Mind,”36 he continued his tendency to justify the institution on the combination of utilitarian and universalistic grounds that characterized many of the liberal Enlightenment’s plans for social improvement. He also signaled that the population that would be educated and improved—or “cured,” to use the medicalized language of social reform—was the American public. Science, contra Jefferson, was not a world of pure intellect to which the lone scholar would retreat to escape society and the competing demands of the head and heart. The background figures in The Artist in His Museum are proxies for Jefferson’s “bustle and tumult of society,” and they embody emotions and attitudes that Peale denies himself in his severe self-depiction. The background figures in the painting are all indistinct; their indistinctness, however, served Peale’s purpose of making them generalized representatives of the public. Although they are static, there is an implicit connection between them as Peale, moving them through the mechanism of

182

•

Part III

his museum, makes their separate narratives coalesce. They represent the ideal public. The background’s male figures are conventional types. The single man with his arms folded is the least readable because he is the most distant.Technically, he might have been included to make up the numbers so that the figures would be arrayed on a forty-five-degree line from the cabinets on the left to the back wall. Peale used a “painter’s quadrant” to line out the painting’s perspectives in his watercolor study; this mechanical adherence to linear proportions was carried out in the finished painting. Peale wrote that he included the figures only as they were “sufficient for the perspective of the room.” Despite this technical explanation, Peale wanted the background figures to be representative. For instance, it has been suggested that the single man, with his folded arms and slightly insouciant stance, represents the ornithologist Alexander Wilson, who died in 1813. Peale had painted Wilson in a similar pose, but from the front instead of the side and with a hat, in Exhuming the First American Mastodon. Wilson used Peale’s museum as a resource for his American Ornithology, whose entries are keyed to the cabinets at the museum. One could also say that there is an air of knowingness about the man that suggests he is an experienced ornithologist, at home among familiar specimens and classifications.37 Except for the folded arms, however, nothing identifies the single man as Wilson. Peale wanted generalized effects in his background figures. He says of this figure in a letter simply that “at the further end is a figure of meditation, a man with folded arms looking at the birds.” The single man thus represents the educated layman or autodidact, confident but always willing to refresh his mind or learn something new from nature. Deriving a personality from the context in which he is placed, he does not represent the disorder, anomie, and propensity for violence that single young men have inflicted on society through the ages: the museum socializes the young man. It is the context that gives meaning to the pose. A man striking that pose in a genre scene, looking at a prizefight or a card game, would convey a diametrically different message. Perhaps Peale was attempting to convey just this fragility of the distinctions between high and low, order and disorder, in positioning the single man as he did. Although Peale says that the man is looking at the birds, he actually stands facing the back doorway, vacillating between continuing his autodidactic tour of the museum and leaving. Herbert Muscamp writes, “[A] door is seldom just a door, nor merely an abstract geometrical form. It is also a social and psychological device that pivots us between our outer and inner worlds. A threshold is a metaphoric as well as literary boundary.” But the out-of-doors was al-

“I Bring Forth into Public View”

•

183

ways a temptation in America. It required discipline and restraint to resist it.38 The man’s folded arms indicate confidence over what he surveys, but they also wrap him up in a way that exemplifies the protective armor of bourgeois reticence and self-containment, a containment that always threatens to fly apart if one fails to master one’s emotions and appetites. In an interesting analogue to this stance, in Peale’s Mastodon the middle-class spectators stand almost uniformly with arms hidden or tight to the body, while the laboring men in the pit work, their arms bare and active. If the will slips, the social consequence is dreadful: downward mobility. The pit’s edge on which the spectators stand in Exhuming the First American Mastodon is narrow, always threatening to crumble. Self-control requires constant willpower and frequent visits to Peale’s museum, which enforces the discipline required for the “hygiene of the self.” Following the line of figures forward in The Artist in His Museum, the tableau of father and son is a model of patriarchal instruction. We can reliably conclude that Peale meant it to show, among other things, what was next for the single man as he progressed through his life cycle and became a father. The father’s instructing right hand transmits the knowledge of Peale’s museum—the gesture is similar to Peale’s own—even as the embracing action of the left arm signifies the new belief, based on the writings of Rousseau, that a child’s education should not be coercive but should proceed by the father’s guidance and the child’s emulation. The book the boy holds makes him not a passive receptor of rote knowledge but an active participant in developing his own mind as he grapples with problems and texts. (The book might be Peale’s own Guide to the Philadelphia Museum, which was available gratis to all visitors. Because the pair looks at the bird cases, it would be a nice touch if the book was the painting’s reference to Alexander Wilson and his American Ornithology.) The new pedagogy was predicated on a style of parenting in which the direct exercise of patriarchal authority and the maintenance of parental distance, both physical and emotional, were muted by a more companionate relation between parent, especially father, and child. Peale specified in his writing that the two were father and son, avoiding any possibility that the older man would be taken for a schoolteacher, a tutor, or some other instrumental figure. David Steinberg makes the point that in Peale’s family portraits women hold books and teach. This is true of the domestic portraits, but in public it was important for Peale to show how the new-model father molded his son by linking ideas in books with ideas in nature.39 In contrast to the male figures in The Artist in His Museum, who fulfill

184

•

Part III

largely stock allegorical functions, the single woman is a more problematic subject. Peale describes her as “dressed in plain rich silk,” a seeming contradiction that actually gets at the heart of the Quaker experience in the Atlantic economies from the mid–eighteenth to the mid–nineteenth century. In the secular world, the Friends’ doctrinal adherence to plainness in all things warred with their success in the marketplace; as a joke told to me by a descendant of Quakers has it, “The best gray is silk.” Thus the “quaker lady” is a middle- or upper-class woman well dressed in silk and distinguished by her gesture of upraised hands. Her presence is noteworthy, first, because she is a woman. Peale’s audience, in his marketing of a cultural and educational product as widely as possible, was the entire public, including women both singly and in families. Not only was a female audience good business, but it also buttressed Peale’s moderate position on women’s rights, which, while recognizing the separate spheres, maintained that women could and should be educated and could even pursue careers.40 Unlike the men in the painting, the woman is not facing the bird cabinets. Whereas the men are tableaux, the woman is caught pivoting away from the birds, left heel still lifted. Upon “seeing the mammoth skeleton [she] is in the action of astonishment” and raises her hands. All the male figures have a common sense of knowingness, as if rationality were an innate male characteristic. The woman’s reaction is pure emotion. Peale, pursuing the motif evident in his depiction of his own hands, pays particular heed to the figures’ gestures: the single man’s folded arms indicate a quiet, confident, and earned mastery; the father’s hands direct his son and enfold him into the world of learning; and the son dutifully holds a book, a symbol of his acceptance of his apprenticeship. The woman’s hands, contrastingly, are caught in a sudden reflexive gesture as she raises them when she first sees the mastodon skeleton.41 The prevalent modern interpretation of the woman’s action is that Peale was gendering the emotions along indivisible lines: men are rational and calm, women, emotional and excitable; men are in control, women never; the male body is depicted reverentially, the woman’s is the object of jokes. The background figures, in this interpretation, are alienated from each other. They will become more alienated, for the painting supposedly indicates progress recessionally toward the goal of the single man’s cultivated autonomy.42 But Peale, as we saw in the preceding chapter, did not intend that men should be autonomous monads. Male autonomy, in Peale’s worldview, required the platform of the family to focus it and temper its exercise. All of Peale’s work celebrated the individual within the socializing institutions,

“I Bring Forth into Public View”

•

185

especially the family, of the larger culture. It is more logical that the painting implies, not a linear and recessive movement, but a movement of the two single figures toward each other, so that they intersect at the equidistant spot held by father and son, fusing into a complete family by the marriage of reason and emotion. Gender aside, everyone in the early Republic was astonished by the “mammoth,” or mastodon, as it was correctly classified: the shock of the new recurs continually in modern times. Peale’s identification of emotion with the figure of the woman and reason with the figures of the men cannot be denied. But what emotion, exactly, is the woman expressing? Peale writes it is “astonishment.” Laura Rigal cleverly argues that it is “awe,” mirroring the attitude Peale expected to elicit from any viewer who gazed up at his “mammoth self-projection.”43 Neither awe nor “wonder” is far from Peale’s “astonishment.” But without Peale’s letter, would we see the woman as enacting awe or wonder? Setting aside Peale’s literary gloss and considering the woman alone, does she not express a more elemental emotion? One unintended by the artist that nonetheless derives logically from his own self-portrayal? Namely, fear.44 The woman’s hands have flown upward in the classic stance of fending off and shocked rebuff. (Some artistic license has to be granted Peale here. It would have been impossible for a spectator not to have seen the skeleton on ducking under the curtain. The unlikely presumption is that, engrossed in the birds, she has stepped crabwise down the cabinets before turning.) She is reacting to the mastodon skeleton as monstrous in two senses, literal and epistemological. Remember that the mastodon was shocking to earlynineteenth-century spectators both in its physical appearance and in its mysterious origins. It was not yet firmly established that the mammoth/ mastodon was not carnivorous; one of Peale’s early names for the beast was the “Carnivorous Elephant of the North.” Its huge tusks and massive head literally threatened the viewer. Rembrandt Peale measured the museum’s skeleton at eleven feet high, seventeen feet wide, and thirty-one feet from the “point of the tusks to the end of the tail.” Its physicality was heightened by its metaphysical menace. A contemporary viewer might have been reminded of Dr. Frankenstein’s reaction to his creature: “I beheld the wretch—the miserable monster whom I had created. He held up the curtain of the bed; and his eyes, if eyes they may be called, were fixed on me. His jaws opened. . . . Oh! No mortal could support the horror of that countenance. . . . [I]t became a thing such as even Dante could not have conceived.”

186

•

Part III

Note Mary Shelley’s use of the curtain to emphasize that what is concealed is always unsettling, if not actually horrible; museums and public displays used curtains so that viewers would not happen unprepared on scenes or lusus naturae.45 The epistemological problem faced viewers once they got over their initial shock (as the woman in the painting will do by the guidance of male authority figures): how to accommodate the mastodon in nature’s order. The importance of the “mammoth” was that Peale’s recovery and reassembly of its bones permitted its reclassification by the French scientist Georges Cuvier as the extinct mastodon. In paleontology and the evolution of the species, the mastodon was convincing evidence that nature was ever changing. Although it was classified and established as extinct in 1809, the public in 1822 would have known only that the structure of nature was no longer certain and inviolate. Moreover, the existence of the mastodon meant that there were probably other gaps—possibly huge ones—in nature. That nothing in science had yet replaced the unified theory of the “Great Chain of Being” compounded the sense of uncertainty. The woman, turning from the order of the bird cases, is caught between the certainty of the past and the unknown embodied in the great skeleton. She throws up her hands, not in awe or wonder but in fearful reaction to a world whose basis can no longer be comprehended.46 It is Peale’s protean figure that resolves the uncertainties of the world for both men and women. Yet Peale, for once, revealed too much of himself in his depiction of the “quaker lady.” If the mastodon is an elemental, monstrous fact of nature, so, finally, is Peale. While men, including Peale, were socialized by their assimilation of the “hygiene of the self” and their roles as public citizens, a man did not have to be in control in exercising his patriarchal duties in the home. Peale’s link to the woman is not just matrimonial but also bluntly sexual. It is intriguing that he identifies the woman specifically as a Quaker and that he describes her in terms similar to those he used for his third wife, the Quaker Hannah Moore. Hannah is, he wrote to John Isaac Hawkins in 1805, “a Plain friend.”47 While scholarly attention has focused on the male figure who is supposedly Alexander Wilson, no one has suggested an identity for the “quaker lady,” but it seems plausible that Peale would code a reference to his recently deceased wife into The Artist in His Museum and recall (perhaps with the aid of his letterbook copies) his first descriptions of Hannah. In an 1805 letter to Raphaelle, Peale elaborated on his description of Hannah, calling her a “friend and . . . as plain as any amongst friends.” Plain here describes Hannah’s features as opposed to her dress or the dress of the

“I Bring Forth into Public View”

•

187

“quaker lady,” and Peale typifies most (“as any”) of the females of the sect as plain. This sexualizes the conversation, and there is a pun in that “amongst friends” to drive the point home. When Peale described his wedding to Hannah, he characterized his bride as afraid to the point of collapse, ascribing Hannah’s condition to her belief that she violated the tenets of her faith by marrying an outsider. Religion may have been a problem for Hannah, but it is hard not to discern in her reaction an element of sexual fright. She was fifty, and Peale described her situation bluntly as that of “what in common acceptation is termed an old Maid.” Peale’s courtship of her was unexpected and whirlwind: they met in June, were engaged by July 17, and married August 12. Peale was sixty-four and still sexually vigorous. His previous wife, Elizabeth DePeyster had died in childbirth February 19, 1804. She died in a particularly horrific fashion: after an overlong pregnancy, “a rupture of the Uterus took place,” killing both mother and child. Hannah, with reason, may have feared suffering not only the same fate but the acts that preceded it.48 Conversely, however, sex was also a way of ensuring the power of the patriarch. Familially, Peale was again addressing and rebuking Raphaelle by extolling marriage and portraying a powerful masculinity in the painting. Peale chastised his son in the painting (as he did continually in his letters) for the lax and careless way he ran his household and family, especially his troubled relationship with his wife, Martha (Patty) McGlathery. Raphaelle failed to follow Charles Willson Peale’s carefully explicated rational programs for what his paintings called Domestic Happiness (Philadelphia, 1812) and The Means of Preserving Health (Philadelphia, 1803). Raphaelle was frequently unable to support his family, and Patty was reduced to begging from her father-in-law. Raphaelle’s decision to concentrate on still lifes rather than work steadily as a portraitist meant he could not have a steady income. His father interpreted the son’s decision as a willful rejection of success. Raphaelle, moreover, was feckless and unable to manage his money, his family, or himself according to his father’s strictures. Raphaelle was reported to have visited brothels (his father describes him seeking portrait patrons while at a “House of Rendevous,” that is, a brothel ), and he was known to drink. He was frequently incapacitated and hospitalized from ill health. In short, Raphaelle, throughout is life, in his father’s mind, engaged in “neglect of duty.” While masculinity is about gender and gender roles (“duty”), however, it is also most basically about sex: to “act the Man” has a forceful carnal meaning.49 Carnality had to be regulated through a well-ordered marriage and a wellregulated body. In 1804, between marriages and on a natural history trip

188

•

Part III

into Maryland, Peale searched for fossils and “he doth confess he had also in view another Bone.” This is a rare Peale pun, and the joke needs to be taken seriously. Searching for a “bone” refers to Eve’s creation out of Adam’s rib to act as his helpmate. Peale did not like being unmarried, and he was eager to find a wife (Hannah Moore, as it turned out) to succeed the recently deceased Elizabeth DePeyster. Peale liked his wife to maintain order in his household, so there is a literal sense here that Peale wanted a partner. Peale’s wife would be, as they all were, his creation as she fulfilled the tasks he set for her; his obituary tribute to Betsey was devoted to her organization of the linen closet. But Peale was also comparing himself to the original man, just as he alluded to the resemblance between himself and other protean figures, such as Noah or even God himself. When Peale reconstructed the mastodon skeletons, he wrote that producing the form out of the chaos of the swamp “would seem a second creation.” Peale skirted outright blasphemy through a Deism in which he was just the instrument of God’s purpose—a descendant from Adam, the first worker. Nonetheless, he showed here his power and dominion over others and nature. Peale was reconstructing a subject—the mastodon—but there was only a thin bright line, as in the painting itself, between his hubris and Dr. Frankenstein’s obsession with breathing life into dead bones. Finally, in Peale’s pun there was the ultimate source of all this power: a “bone” is an erection. Peale’s energy was ultimately founded in his sexuality. But he could satisfy his need for sexual relations only under the cover of a respectable marriage—hence the double meaning behind Peale’s need to find a “bone” and make a wife.50 It is, in part, the fear of male power (it can be said that Peale’s bald dome in The Artist in His Museum alludes to the phallus) that the single woman demonstrates in The Artist in His Museum. Given Peale’s insistence on the need (his need) for regular sexual discharge, one has to consider whether his unsatisfactory sexual life during the 1820s, when he was unmarried, contributed to the message of male power in the last self-portraits. Was Peale signaling his awareness, never expressed in his writing, that the converse of his male perspective on marriage and sexual congress meant pleasure for him and pain for the woman? Peale again reverses Raphaelle, who blocked men from seeing women by his “deceitful maze” in the Venus, which simultaneously raised and frustrated sexual desire. Peale, subconsciously but nakedly, reverses the gazer and the gazed, showing the woman reacting in shock at the hidden male body that will possess her, even in respectable marriage. The curtain in The Artist in His Museum separates the rational Peale from the animalistic Peale, suggesting, in the shadows to the right of the painting, the aspects of his character—his tendency toward “mauling”

“I Bring Forth into Public View”

•

189

others—that always had to be kept under wraps. In writing about his plan for the painting, Peale says that he wanted to make the mastodon “as conspicuous as possible,” but in the finished painting it is as obscured and hidden as the subconscious mind of the artist.51 • • •

The Artist in His Museum and Peale’s last self-portraits are a coda, forcefully bringing the arc of his career to a close and completing his lifelong concentration on self-presentation. We do not know much about how his contemporaries received these paintings. “For the Multitude” received critical comment when it was shown at the annual exhibition of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1824. An anonymous reviewer noted the few portraits exhibited and their generally poor quality; he commented that “yet the elder Peale is seen with interest, once more, lecturing upon the bone of the Mammoth,” but that “once more” suggests weariness or public indifference to Peale’s ongoing role as a naturalist/educator and museum keeper; unlike the “quaker lady,” viewers were not throwing up their hands in astonishment anymore. The ironic counterpoint to Peale’s flourish in painting himself as the instructing naturalist was his actual failure to find an audience for his teaching: a series of public lectures on natural history failed in 1823. Peale ascribed the failure to the multitude and multiplicity of exhibitions, shows, animal acts, and other public entertainments now available in Philadelphia. At the very moment of Peale’s artistic self-apotheosis, and in the midst of a letter describing the technical virtuosity he had achieved in The Staircase Self-Portrait, he interjected a poignant doubt: “But I may be mistaken in my abilities, as of late I find it the case, instance, lectures on Natural history.” The world Peale represented—the world of the American Enlightenment, with its total confidence that the world could be understood and mastered—was disappearing. It turned out that the connecting waters Peale envisioned in his near-utopian letter to Dr. Bradford did not just bind Americans together. They also left people behind.52 Peale’s fierce mien in these self-portraits compensated (or overcompensated) for the slippage of his position in the worlds of art and science. In positioning himself as society’s warden, he made himself a bulwark against what he perceived as impending moral and cultural decline. And personally, in his depiction of his body, he raged, like Canute, against aging and the onset of death; the flood that Peale held at bay in Exhuming the First American Mastodon and in Noah and His Ark now threatened to close over him.

190

•

Part III

When Peale emphasized that he did not use glasses in painting a self-portrait, he denied that he was slowing down and affirmed that he could overcome nature through an act of will. Despite this defiance, as his powers inevitably diminished, he feared the loss of his potency: Freud points out that men’s fear of losing their eyes is symbolic of the fear of castration.53 The slippage of Peale’s position even as he celebrated it is further evidenced by the museum’s abandonment of the Long Room and the State House. In 1826 Peale, desperate to put his museum on secure footing and tired of wrangling with a city government unwilling to accommodate the museum’s needs, contracted to move his collection to the new Arcade Building (Figure 49).The move illustrated the changing times as Peale’s museum left Philadelphia’s actual and symbolic civic center for a building that embodied the power of expansive merchant capitalism. (In 1824 the State House had been renamed Independence Hall, a name intended to evoke its status in the national memory instead of its function.) The Arcade, occupying an entire block in central Philadelphia, was a huge three-storied indoor space containing some sixty shops and retail outlets designed and built to provide a center of consumption. It was public space in the service of the market, and its expression of the division of labor undermined the universalistic ideology of Peale’s museum. In the Arcade, entry into the museum would become one of many consumer choices.The movement of Peale’s museum into the Arcade began the process of the museum’s decline from the ideal of a civic institution proposed by its founder. The ultimate dissolution of that ideal, and the museum itself, was the sale of the Peale museum’s collection in 1854 to P. T. Barnum, the master of sensation and publicity.54 In The Artist in His Museum Peale achieved the summation of his life and art, depicting both just before they disappeared. In the painting he avoided the social tension in Exhuming the First American Mastodon by focusing on his own figure. The antinomies—life and art, art and audience, individual and nation, past and present—in this painting are almost endless, and they are all mediated by the controlling figure of Charles Willson Peale. That he was able to hold these opposites in harmony for so long illustrates his ferocious willpower and his ability to govern others by governing himself. Yet the painting’s right side is shadowed, obscuring the reconstructed skeleton of the extinct mastodon. Contrary to Peale’s intention of making “as much & as conspicuous as possible the Skeleton of the Mamoth,” the completed painting reveals the skeleton only partially and darkly; the light that Peale so diligently constructed in the picture does not illuminate the skeleton. Peale hesitated between a full revelation of the skeleton and a treatment of it as a lusus naturae, a freak to be hidden behind a

“I Bring Forth into Public View”

•

191

figure 49. “The Philadelphia Arcade,” c. 1827. Unlocated woodcut reproduced in J. Thomas Scharf and Thompson Westcott, History of Philadelphia, 1609–1884 (Philadelphia, 1884).

curtain. Only by not considering it too closely could Peale reconcile his hieratic position with the questions the mastodon skeleton posed. Peale always had to appear in control. The final effect of the curtain in The Artist in His Museum is to quarantine Peale from the uncertainties he himself had uncovered. Mark Rothko has written about artistic facades, like The Artist in His Museum, that they simultaneously reveal and conceal. We have seen how this was the case in Peale’s careful presentation of himself to his audience and his concealment (despite surface transparency) of struggles of his life. The painting itself is packed with signs of Peale’s significance, but in it he is finally stilled and rendered inaccessible; Peale has finally painted himself into a corner, trapping himself in his own design. Nietzsche wrote of curtains and theaters that they both stimulate and limit, even dull, the senses and especially curiosity: “We looked at the drama . . . whose most profound meaning we almost thought we could guess and that we wished to draw away like a curtain in order to behold the primordial image behind it. . . . Its revelation, being like a parable, seemed to summon us to tear the veil and to uncover the mysterious background; but simultaneously this all-illuminated, total visibility cast a spell over the eyes and prevented them from penetrating

192

•

Part III

deeper.” Facades also express the limits of the artist’s self-scrutiny and selfknowledge. In his effort to stop time, both biographical and historical, in The Artist in His Museum, Peale succeeded by making the painting into an exhibition case holding his museum’s last specimen. In the painting, Peale finally became his own artifact. Literally and figuratively, the painting turned Peale into a relic of past time, preserving him as an image but draining him of his life. Peale’s awareness of the cost of this choice is shown in the painting’s shadowed background, which, like the tensions he coded into his portraits or the narrow edge of higher ground in the Mastodon painting, indicates a contingent and uncertain future—one where the manner in which Americans forged themselves would again have to be refashioned, in an ongoing process that has never stopped. The curtain Peale raised in such a magisterial act of self-definition was about to fall: “Hush these momentoes.”55

notes

The following abbreviations and short titles are used in the notes. CWP F

PP1

PP2

PP3

PP4

PP5

Charles Willson Peale Lillian B. Miller, ed., The Collected Papers of Charles Willson Peale and His Family (Millwood, N.Y., 1980), microfiche edition. This notation is followed by a colon and then a series designation, a card number, and a location letter and number. (E.g., in “F:IIB/14A12,” IIB would be the series designation, 14 the card number, A the location letter, and 12 the location number.) Lillian B. Miller, Sidney Hart, and Toby A. Appel, The Selected Papers of Charles Willson Peale and His Family. Volume 1: Charles Willson Peale. The Artist in Revolutionary America, 1735–1791 (New Haven, Conn., 1983). Lillian B. Miller, Sidney Hart, and David C. Ward, The Selected Papers of Charles Willson Peale and His Family. Volume 2: Charles Willson Peale. The Artist as Museum Keeper, 1791–1810 (New Haven, Conn., 1988). Lillian B. Miller, Sidney Hart, and David C. Ward, The Selected Papers of Charles Willson Peale and His Family. Volume 3: The Belfield Farm Years, 1810–1820 (New Haven, Conn., 1991). Lillian B. Miller, Sidney Hart, David C. Ward, and Leslie Reinhardt, The Selected Papers of Charles Willson Peale and His Family. Volume 4: Charles Willson Peale, His Last Years, 1821–1827 (New Haven, Conn., 1996). Sidney Hart and David C. Ward, The Selected Papers of Charles Willson Peale and His Family. Volume 5: The Autobiography of Charles Willson Peale (New Haven, Conn., 2000).

193

194 RaP RuP Sellers, CWP Sellers, P&M P&M Suppl.

•

Notes to Pages xvii–xviii

Raphaelle Peale Rubens Peale Charles Coleman Sellers, Charles Willson Peale (New York, 1969). Charles Coleman Sellers, Portraits and Miniatures by Charles Willson Peale (Philadelphia, 1962). Charles Coleman Sellers, Charles Willson Peale with Patron and Populace: A Supplement to Portraits and Miniatures by Charles Willson Peale with a Survey of His Work in Other Genres (Philadelphia, 1969).

preface 1. For the history of Peale’s manuscripts of his autobiography, see PP5:xvii– xxvii. On providence and nature in Franklin’s Autobiography, see Robert A. Ferguson, The American Enlightenment, 1750–1820 (Cambridge, Mass., 1997), p. 74. On p. 79 Ferguson discusses how at moments of crisis Franklin, like most of his peers, resorted to Providence to sanctify his actions and strengthen his resolve. 2. Exploring the relationship between the visual and the verbal in American art became a practical and intellectual issue in the 1990s. The intention was to widen the scope of art’s impact on American society, and it was especially useful for the potential such an approach held for gauging audience response. See David C. Miller, ed., American Iconology: New Approaches to NineteenthCentury Art and Literature (New Haven, Conn., 1993), pp. 1–17. 3. Ferguson, in The American Enlightenment, writes that “Revolutionary Americans use their faith in writing to stabilize the uncertain world in which they live” (p. 5). Ferguson is analyzing public writing, but I will argue similarly that personal writing can be used to stabilize the self and that Peale used it for this purpose. Neil Hertz, in his foreword to Sigmund Freud, Writings on Art and Literature (Stanford, Calif., 1997), has characterized Freud as saying that writing is “Oedipal, a coming to terms with the Father, a shouldering of the burden of the past” (p. x). I think this is only halfway correct: writing involves overcoming the terms of the father and shouldering the burden of the past by transcending it in the development of one’s own identity. When Peale attempted to claim the Digby inheritance (see below), he used a scribe, signifying that he had yet to develop his own voice and was replicating his father’s language and his life, continuing the fiction of the family’s gentility. As Peale started writing and preserving his archive, he confronted the burden of his father and threw it off by writing his self. As they pertain to Peale, these topics will be discussed in detail in the body of this book, and the sources for this summary will be placed where appropriate. On the crucial question of fame (fama) for the revolutionary generation,

Notes to Pages xx–xxii

•

195

see Douglass Adair, Fame and the Founding Fathers: Essays (New York, 1974), especially pp. 3–26. 4. Peale’s portraits are a gold mine for historians of early America who are looking for illustrations; see, for example, Stephen E. Ambrose, Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West (New York, 1996). The standard narrative life of Charles Willson Peale remains Sellers, CWP; for documentary material on the Peales, see the publications in microfiche and letterpress produced by the Peale Family Papers Project, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution (PP1, PP2, PP3, PP4, and PP5). Peale’s career is evidence in support of T. J. Clark’s acute observation that the key to modernism is not the “hiddenness of [Adam Smith’s] hidden hand; [but] rather, the visibility of that hiddenness—the availability to individual consciousness of more and more ‘information’”; T. J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven, Conn., 1999), p. 8. 5. The best examination of the many levels of meaning in The Artist in His Museum is Roger B. Stein, “Charles Willson Peale’s Expressive Design: The Artist in His Museum,” Prospects: An Annual of American Cultural Studies 6 (1981): 139–85. See also David C. Ward, “Celebration of Self: The Portraiture of Charles Willson Peal and Rembrandt Peale, 1822–1827,” American Art 7 (Winter 1993): 11–14. 6. The development of the American studies movement in the 1930s marked a shift from using Peale’s paintings primarily for biographical illustrations to considering them in their own right as manifestations of the richness of American art and culture. Studies such as James Thomas Flexner’s America’s Old Masters: First Artists of the New World (New York, 1939) were a nationalistically inspired act of recovery. As the second generation of American studies scholars reached maturity, interpretations widened beyond the demonstration that America had always had artists. In particular, Lillian B. Miller and Neil Harris did pathbreaking scholarship by providing the context in which early American artists worked; Lillian B. Miller, Patrons and Patriotism: The Encouragement of the Fine Arts in the United States, 1790–1860 (Chicago, 1966), and Neil Harris, The Artist in American Society: The Formative Years, 1790–1860 (New York, 1966). As the subtitles of these books suggest, both Miller and Harris worked in a nationalistic frame of reference, although the depth and breadth of their analysis elevated them above mere cheerleaders for American culture. Neither Miller nor Harris was an art historian, however, and they offered little analysis of works of art beyond the illustrative. Work on Peale remained framed by the celebratory paean written by the artist’s descendant, Charles Coleman Sellers. Sellers’s CWP, a two-volume biography of Peale, was published in 1949 and reissued, slightly condensed but otherwise unchanged, in 1969. It remains the sole biography of the artist. Sellers remains influential because Lillian B. Miller essentially picked up Sellers’s celebratory tone and added a gloss on the earlier biographer’s work in her many

196

•

Notes to Page xxii

writings on the Peale family: see, for instance, her largely uncritical survey “The Peales and Their Legacy, 1735–1885” in The Peale Family: Creation of a Legacy, 1770–1870, ed. Lillian B. Miller (New York, 1986), pp. 17–97. See Robert Hughes, American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America (New York, 1997), pp. 102–3, for a short version of the received art historical wisdom. An insightful critique of traditional Peale scholarship, pointing out the extent to which the older empiricism had outlived its usefulness, is David Rodney Brigham, “[Review] Lillian B. Miller and David C. Ward, eds., New Perspectives on Charles Willson Peale (Pittsburgh, 1991),” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 116 (April 1992): 244–47. I am especially indebted to Brigham for his exposure of the unconscious ideological assumptions made by many Peale scholars, including myself. Among the most influential new studies on Peale are Phoebe Lloyd, “Philadelphia Story,” Art in America (November 1998): 154–71, 195–203; Kenneth Haltman, “Figures in a Western Landscape: Reading the Art of Titian Ramsay Peale from the Long Expedition to the Rocky Mountains, 1819–1820” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1992); Susan Stewart, “Death and Life, in That Order, in the Works of Charles Willson Peale,” in The Cultures of Collecting, ed. John Elsner and Roger Cardinal (London, 1997), pp. 204–23; David Steinberg, “Charles Willson Peale: The Portraitist as Divine,” in New Perspectives on Charles Willson Peale, ed. Lillian B. Miller and David C.Ward (Pittsburgh, 1991), pp. 131–43. While much of this work has been extremely valuable, it is pervaded by a desire to shock. For instance, David Lubin, in Acts of Portrayal: Eakins, Sargent, James (New Haven, Conn., 1985), p. 165 n. 43, asserts that The Artist in His Museum portrays Peale as a showman and masturbator. Most dramatically, Lloyd has charged that Peale murdered his son Raphaelle in a fit of jealousy over the younger artist’s talent and wilfulness; Lloyd, “Philadelphia Story,” pp. 154–71, 195–203. The debate over Raphaelle Peale’s death and Lloyd’s charge against Charles Willson Peale of murder or manslaughter is summarized (complete with extensive bibliography) by David C. Ward and Sidney Hart in PP5:485–86. Ironically, Lloyd is herself an empiricist (she is now proposing that Raphaelle’s body be exhumed for DNA testing to settle the question of his death), and this limits her analytical ability, as Alexander Nemerov astringently noted; Alexander Nemerov, The Body of Raphaelle Peale: Still Life and Selfhood, 1812–1824 (Berkeley, Calif., 2001), p. 212 n. 15. While much recent Peale scholarship has had an ideological edge, countering the benign consensus view of the older work, some has proceeded without it. See especially Brandon Brahme Fortune, “Charles Willson Peale’s Portrait Gallery: Persuasion and Plain Style,” Word and Image 6 (October–December 1990), pp. 308–24, and “From the World Escaped: Peale’s Portrait of William Smith and His Grandson,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 25 (Summer 1992): 587–615; Ellen Miles and Leslie Reinhardt, “‘Art Conceal’d’: Peale’s Double Portrait of Benjamin and Eleanor Ridgely Laming,” Art Bulletin 78 (March 1996): 57–74.

Notes to Pages xxii–xxiii

•

197

My own work on Peale has shifted, like that of the wider scholarship, from an archival to a more analytical emphasis; see, for instance, Sidney Hart and David C. Ward, “The Waning of an Enlightenment Ideal: Charles Willson Peale’s Philadelphia Museum, 1790–1820,” Journal of the Early Republic 8 (1988): 389–418, and David C. Ward, “Charles Willson Peale’s Farm ‘Belfield’: Enlightened Agriculture in the Early Republic,” in Miller and Ward, New Perspectives, pp. 283–301. 7. See Henry May, The Enlightenment in America (New York, 1976), p. 359. Brodsky’s comment is in Joseph Brodsky, On Grief and Reason: Essays (New York, 1995), p. 300. I found the work of Pierre Bourdieu helpful in considering the extent to which an individual’s self-assertion can be expressed but also is constrained by societal limits; Pierre Bourdieu, Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action (Stanford, Calif., 1998), p. 2. 8. Paul de Man has argued that the actual life of an individual does not exist until it is written, that the structure of writing is necessary to the structuring of a life. This was the case, as I will argue in this book, for Charles Willson Peale. But while de Man’s logocentrism is provocative, it is useful only if a historicist dimension is added to his intellectual emphasis on a self-realization through writing. Paul de Man is quoted and summarized in Paul John Eakin, Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in the Art of Self-Invention (Princeton, N.J., 1985), pp. 185, 184–209; see also Bourdieu, Practical Reason, p. 2. Other studies on the relationship between self and autobiography are Robert F. Sayre, “Autobiography and the Making of America,” in Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, ed. James Olney (Princeton, N.J., 1980), pp. 146–68, and Herbert Leibowitz, Fabricating Lives: An Anatomy of American Autobiography (New York, 1989); and Ursula Frohne, “Strategies of Recognition: The Conditioning of the American Artist between Marginality and Fame,” in American Icons: Transatlantic Perspectives on Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century American Art, ed. Thomas W. Gaehtgens and Heinz Ickstadt (Santa Monica, Calif., 1992), pp. 217–23, which provides an overly structural view of the location of the artist in republican America. 9. Lionel Trilling, “Mansfield Park,” in The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent: Selected Essays, ed. Leon Weiseltier (New York, 2000), p. 301. Peale’s life demonstrates Foucault’s dictum that the “individual is an effect of power, and at the same time, or precisely to the extent to which it is that effect, it is the element of its articulation. The individual which power has constituted is at the same time its vehicle.” Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–77 (New York, 1980), p. 98. 10. In many ways, Peale’s life and art exemplify Keats’s concept of “negative capability.” John Keats to his brothers, August 1817, quoted in Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. George Watson (1906; reprint, London, 1993), p. 256. Coleridge’s use of Keats is directly useful to the discussion of Peale. Coleridge writes about Descartes: “Grant me a nature having two contrary forces, the one which tends to expand infinitely, while the other strives to apprehend or find itself in this infinity, and I will cause the world of intelli-

198

•

Notes to Pages xxiii–5

gences with the whole system of their representations to rise up before you” (p. 162). 11. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer (1782) (1925; reprint, New York, 1986), p. 69.

chapter 1. forging 1. The verdict against Charles Peale is in PP1:4–5. See Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, England, 1992), pp. xiv, 50–73. 2. Leon Radzinowicz, A History of English Criminal Law and Its Administration from 1750, 3 vols. (London, 1948), 1:146–59; William Shakespeare, Othello, 3.3.159–61; J. G. A. Pocock, quoted in Paul Baines, The House of Forgery in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London, 1999), p. 14. See also Constantine George Caffentzis, Clipped Coins, Abused Words, and Civil Government: John Locke’s Philosophy of Money (Brooklyn, N.Y., 1989), for the relationship between maintaining the value of coins and words. 3. See John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1997), for an example of this type of conservative historiography. A visual signpost of its recurrence was the National Gallery of Art exhibition The Treasure Houses of Britain and its catalogue; Gervase Jackson-Stops, ed., The Treasure Houses of Britain: 500 Years of Private Patronage and Art Collecting (Washington, D.C., 1986). See Raymond Williams, The English Novel (London, 1970), esp. pp. 9–23, for an initial literary deconstruction of the “Great House syndrome,” one that needs reapplication today. 4. For a discussion of money as a solvent of traditional relationships in this period, see E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture (New York, 1991), pp. 24, 33, 31; see also Linebaugh, The London Hanged, p. 115, for Walpole’s “Robinocracy.” 5. The little that we know about Charles Peale is unreliably recorded in Sellers, CWP, pp. 3–16. The construction of a genteel myth about Charles Willson Peale’s past, and its importance to the early history of American art, is dissected in Lance Lee Humphries, “Rachel Brewer’s Husband: Charles Willson Peale. The Artist in Eighteenth-Century American Society” (M.A. diss., University of Virginia, 1993), pp. 1–10; the Baines quote is from The House of Forgery, p. 22. The problem of identity and verification in early America has been explored by Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America (New Haven, Conn., 1982), pp. 1–32. 6. Linebaugh, The London Hanged, p. 95; Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York, 1975), p. 339; Abbot E. Smith, Colonists in Bondage: White Servitude and Convict Labor in America, 1607–1776 (1947; reprint, New York, 1971), pp. 110–35; Jack Kaminkow and Marion Kaminkow, eds., Original Lists of Emigrants in Bondage from London to the American Colonies, 1719–1744 (Baltimore, 1967), pp. 122, 192.

Notes to Pages 6–13

•

199

7. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom, pp. 295–315. 8. Sellers, CWP, pp. 8–10. 9. “Inventory of the Goods and Chattels of Charles Peale, July 17, 1751,” PP1:30–31. 10. Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740–1790 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1982), p. 60; Charles Peale to George Garnett, January 30, 1745/46, PP1:14. 11. PP1:12, 20, 27. 12. PP1:12, 20, 27. 13. PP5:4. For the responsibilities of the patriarchal head of the family, see Sidney Hart, “Charles Willson Peale and the Theory and Practice of the EighteenthCentury Family,” in The Peale Family: Creation of a Legacy, 1770–1870, ed. Lillian B. Miller (New York, 1986), pp. 112–17. Hart’s chapter, which conveys a sense of the contradictions of the late eighteenth century, is in contrast to Daniel Blake Smith’s Inside the Great House: Planter Family Life in EighteenthCentury Chesapeake Society (Ithaca, N.Y., 1980), especially pp. 281–99, the summary conclusions of which overanticipate the arrival of the modern family in the eighteenth century in the Chesapeake region. 14. PP5:4, 137, 9. In the eighteenth century, the term orphan could apply to someone who had lost only one parent, especially if that was the father; Oxford English Dictionary, 2d ed. (Oxford, 1989). 15. On horses, see Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia. The history of watches and timekeeping is voluminous; for it and the later regularization of time as a means to oppress, see E. P. Thompson, “Time, Work Discipline and Industrial Capitalism,” in Thompson, Customs in Common, pp. 352–70. 16. PP5:7–8. Peale’s eagerness to get married at seventeen ran against the trend in the eighteenth century of a rising age of first marriage; see John J. McCusker and Russell R. Menard, The Economy of British America, 1607–1789 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1985), p. 228. 17. PP5:7–8. 18. PP5:7–8. For Peale’s early courtships and marriage, see Humphries, “Rachel Brewer’s Husband,” pp. 40–55. 19. See PP5:8–11 for CWP’s account of his trial by apprenticeship and bad masters. 20. PP5:10. One reason why America was able to adapt so readily to slavery was that the colonies’ experience with other forms of forced labor made the step a short one; see Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom, pp. 295–315. 21. PP5:11. 22. For a discussion of the traditional versus the emerging economy, see Smith, Inside the Great House, passim. On the clash of these two economic systems in the Chesapeake region, see also Hart, “Charles Willson Peale.” Also see Allan Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake, 1680–1810 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1986), and Albert H. Tillson, “New Light on the Chesapeake,” Reviews in American History 22 (September 1994): 393–94. 23. PP5:11.

200

•

Notes to Pages 13–17

24. John Milton, Paradise Lost, in The Poems of John Milton, ed. John Carey and Alastair Fowler (New York, 1968), bk. 4, lines 293–310; bk. 10, lines 145– 49. Peale knew and used Paradise Lost both as a poem and as a subject for his paintings; one of his first paintings (unlocated) was of Adam and Eve in the Garden. 25. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile; or On Education, trans. and ed. Alan Bloom (New York, 1979), p. 171. 26. PP5:33; see also Christopher Hill, Milton and the English Revolution (New York, 1978), on the implications of the Fall of Man for social, political, and economic arrangements in the secular world. On the self-made man in America, see John G. Cawelti, Apostles of the Self-Made Man (Chicago, 1965), for the powerful ideological aspects of the myth. 27. PP5:12. 28. Milton, Paradise Lost, bk. 4, lines 315–19. 29. Susan Rather, “Carpenter, Tailor, Shoemaker, Artist: Copley and Portrait Painting around 1770,” Art Bulletin 79 (June 1997): 269–70. The literature on trans-Atlantic artisans, republicanism, and radicalism is immense; the following are starting points. For an introductory overview, see Gwyn A. Williams, Artisans and Sans-Culottes: Popular Movements in France and Britain during the French Revolution (New York, 1969), especially pp. 3–18 on class and rights. On America, see Eric Foner, Tom Paine and Revolutionary America (New York, 1976), pp. 71–106; Howard B. Rock, Artisans of the New Republic: The Tradesmen of New York City in the Age of Jefferson (New York, 1979), pp. 19–44; Richard Alan Ryerson, The Revolution Is Now Begun: The Radical Committees of Philadelphia (Philadelphia, 1978), pp. 7–38. Still an excellent overview of the early American economy, with special emphasis on labor, is George Rogers Taylor, The Transportation Revolution, 1815–60 (New York, 1951), pp. 3–14, 250–69. 30. The question of early American income is murky because of problems of evidence and problems of methodology.The figures given here (based on 1840 dollars) represent the low and high of the scholarly consensus; McCusker and Menard, Economy of British America, pp. 259–60. We do not know how much Peale earned as an artisan, but his indebtedness is summarized in an editorial note, PP1:37–38; PP5:14. 31. PP5:14. 32. Rather, “Carpenter, Tailor”; PP5:14–15, 21. 33. T. H. Breen, “The Meaning of ‘Likeness’: American Painting in an Eighteenth-Century Consumer Society,” Word and Image 6 (October-December 1990): 325–50. Ellen Hickey Grayson, “Towards a New Understanding of the Aesthetics of ‘Folk’ Portraits,” in Painting and Portrait Making in the American Northeast, ed. Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife (Boston, 1995), pp. 217–34, explores the link between artisans and the development of a particularly American aesthetic. See also Ursula Frohn, “Strategies of Recognition: The Conditioning of the American Artist between Marginality and Fame,” in American Icons: Transatlantic Perspectives on Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-

Notes to Pages 19–28

•

201

Century America Art, ed. Thomas W. Gaehtgens and Heinz Inckstadt (Santa Monica, Calif., 1992), pp. 212–18. McCusker and Menard’s Economy of British America, pp. 268–69, summarizes, with many caveats, the consensus view that there was a “growth spurt” in the economy beginning in the 1740s and continuing up to the Revolution. 34. The courtship is mentioned briefly in PP1:35 and in PP5:12–13. See also Lance Humphries, “Rachel Brewer’s Husband,” pp. 40–46. (This Charles Carroll was called “Barrister” to distinguish him from two other prominent men of the same name: Charles Carroll of Carrollton and Charles Carroll of Duddington.) 35. Humphries, “Rachel Brewer’s Husband,” pp. 46–55; PP5:13. 36. Peale’s contemporaneous account of the “Digby” episode is in CWP to “Captain Digby,” September 25, 1767, PP1:34–36; see also Humphries, “Rachel Brewer’s Husband,” pp. 44–47. 37. Humphries, “Rachel Brewer’s Husband,” p. 43. 38. The actual letter that Peale had written for him is reproduced in F:IIA/ 1D2–7. On handwriting, and particularly the way that different styles were adopted for different purposes in the eighteenth century, see Tamara Plakins Thornton, Handwriting in America: A Cultural History (New Haven, Conn., 1996), pp. 35–41. 39. Paul de Man is quoted and summarized in Paul John Eakins, Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in the Art of Self-Invention (Princeton, N.J., 1985), pp. 185, 184–209. 40. CWP to “Captain Digby,” September 25, 1767, PP1:35; AF:5.

chapter 2. “this faint spark of genius” 1. Sellers, CWP, p. 438; CWP, “Indenture of Thomas Stinchcomb,” [1763], F:IIA/1D1 (given Peale’s absconding from Maryland, it is likely that the agreement was abrogated); “Purchase of a Negro Girl,” June 9, 1764, F:IIA/1E13. 2. PP5:19, 20. 3. PP5:21, 23. 4. PP5:16. 5. PP5:24; Sellers, P&M, pp. 24–25. 6. PP1:37–38; Ronald Hoffman, A Spirit of Dissension: Economics, Politics, and the Revolution in Maryland (Baltimore, 1973), pp. 38–39, 47–49; Lance Humphries, “Rachel Brewer’s Husband: Charles Willson Peale. The Artist in Eighteenth-Century American Society” (M.A. diss., University of Virginia, 1993), pp. 100, 102. 7. PP5:25, 29. 8. See PP5:29–30 for the dramatic scene of an undressed Bordley transfixed by Peale’s painting. 9. Charles Carroll Barrister, to William Anderson, October 30, 1766, Maryland Historical Magazine 36 (September 1941): 342–43. For the organization that funded Peale’s trip to London, see Robert Janson-LePalme, “Generous Mary-

202

•

Notes to Pages 29–32

landers: Paying for Peale’s Study in England,” in New Perspectives on Charles Willson Peale, ed. Lillian B. Miller and David C. Ward (Pittsburgh, 1991), pp. 11–29. 10. The list of donors is in PP1:57–58. Wealth and property figures are taken from Edward C. Papenfuse, Alan F. Day, David W. Jordan, and Gregory A. Stiverson, A Biographical Dictionary of the Maryland Legislature, 1635–1789, 2 vols. (Baltimore, 1979); see also Janson-LePalme, “Generous Marylanders,” pp. 13–16. 11. Recent studies of the visual representation of colonial power that concentrate on instances of colonial accommodation or resistance to the “natives” risk ignoring the forest of the dominant visual discourse for the appeal of the single exotic tree. In the dialectic of English imperialism as it played out visually, the relationship between local rulers and local subordinates such as Native Americans or slaves was less significant than that between the subordinate local rulers and their political and cultural masters in metropolitan London. For every “transgressive” portrait of an English officer adopting “Indian” garb, there are hundreds of American colonial portraits that mimic the English model. To emphasize the former at the expense of the latter is to miss England’s nearworldwide cultural authority and to underestimate the political and military power that supported it. The latest expression of this tendency is Beth Fowkes Tobin, Picturing Imperial Power: Colonial Subjects in Eighteenth-Century British Painting (Durham, N.C., 1999), especially pp. 1–26, in which the author reverses colonial power relationships. For a much more nuanced discussion of the interpenetration of metropolitan and colonial culture, see Leslie K. Reinhardt, “British and Indian Identities in a Picture by Benjamin West,” EighteenthCentury Studies 31 (1998): 283–305. 12. PP5:32. Barry Unsworth, Saving Nelson (New York, 1998), p. 226, calculates that the British fleet at Trafalgar (1803) would have contained fifty thousand oak trees. On Benjamin West, see Robert C. Alberts, Benjamin West: A Biography (Boston, 1978), pp. 33, 127–43, and Dorinda Evans, Benjamin West and His American Students (Washington, D.C., 1980), which discusses Peale on pp. 37–46. 13. CWP, Diary 1. Part 2: Memoranda and Accounts While in England, 1767, PP1:51–70; PP1:58–69. 14. PP1:59, 63; Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford, England, 1990), p. 41. 15. On the relation between appearance and character, see Laurence Sterne, “An Essay on the Knowledge of the Character of Men” (1743), in Laurence Sterne, Joseph Andrews with Shamela and Related Writings: A Critical Edition, ed. Homer Goldbert (New York, 1987), p. 325. Peale’s comment about West’s encouragement of him is in a letter to John Beale Bordley, March 1767, PP1:47–48. See also Evans, Benjamin West, p. 39. Jules David Prown, “Charles Willson Peale in London,” in Miller and Ward, New Perspectives, p. 35, discusses Peale’s choice of miniature painting matter-of-factly as a simple career choice.

Notes to Pages 33–43

•

203

16. Charles Carroll, Barrister, to CWP, October 29, 1767, PP1:70–71; Prown, “Charles Willson Peale in London,” pp. 33–34. 17. Bernard Bailyn, The Peopling of British North America (New York, 1986), p. 131; see also Bernard Bailyn, Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution (New York, 1986). 18. PP1:61–63; PP5:34, 36. The excerpt from the “Exhibition Catalogue, Society of Artists of Great-Britain” that is reproduced in PP1:72 is incomplete; the original catalogue is at the Library of the Royal Academy, London. 19. Boy with a Toy Horse was exhibited at the fall 1768 exhibition of the Society of Artists of Great-Britain; PP1:72. 20. CWP’s Pitt needs a full scholarly treatment; documentary materials are in PP1:75–77 and Sellers, P&M, pp. 172–74. See also Sidney Hart, “Charles Willson Peale’s Portrait of William Pitt,” Northern Neck of Virginia Historical Magazine 49 (December 1999): 65–79. 21. PP1:76, 86. 22. PP1:76, 86. 23. CWP to John Beale Bordley, November 1772, PP1:127. 24. CWP to John Beale Bordley, 1770–71[?], PP1:86; CWP to Edmund Jenings, July 18, 1771, PP1:101; Thomas Paine, Common Sense and Other Political Writings (1776) (Indianapolis, 1953), p. 7. 25. See Sidney Hart, “A Graphic Case of Transatlantic Republicanism,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 80 (1985): 203–13, for the most recent political reading of Bordley. For Dickinson, see Karol Ann Peard Lawson, “Charles Willson Peale’s John Dickinson: An American Landscape as Political Allegory,” in Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 136 (December 1992): 455–86. A superb catalogue raisonné treatment of the Bordley is in Ellen G. Miles, ed., American Paintings of the Eighteenth Century: The Collections of the National Gallery of Art. Systematic Catalogue (Washington, D.C., 1995), pp. 113–17. Bailyn’s statement is from Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), p. 19. See also Robert Lawson-Peebles, Landscape and Written Expression in Revolutionary America (New York, 1988), especially pp. 73–84, on Noah Webster, language, and American nationalism. 26. John Beale Bordley deserves a modern biography; in the meantime, see his entry in the Dictionary of American Biography (New York, 1969) and Sellers, P&M, pp. 36–37. For his statements on self-sufficiency and autarky, see “Necessaries: Best Product of Land: Best Staple of Commerce” (1776), in John Beale Bordley, Essays and Notes on Husbandry and Rural Affairs (Philadelphia, 1799). 27. Hart, “A Graphic Case,” pp. 210–12. 28. Bailyn, Ideological Origins, pp. 18–19. 29. PP5:47. On the political implications of homespun, with some reference to cultural matters (the author mentions Copley but not Peale, who would have helped make his case), see Michael Zakim, “Sartorial Ideologies: From Home-

204

•

Notes to Pages 45–54

spun to Ready-Made,” American Historical Review 106 (December 2001): 1554–65. Paine’s assertion is from Common Sense, p. 48.

chapter 3. “application” 1. PP5:43. The literature on Philadelphia is huge. Two texts that I relied on were Henry May, The American Enlightenment (New York, 1976), pp. 197–222 (“Philadelphia and the World”), and Gary Nash, First City: Philadelphia and the Forging of Historical Memory (Philadelphia, 2002), pp. 45–95. At the most basic level, Philadelphia was simply larger than the small towns and estates of the Eastern Shore: its population was about thirty thousand in 1775 and had doubled by the first decade of the nineteenth century (Nash, First City, p. 45). 2. CWP to John Beale Bordley, November 1772, PP1:127; PP5:41. 3. Quoted in Rembrandt Peale, “Reminiscences: The Person and Mien of Washington,” Crayon 2 (April 1856): 388. 4. George Washington to Jonathan Boucher, May 21, 23, 1772, in PP1:120. 5. PP1:127; portrait totals are taken from Sellers, P&M, pp. 259–66. 6. PP1:535–36, 538. 7. CWP, “Portrait List, ca. 1770–1772,” PP1:631–33; CWP, “Portrait List, Summer/Fall 1778,” PP1:633–34; CWP, “Portrait List, October 13, 1784,” PP1:634–35; CWP “Portrait List, August 30–November 3, 1788,” PP1:636; CWP, “Portrait List, 1789,” PP1:636–37; CWP, “Portrait List, 1789–1790,” PP1: 637–39; CWP, “Portrait List, 1790,” PP1:639–40; CWP, “Portrait List, 1791,” PP1:641–42. 8. For an episode in awful travel, see the initial entries for CWP’s “Diary 9,” PP1:549–50: “I was obliged to lead the Horse every step of the way, and was frequently to the Tops of my boots in mud & mire . . . making about 5 miles of walking in as bad roads as could be expected in the winter season” (PP1:550). 9. PP1:133; see also Sellers, CWP, p. 213. 10. PP1:535; PP5:199; the day-by-day account of the Bogart dispute is in CWP, “Diary 12,” F:IIB/13A12–14. 11. CWP, “Diary 12,” F:IIB13/A12–13. 12. Another instance of dissatisfaction was when CWP retouched a portrait of General William Smallwood originally painted by Robert Edge Pine (1788; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.). CWP reported that Smallwood was not happy with either painter. Pine “has laboured to please and has given the mouth and cheeks an affected smile, that has done Injury to the Portrait. I have been obliged to make the figure as beautifully formed as possible, and now scarcely have satisfied him”; PP1:504–5. This episode demonstrates the extent to which the artist was constrained by the dictates of his sitter. 13. See PP1:536 for CWP’s silence and discretion. 14. The latest interpretation of Peale’s oval face, which follows on the less sophisticated but similar interpretations of Charles Coleman Sellers and Lillian B. Miller, is David Steinberg, “Charles Willson Peale Paints the Body Politic,” in

Notes to Pages 55–58

•

205

The Peale Family: Creation of a Legacy, 1770–1870, ed. Lillian B. Miller (New York, 1996), pp. 124–25. 15. On the evolution toward flatness in modern painting, see Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, 4 vols., ed. John O’Brian (Chicago, 1993), 4:86–88. David Hockney has suggested that artists used optics to divide their canvases up into montages of recessional squares; this might explain Peale’s quartering of a recessional element into his paintings. See David Hockney, Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters (New York, 2001), pp. 71, 94–100, 141. Peale’s optical machines are explored by Wendy Bellion, “Likeness and Deception in American Art at the Turn of the Eighteenth Century” (Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 2001), and Edward Schwarzschild, “From the Physiognotrace to the Kinematoscope: Visual Technology and the Preservation of the Peale Family,” Yale Journal of Criticism 12 (1999): 57–60. 16. Wendy Bellion’s work on Peale’s optical machines is much needed and will supersede the rudimentary comments in Sellers, P&M, pp. 13–14. See Coleman Sellers, “Account as Administrator of Charles Willson Peale’s Estate, 1827–28,” PP4:587, for the camera lucida, which was sold to the artist-naturalist Titian Ramsay Peale. Peale’s comment about using “his machine” in the Long Room study is in PP4:166. The portrait of Hannah Moore Peale is in Sellers, P&M, p. 165. David Hockney’s experience with the camera lucida confirms Peale’s remark that the lens made it difficult to use in taking a portrait; see Hockney, Secret Knowledge, p. 28. The subject of optics and art is covered exhaustively in Martin Kemp, The Science of Art: Optical Themes in Western Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat (New Haven, 1990); see pp. 167–203 for the types of machines (camera lucida, camera obscura, perspective machines) that Peale used. 17. CWP to Coleman Sellers, January 2, 1819, PP3:675; for Peale, illusionism, and trompe l’oeil, see David C. Ward and Sidney Hart, “Subversion and Illusion in the Life and Art of Raphaelle Peale,” American Art 8 (Summer/Fall 1994): 100–113; also Brandon Brame Fortune, “Charles Willson Peale’s Portrait Gallery: Persuasion and Plain Style,” Word and Image 6 (October-December 1990): 308–24. 18. “Wall furniture” is from T. H. Breen, “The Meaning of ‘Likeness’: American Portrait Painting in an Eighteenth-Century Consumer Society,” Word and Image 6 (October-December 1990): 340, taking the term from Copley. 19. Ibid., p. 350. 20. For “plain style,” see Fortune, “Charles Willson Peale’s Portrait Gallery,” pp. 308–24; for Peale’s remark to his son, see CWP to ReP, August 25, 1823, PP4:311. Peale never identified the source for his “Italian” saying. Michael Baxandall, following Piero della Francesca, does discuss the importance of line (disegno) in Italian painting but only in conjunction with the other attributes of proportion (commensuratio) and color (colorare); Michael Baxandall, Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures (New Haven, Conn., 1985), p. 112. See also CWP to John Isaac Hawkins, March 28, 1807, PP2:1010; Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” October 39 (Winter 1986): 10.

206

•

Notes to Pages 58–61

21. The circumstances of the Gittings portrait are in PP5:173, 175. A useful summary is in Sellers, P&M, p. 88. Art historians of several generations have confused Peale’s reading of the Gittings’s “landscape with slaves and the reality of plantation slavery”; see Edgar P. Richardson, Brooke Hindle, and Lillian B. Miller, Charles Willson Peale and His World (New York, 1982), p. 204, where Miller uncritically adopts Peale’s characterization of the slaves’ “share in the contentment of the farm.” Miller’s protégé, David Steinberg, repeats this conclusion in his “Charles Willson Peale,” p. 132; he reads the painting’s racial division of labor as not providing “an historically accurate image of black-white collaboration” and as inaccurately showing a split between “realms of property and owners.” Steinberg misreads the literature on slavery on which he makes this conclusion. In so doing, he sidesteps the question of power in slavery as a mode of production. On the plantation there was only one owner, and he owned not just labor power but the laborers themselves. 22. The sheaf that Gittings holds is not, as Steinberg argues, “inexplicably attained” (“Charles Willson Peale,” p. 132); it is a tribute sweated from his human chattel and a symbol of his power, not over nature, but over men—men rendered by Peale as dehumanized black dots. For Gittings’s property and wealth, see Edward C. Papenfuse, Alan F. Day, David W. Jordan, and Gregory A. Stiverson, A Biographical Dictionary of the Maryland Legislature, 1635–1789, 2 vols. (Baltimore, 1979), 1:355–56. This scholarly framing of the Gittings portrait that adopts the ideology of the master-class shows how scholarship can also contribute to what Clark calls the “naturalization” of social processes; T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers (New York, 1985), p. 8. 23. CWP described the Laming sittings briefly in PP5:172 but in considerable detail in his contemporaneous diary, PP1: 533–37. A superb reading of the double portraits is Ellen Miles and Leslie Reinhardt, “‘Art Conceal’d’: Peale’s Double Portrait of Benjamin and Eleanor Ridgely Laming,” Art Bulletin 78 (March 1996): 58–74. On the painting itself, see Ellen Miles et al., American Paintings of the Eighteenth Century: The Collections of the National Gallery. Systematic Catalogue (Washington, D.C., 1995), pp. 120–28; Sellers, P&M, pp. 119–20; Jules Prown, “Charles Willson Peale in London,” in New Perspectives on Charles Willson Peale, ed. Lillian B. Miller and David C.Ward (Pittsburgh, 1991), p. 44. Prown draws the conclusion that Peale was “romantic and uxorious”—a conclusion I dispute, finding nothing romantic in Peale’s personality and nothing uxorious in Peale’s patriarchal treatment of his wives. Here again, the scholar has been seduced by Peale’s presentation of himself and the perpetuation of that view by his prominent biographers. 24. Peale’s relation to the “georgic” tradition of retirement is surveyed in Brandon Brame Fortune, “‘From the World Escaped’: Peale’s Portrait of William Smith and His Grandson,” Eighteenth Century Studies 25 (Summer 1992): 587– 615. For CWP’s attack on country estates as “pick pockets,” see PP5:172–73. 25. I owe the connection of Nicholas Malebranche’s De La Recherche de la Verité (Amsterdam, 1688) with the Enlightenment’s search for truth to Leslie

Notes to Pages 64–74

•

207

Reinhardt. Benjamin Rush is quoted in Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1969), p. 427. On the casual dress of scientists at home, see Karin Calvert, “The Function of Fashion in Eighteenth-Century America,” in Of Consuming Interests: The Style of Life in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Cary Carson, Ronald Hoffman, and Peter J. Albert (Charlottesville, Va., 1994), pp. 267–68. See also Brandon Brame Fortune, Franklin and His Friends: Portraying the Man of Science in Eighteenth-Century America (Philadelphia, 1999), pp. 51–65, “Banyans and the Scholarly Image.” Crèvecoeur’s phrase can be found in Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer (1782) (1925; reprint, New York, 1986), p. 69. 26. Miles and Reinhardt, “‘Art Conceal’d,’” pp. 61–68, 73–74. 27. Ibid., pp. 59–60. 28. The corrupting dependence of southern whites on slavery, a corruption that ran the gamut from economic backwardness to licentious debauchery, was a staple of American antislavery theory and practice throughout the antebellum period; see Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (New York, 1970), pp. 46–51. 29. PP1:301.

chapter 4. a good war and a troubled peace 1. Kenneth Silverman, A Cultural History of the American Revolution (New York, 1976), p. 316. 2. John Adams to Abigail Adams, August 21, 1776, in Lyman Butterfield, ed., The Book of Abigail and John: Selected Letters of the Adams Family, 1762–1784 (Cambridge, Mass., 1975), pp. 156–57. Peale’s concern about his appearance was usual for artists; for Copley’s elegant dress and its role in elevating both the artist and his art, see Carrie Rebora et al., John Singleton Copley in America (New York, 1996), p. 105. 3. PP1:190, 192. Peale spent forty-five shillings on October 5 for an epaulette to reflect his election on October 3 to the rank of lieutenant; PP1:92–93. 4. For CWP’s diary account of his service, see PP1:208–26. In his autobiography Peale dealt much more cursorily with his combat experience; compare PP5:52 with the diary entries. Robert Middlekauff, The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763–1789 (New York, 1982), pp. 503, 524, 531, 618, uses Peale’s diaries in part to show how an officer was meant to behave toward his men. 5. For the Battle of Princeton, see PP1:217–23, 436. For Peale’s experiments with telescopic sights (done with David Rittenhouse), see PP1:165. Peale’s whole experience with firearms belies the revisionist argument, made most recently by Michael Belleisles in Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture (New York, 2000), that colonial Americans not only were unskillful shots but had no experience with firearms at all; see Peale’s letter to Thomas Allwood, August 30, 1775, PP1:144, where he characterizes Americans as “much used [to] hunting and are all good

208

•

Notes to Pages 74–78

marksmen. [E]ven our Children as soon as they can carry a Gun are accustomed to shooting.” 6. PP5:55. Philadelphia’s “war at home,” which took place during the Revolution between radicals and conservatives, has been studied extensively (see above), and Peale occasionally figures in scholarly accounts of that war: see, for example, Eric Foner, Tom Paine and Revolutionary America (New York, 1976), pp. 109, 115, 116. But there is no scholarly treatment of Peale’s career as a political radical and activist. This neglect continues the pattern whereby scholars consider Peale only as an artist. Extensive documentary evidence about Peale’s wartime activities is in PP1 and PP5. 7. Peale’s radical activity on the ground in Philadelphia and his participation in confiscating estates are covered in PP1:282–338. The Fort Wilson Riot is in PP1:315–16, also PP5:79–82. See Silverman, A Cultural History, p. 369, on Peale’s militancy. Peale subsequently kept the club and used it for home defense against burglars; PP5:134. I would argue also that Peale kept the club as a talisman of his radical service during the Revolution. 8. PP5:77–83; Silverman, A Cultural History, p. 369. 9. For the use of body and public health analogies to politics during the French Revolution, see Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (New York, 1989), pp. 203–47, the chapter entitled “Body Politics”; see also pp. 828–36 for Robespierre’s and the Committee of Public Safety’s enforcement of ideological health. 10. For the economic and political conflict over price fixing and engrossing, see Foner, Tom Paine, pp. 145–82. 11. See PP5:83 for Peale’s turn away from politics. Peale’s brief career as a legislator is described (briefly) in PP5:82–83. On the radical election of 1776 and the reversal four years later, see Robert Brunhouse, The Counter-Revolution in America, 1776–90 (New York, 1971), pp. 60–76, 88–90. 12. CWP to Joseph Brewer, January 15, 1783, PP1:382–83. 13. Susan Stewart, “Death and Life, in That Order, in the Works of Charles Willson Peale,” in The Cultures of Collecting, ed. John Elsner and Roger Cardinal (London, 1997), pp. 204–23. My criticism of the “breakdown,” or “compensation,” theory comes from conversations with my undergraduate advisor, Christopher Lasch, who made the simple point that if people in the nineteenth century were as anxious as historians make them appear, it is hard to see how they would have gotten anything done. For a recent statement of the breakdown theory of culture, see Ann C. Rose, Victorian America and the Civil War (New York, 1992). A magisterial refutation of the idea that the bourgeoisie in Victorian Anglo-America were riven and incapacitated by psychological and social neuroses is Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud (New York, 1984). For a spirited discussion of art and neurosis that dissects simplistic psychoanalyzing, especially the notion that genius is somehow hydraulic— that as it is exhausted, neuroses ensue—see Lionel Trilling, The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent: Selected Essays, ed. Leon Weiseltier (New York, 2000), pp. 87–104.

Notes to Pages 79–83

•

209

14. Stewart botches as well the chronology of the New Jersey campaign in which Charles Willson Peale encountered his brother: the encounter occurred in early December 1776, when Washington retreated from Trenton as the British approached, and the “Hellish scene” was the chaotic crossing of the Delaware, not a battle. In other words, even if Charles Willson Peale did suffer a breakdown during this episode, it was because of witnessing social chaos, not combat. James Peale was in the rearguard covering the retreat when he met up with Charles Willson Peale at the river.The subsequent Battle of Trenton, when Washington surprised the British on Christmas Day after recrossing the river, was a victory for the Continental Army. See PP5:50–51 for the campaign and PP5:50 for Peale’s description of James Peale. The chronology of the paintings is taken from Sellers, P&M, pp. 164, 167. See also CWP to Joseph Brewer, January 15, 1783, PP1:382–83. 15. Sellers, P&M, pp. 261, 262–63; CWP to Samuel Chase, November 23, 1784, PP1:424–25. 16. Sellers, P&M, p. 138. The several images of Morris by Peale indicate the difficulties in finding specific political meaning from Peale’s forms, as David Steinberg has attempted to do in “Charles Willson Peale Paints the Body Politic,” in The Peale Family: Creation of a Legacy, 1770–1870, ed. Lillian B. Miller (New York, 1996), pp. 124–25. Not the least of these difficulties is that an oval head shape can be found in all Peale’s portraits, from the colonial beginnings of his career to the 1820s, so that it cannot exemplify an aesthetic search for order in the postrevolutionary period. Steinberg also stumbles over the fact that both men and women in Peale portraits have oval heads; this forces him to contradict himself, since, as he also notes, for women the oval meant beauty instead of rationality. 17. See PP5:113. Henry May unfairly describes Peale as an “ultracautious Deist” for reflecting Enlightenment culture rather than directing it. May ignores Peale’s move from the radical Deism of his revolutionary politics to a cultural politics that helped socialize the individual to America’s normative values. Moreover, in focusing on secular election (in the religious sense), May downplays the crises of the early republic. He writes, “[W]hat the defenders of rational culture were finally most afraid of was themselves.” This compensatory view of culture sees the search for order as always regressive, hedged by fear of the unknown. Henry May, The Enlightenment in America (New York, 1976), pp. 214, 252–77, 359. 18. PP5:83. This negative conclusion about political events that are “missing” from Peale’s writings can be supported only by reading the Peale Papers and not finding them there. 19. PP1:301, 492. 20. See Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, Mass., 1999), pp. 7–8, on the role of representation under absolutist rule. 21. PP1:301, 492. 22. An accessible summary of the holdings of Peale’s portrait gallery (along

210

•

Notes to Pages 83–89

with other items) is the 1854 sale catalogue: Thomas and Sons, Auctioneers, Peale’s Museum Gallery of Oil Paintings (Philadelphia, 1854), F:XIA/17. Peale’s Gallery of Famous Americans has been recreated at Independence National Historical Park Collection, Philadelphia, housed in William Strickland’s neoclassical Second Bank Building. A summary view of its history and contents is contained in Sellers, P&M, pp. 16–17. The oval framing of the portraits attempts to overcome their flatness by making them more sculptural and heroic, following Hogarth. 23. See Thomas McCarthy, foreword to Habermas, Structural Transformation, p. xi, regarding portraiture in absolutist states as opposed to democratic ones. 24. Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” October 39 (Winter 1986): 10; Bernard Bailyn, Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the People of America on the Eve of the Revolution (New York, 1986), the visual essay “Voyagers in Flight,” after p. 352 (the renderings of runaways were taken from the physical descriptions in advertisements and made by the artist-illustrator Richard Schlecht). 25. CWP to John Isaac Hawkins, March 28, 1807, PP2:1010; see also William Sterne Randall, Benedict Arnold: Patriot and Traitor (New York, 1990), whose subtitle is his theme. 26. See “Arnold and the Devil,” Pennsylvania Packet, October 3, 1780, PP1:354–55; see PP1:352–53 for a comprehensive editorial note on the Arnold demonstration and its place in the politics and iconography of early American nationalism and crowd violence. 27. For a survey of the disorientation and then anger that Arnold’s treason caused among Americans, see Randall, Benedict Arnold, pp. 563–64; also Silverman, A Cultural History, pp. 377–82. 28. “Arnold and the Devil,” PP1:355.Washington is quoted in Randall, Benedict Arnold, p. 564. 29. Peale’s portrait gallery illustrates the attempt to contain individual selfassertion within a larger public order to which the self is subjected—an attempt that was characteristic of capitalist democracy, especially in its developing stages. Later, the triumph of mass society would tend to eradicate individualized representations of power; thus the portrait, especially in America, has become an attenuated and pallid form. See Habermas, Structural Transformation, pp. 14–26. 30. Peale’s “hope [that] I shall continue to be equally fortunate in my choise of men” was a forlorn hope against the likelihood that he would not; CWP to John Isaac Hawkins, March 28, April 3, 1807, PP2:1010. For “the cultural construction of a citizen,” including the use of visual displays and public celebrations, in revolutionary France, see Schama, Citizens, pp. 123–82. 31. For an overview of Peale’s visual displays, see their listing in Sellers, P&M Suppl. For the importance of civic events and public participation in politics and state making, see David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776–1820 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1997), pp. 1–14.

Notes to Pages 89–96

•

211

Unfortunately, Waldstreicher does not discuss Peale, although he has lengthy treatments of Philadelphia’s civic celebrations in which Peale was involved. See “Celebration of the Arrival of George Washington in Philadelphia,” Pennsylvania Packet, December 4, 1781, PP1:365–66. 32. “Celebration of the Arrival,” PP1:366; Douglass Adair, Fame and the Founding Fathers (New York, 1974), p. 8; Pierre Grimal, A Concise Dictionary of Classical Mythology (Oxford, 1986), p. 153. 33. “Celebration of the Arrival,” PP1:365–66. 34. PP5:379; CWP to ReP, July 27, 1812, PP3:155, 158–59; Rubens Peale, “Memorandum Book,” F:VIIB/1 (for Franklin giving Rubens a card with “Perseverantia” written on it); “Celebration of the Arrival,” PP1:365; PP5:91; “Celebration of the Surrender of Cornwallis,” Pennsylvania Packet, November 1, 1781, PP1:361–62, 364. 35. “Pennsylvania Assembly, Report Recommending a Triumphal Arch,” December 2, 1783, PP1:398–401. 36. PP5:91–93. 37. PP5:94. 38. PP5:368. Basic information on the “moving pictures” is provided by CWP in PP1:415ff. and especially CWP, “Advertisement of Moving Pictures,” Pennsylvania Packet, May 19, 1785, PP1:431–33; also PP5:85–88. Descriptions of the exhibition are assembled in Sellers, P&M Suppl., 21–22. See Stewart, “Death and Life,” pp. 216–17, for an interpretation of the meaning of the pictures. Martin Kemp, The Science of Art: Optical Themes in Western Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat (New Haven, Conn., 1990), pp. 203, 207–8, describes how the technology of the “moving pictures” and other displays of automata created “artificial” depictions of nature in which the subject was destabilized instead of verified. So while Peale was interested in showing how he could control nature, the moving pictures were too “spectacular,” disorienting the audience. 39. Matthew Craske, Art in Europe, 1700–1830 (New York, 1997), p. 205; CWP, “Advertisement of Moving Pictures,” PP1:431–33. 40. CWP, “Advertisement of Moving Pictures,” PP1:431; Craske, Art in Europe, p. 205. 41. PP5:95; for hobby horse, see Richard A. Lanham, “Games, Play, Seriousness,” in Lawrence Sterne, Tristram Shandy (1760; reprint ed., 1980), p. 592.

chapter 5. “the medicinal office of the mind” 1. J. Thomas Scharf and Thompson Westcott, History of Philadelphia, 1609– 1884, 3 vols. (Philadelphia, 1884), 1:470; PP5:64–65. 2. Charles Brockden Brown, Arthur Mervyn or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 (1799), in Charles Brockden Brown, Three Gothic Novels (New York, 1998), pp. 346, 360, 376. A fascinating art historical study that charts the breakdowns following another catastrophic epidemic is Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer’s “Blem-

212

•

Notes to Pages 97–102

ished Physiologies: Delacroix, Paganini, and the Cholera Epidemic of 1832,” Art Bulletin 83 (December 2001): 686–707; see especially pp. 691–98 for an account of metaphorical and civic breakdown. Philadelphia’s plague year needs a modern study; in the meantime see J. H. Powell, Bring out Your Dead: The Great Plague of Yellow Fever in Philadelphia in 1793 (Philadelphia, 1793), pp. 90–133, the chapter titled “Panic.” 3. CWP to Andrew Ellicott, February 28, 1802, PP2:411; on the impact of the fever on Philadelphia’s society and culture, see Robert Lawson-Peebles, Landscape and Written Expression in Revolutionary America:The World Turned Upside Down (Cambridge, England, 1988), pp. 88–98. 4. CWP to RaP, June 6, 1807, PP2:1019; Lawson-Peebles, Landscape and Written Expression, pp. 92–93. 5. On Rush’s response to the epidemic, see Lawson-Peebles, Landscape and Written Expression, pp. 91–99; see Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1969), p. 427, for the coercive element in Rush’s educational scheme. On Peale and religious bodies in Philadelphia, see David Brigham, Public Culture in the Early Republic: Peale’s Museum and Its Audience (Washington, D.C., 1995), pp. 22–24. “Medicinal Office of the Mind” is in CWP to Andrew Ellicott, February 28, 1802, PP2:411. 6. ReP to Titian Ramsay Peale, August 4, 1821, PP4:67–69. The best history of Peale’s museum, emphasizing especially its local conditions in Philadelphia, is Brigham, Public Culture, passim, and pp. 1–13 for Peale’s mission. 7. PP5:368. 8. The early history of the Columbianum, with documents, is in Anna Wells Rutledge, Cumulative Record of Exhibition Catalogues (1955), in The Annual Exhibition Record of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1807–1870, 3 vols., ed. Peter Hastings Falk (Madison, Conn., 1988), 1:2–3. For Rembrandt Peale’s attempts to use education in writing and drawing to promote regularity and standardization in both character and society, see Rembrandt Peale, Graphics: A System of Drawing and Writing, for the Use of Schools and Families (Philadelphia, 1825); the 1835 edition is in F:VIB/6. 9. Wendy Bellion, “Likeness and Deception in American Art at the Turn of the Eighteenth Century” (Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 2001). At a talk by Bellion at the National Gallery of Art,Washington, D.C., on January 11, 2001, Tess Mann of the Peale Family Papers pointed out how the structuring of the painting from the museum ticket up to Titian’s pointing finger links Peale’s audiences, old and new. 10. CWP to Andrew Ellicott, February 28, 1802, PP2:411. 11. Ibid. 12. Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy (1760; reprint, New York, 1980); Henry Fielding, A History of Tom Jones a Foundling (1749; reprint, New York, 1995); Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey (1768; reprint, New York, 1986). 13. CWP to Andrew Ellicott, February 28, 1802, PP2:411. 14. Didier Maleuvre, Museum Memories: History, Technology, Art (Stanford, Calif., 1999), p. 11.

Notes to Pages 103–9

•

213

15. These figures first appeared in Sidney Hart and David C. Ward, “The Waning of an Enlightenment Ideal: Charles Willson Peale’s Philadelphia Museum, 1790–1820,” Journal of the Early Republic 8 (Winter 1988): 404. Brigham, Public Culture, p. 182, criticizes these figures (although he uses them anyway) for not taking into account the higher prices for special exhibitions, thus overstating museum attendance. Fair enough, but we sought a median solution to the varied fees charged in order to create estimates. We did not, for instance, figure in group packages, family packages, or nighttime packages, which would tend to inflate our estimates of attendance. 16. For background on the museum’s early history, see Brigham, Public Culture, and for the political economy of the museum straddling the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, see Hart and Ward, “Waning of an Enlightenment Ideal.” 17. CWP to William Findley, February 18, 1800, PP2:278; Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere:An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, Mass., 1999), pp. 74, 37; Alexander Nemerov, The Body of Raphaelle Peale: Still Life and Selfhood, 1812–1824 (Berkeley, Calif., 2001), pp. 49–53. 18. CWP to Andrew Ellicott, February 28, 1802, PP2:410. 19. CWP, Broadside: “My Design in Forming This Museum,” 1792, PP2:14; “Lover of Nature” to Dunlap and Claypoole’s American Daily Advertiser, March 27, 1794, PP2:88; “A.R.” to Dunlap and Claypoole’s American Daily Advertiser, May 2, 1794, PP2:92; Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia (1781), in The Life and Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Adrienne Koch and William Peden (New York, 1944), pp. 186, 192–93 (for the confluence of the Potomac and the Shenandoah) and 213–15 (for his answer to Buffon). 20. CWP to Thomas Jefferson, January 29, 1808, PP2:1056. 21. Bernard Bailyn, Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the People of America on the Eve of the Revolution (New York, 1986), p. 131. 22. Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser, February 5, 1808; PP2:1055–57. 23. Thomas Jefferson to CWP, January 6, 1808, PP2:1055. For the Lewis and Clark expedition’s awe at the grizzly bears as well as Jefferson’s assumption that the Rockies were the same size as the Appalachians, see Stephen E. Ambrose, Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson and the Opening of the American West (New York, 1996), pp. 218–19, 75. 24. The classic work on the “great chain of being” is Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (1933; reprint, Cambridge, Mass., 1970). See also Herbert Leventhal, In the Shadow of the Enlightenment: Occultism and Renaissance Science in Eighteenth-Century America (New York, 1976), pp. 219–59, for the tension between the stability of the natural order inherent in the concept of the great chain of being and new scientific discoveries; he treats the question of extinction on pp. 235–36. Peale’s own description of the natural framework is in CWP, “Lecture on Natural History,” May 17, 1824, PP4:254. 25. CWP, “Lecture on Natural History,” PP4:254, 256. 26. Ibid., PP4:261.

214 27. 28. 29. 30.

•

Notes to Pages 109–15

Ibid., PP4:268, 270. Ibid., PP4:268. Ibid., PP4:268. Ibid., PP4:270.

chapter 6. “the hygiene of the self” 1. The “Blackberry Ramble” is in PP5:478; see also CWP to RuP, August 23, 1824, PP4:450–57, which includes the sketches (originals at the American Philosophical Society) that Peale made of houses and buildings on his way. The dam-building summer is in PP5:432–33. For CWP’s records on the dam, see “Notes of Days Work on the Mill Dam,” Daybook 2, 1810–24, F:IIE/6. (Peale’s two daybooks for 1810–20 are invaluable and untapped sources on wages and labor in the Philadelphia region.) 2. CWP, “Diary 7, May 30–November 3, 1788,” PP1:508; PP5:229. 3. For windmills, see PP3:231–232, 263–64, 269–71, 274–76, and especially CWP to Thomas Jefferson, November 14, 1814, pp. 278–82 with in-text sketches; for the unspillable milk cart, see PP3:50–51, 112–13; for the seed drill, see CWP to Thomas Jefferson, December 23, 1815, PP3:378–80 (with in-text sketches). Peale’s interest in scientific agriculture has been dealt with descriptively in David C. Ward, “Charles Willson Peale’s Farm Belfield: Enlightened Agriculture in the Early Republic,” in New Perspectives on Charles Willson Peale, ed. Lillian B. Miller and David C. Ward (Pittsburgh, 1991), pp. 283–301. 4. PP5:229. 5. See Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting” (1960), in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, 4 vols., ed. John O’Brian (Chicago, 1986), 4:85–86: “The essence of Modernism lies . . . in the use of characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself, not in order to subvert it but in order to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence. . . . Modernism criticizes from the inside, through the procedures themselves of what is being criticized.” 6. CWP, An Epistle to a Friend on the Means of Preserving Health, Promoting Happiness, and Prolonging the Life of Man (Philadelphia, 1803), PP2:493. 7. PP5:229. 8. PP5:166–67. 9. On the definition of a scientist’s task in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as collection, classification, and display, see Charles C. Gillispie, “The Natural History of Industry,” in Science, Technology, and Economic Growth in the Eighteenth Century, ed. E. Musson (London, 1972), pp. 131–32, and John C. Greene, “Science and the Public in the Age of Jefferson,” Isis 39 (1958): 13–26. 10. The first American edition of Jean Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau appeared in 1796, but Peale may have seen one of the many English editions. See Clifford K. Shipton and James E. Mooney, eds., National

Notes to Pages 116–21

•

215

Index of American Imprints through 1800: The Short-Title Evans (Worcester, Mass., 1969), 2:747. On Peale’s drafting of the autobiography, its multiple texts, and the reconstruction of the process by which these texts were composed, see the editors’ preface to PP5:xvii-xxvii. 11. Tamara Plakins Thornton, Handwriting in America: A Cultural History (New Haven, Conn., 1996), pp. 33–41; PP5:267. 12. The manuscript of the autobiographical fragment [hereafter cited as AF] is reproduced in F:IIC/1. 13. The original manuscript of the AF is at the American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia.The cramped and scribbled nature of the notebook text makes it necessary to ask whether CWP copied out this rough draft into a fair copy for Molly and the Tilghmans to read. If CWP did present the notebook to the family as testimony of his blameless life, he could be seen as emphasizing his blunt, rude honesty even though he violated the norms of gentility that the Tilghmans would have expected. On a written level, he was behaving as precipitously as he had with Rachel Brewer in his initial courtship of her (AF:4). The first draft of CWP’s courtship is in “Diary 10, Part 2—August 7 to December 13, 1790,” PP1:597–610. For the background on the Tilghman family and their place among the close-knit aristocracy of Maryland’s Eastern Shore, see Christopher Johnston, “The Tilghman Family,” Maryland Historical Magazine 1 (1906): 282–83, as well as James A. Henretta, The Evolution of American Society, 1750–1815: An Interdisciplinary Analysis (Lexington, Mass., 1973), pp. 90–91, on control of marriage and the dynastic aspects of landholding. 14. PP1:610; for the rumor that CWP was a bigamist, see PP1:609. 15. PP1:607. For the other major case, after the end of the Revolution, when Peale dosed himself with some form of narcotic, see below. 16. PP1:600–601. 17. PP1:607. 18. PP1:607; the partially erased page is on PP1:608 and is reproduced in F:IIB/11A8. 19. On Alexander Robinson, CWP to Angelica Peale Robinson, April 13, 1803, PP2:521. The episode of Benjamin Franklin Peale’s divorce and the commitment of his ex-wife deserves a full scholarly treatment because of its implications for the medicalization of “difficult” women in the nineteenth century. Unfortunately, very little evidence from anyone other than CWP has been found to analyze all aspects of the episode; CWP’s view of events is contained in summary view in a letter that CWP wrote to Thomas Gilpin, April 2, 1820, PP3:812–13, but never sent, perhaps because it contained too much information; Peale here was doubly censoring himself. CWP’s obituary of RaP is in PP5:482–85. 20. CWP to Angelica Peale Robinson, December 23, 1813, PP3:222. 21. CWP, An Essay to Promote Domestic Happiness (Philadelphia, 1812), PP3:139. For Franklin on appearances and reality, see John William Ward, “Benjamin Franklin: The Making of an American Character,” in Red, White and Blue: Men, Books, and Ideas in American Culture (New York, 1969), pp. 134–39.

216

•

Notes to Pages 121–22

CWP’s condemnation of “witt” is in his letter to Angelica, December 23, 1813, PP3:222. In an aspect of the transition from rationalism to romanticism, wit was losing its original sense as the faculty of reason and thought and taking on the predominate definition of a written or verbal jeu d’esprit that flashed to illuminate hidden, inner meanings or reversed to undercut established conventions. Oxford English Dictionary, 2d ed. (Oxford, 1989). 22. That Peale’s busyness was the antithesis of the Death Row convict’s isolated self-containment is suggested by Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1977; reprint, New York, 1995), pp. 124–25. The anecdote about how CWP became an abstainer is in “Diary 17—May 30 to June 12, 1799,” PP1:241, and, in slightly more elaborated form, in PP5:269–70. See CWP, Epistle to a Friend, PP2:498 and passim, for Peale’s codification on his rules of health. The literature on the connection between the regularization of the individual body and the body political-economic, the internalization of what Max Weber called the “Protestant ethic,” is voluminous. Max Weber and R. H. Tawney, in Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926; reprint, 1975), especially pp. 227–51, “The Triumph of the Economic Virtues,” set the terms of this debate in the context of economic revolution. For its resonance in manners and mores, see the Norbert Elias series The Civilizing Process (New York, 1978). For a treatment of alcohol and modernity in America, see W. J. Rohrbaugh, The Alcoholic Republic: An American Tradition (New York, 1979). For a study of sex that has implications for Peale’s sense of sexual economy, see G. J. Barker Benfield, “The Spermatic Economy: A Nineteenth-Century View of Sexuality,” Feminist Studies (1972): 45–74. For bodily functions, see James C. Whorton, Inner Hygiene: Constipation and the Pursuit of Health in Modern Society (New York, 2000), which mostly treats the later nineteenth century, but see pp. 1–27. For issues of the contested terrain of class and culture in the inculcation of the new discipline, see E. P. Thompson, “Time, Work Discipline and Industrial Capitalism,” in Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture (New York, 1991), pp. 352–403, and for a transposition of Thompson to America, see Herbert G. Gutman, Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America: Essays in American Working-Class and Social History (New York, 1976). See also Paul Johnson, A Shopkeeper’s Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815–1837 (New York, 1978), for a case study of “modernizing” behavior and its cultural effects. 23. CWP to Caspar Wistar, November 13, 1804, PP2:780–81; CWP, Diary 25, December 1826, PP4:561–66. 24. See Sellers, CWP, pp. 438–49, for Elizabeth DePeyster Peale’s childbearing history; Rigal, American Manufactory, pp. 105–6; CWP, Diary 25, December 1826, PP4:561–64; and Sellers, CWP, “Peale Genealogy,” pp. 438–39. Steven Mintz and Susan Kellog report that with the improving material conditions of the eighteenth century, the average Chesapeake family had seven or eight children. This number dropped to five or six by the middle of the nineteenth century. Steven Mintz and Susan Kellog, Domestic Revolutions: A So-

Notes to Pages 122–27

•

217

cial History of American Family Life (New York, 1988), pp. 40–41, 51. For Peale’s testimony on the importance to him of marriage, the family, and procreation, see CWP to Caspar Wistar, November 13, 1804, PP2:780, and CWP, Diary 25, December 1826, PP4:561–64. 25. CWP to Caspar Wistar, November 13, 1804, PP2:780; CWP, Diary 25, December 1826, PP4:561–64. 26. CWP, Epistle to a Friend, PP2:495, 501, 491. 27. Ibid., PP2:497, 494; CWP, “Diary 20, Part 1—May 29 to June 21, 1804,” PP2:706. For the very high alcohol intake per capita in the United States relative to other countries worldwide (Americans drank roughly two to three times as much as Britons in 1800), see Rorabaugh, The Alcoholic Republic, p. 238. 28. Peale repeated his strictures on mastication and lubrication while eating throughout his writings on eating and health. For a summary, see CWP, Epistle to a Friend, PP2:496. 29. On Rush’s “millennial expectations” of his cure of bloodletting and purging, see Robert Lawson-Peebles, Landscape and Written Expression in Revolutionary America: The World Turned Upside Down (Cambridge, England, 1988), pp. 84–99; see especially 96–98 for Rush’s feverish defense of his cure (he was described as acting like a “maniac” in one Philadelphia epidemic) under growing opposition to its cruel ineffectiveness. 30. For Peale’s patent vapor bath, see PP2:315–17. For bathing as cleanliness and a cure, see Sidney Hart, “‘To Encrease the Comforts of Life’: Charles Willson Peale and the Mechanical Arts,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 110 (July 1986): 328–31. 31. PP2:317, 507; PP4:578. 32. Whorton, Inner Hygiene, pp. 10–11. 33. The classic analogy of the modernizing economy was that between the circulation of blood and free trade. (Dryden wrote in Annus Mirabilis [1696], his celebration of imperialist England, of “Trade which like blood should circulatory flow.”) The analogy served the interests of classical economists by making free trade appear natural, inevitable, and automatic. “Gresham’s Law” (named after its formulator, Sir Thomas Gresham [1519?–79]) states that bad money drives out good; the relationship between this and Peale’s concern for keeping the body free of impurities, the need for “honest” food and water, etc., needs little discussion. On regularity, bourgeois virtue, and health, see Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” October 39 (Winter 1986): 12. See also Marcia Pointon, Hanging the Head: Portraiture and Social Formation in EighteenthCentury England (New Haven, 1993), pp. 85, 251. 34. CWP, Epistle to a Friend, PP2:501, 500–501, 502; Lionel Trilling, “Mansfield Park,” in The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent: Selected Essays, ed. Leon Weiseltier (New York, 2000), p. 301. T. J. Clark has called this internalization of the dictates of the market the “colonization of everyday life.” T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers (New York, 1985), p. 9.

218

•

Notes to Pages 128–37

35. PP3:645, 648; PP5:294, 315. Laura Rigal has pointed out the centrality of the representation of labor in the early republic; see Laura Rigal, The American Manufactory: Art, Labor, and the World of Things in the Early Republic (Princeton, N.J., 1998), especially pp. 107–10 for Peale. 36. PP5:431, 426; PP4:210, 268. It is probably coincidental that Peale painted a scene of biblical healing while he was hurt; he actually was in competition with Benjamin West’s Christ Healing the Sick (1815; Pennsylvania Hospital, Philadelphia). West died in 1820, and Peale apparently felt liberated to undertake subjects done by his old master; PP5:428–29; Sellers, P&M Suppl., 46–47. 37. PP2:674; PP5:294; PP3:315; PP5:172; PP2:752. On money and the alienation of man from man, see Weber and Tawney, Religion, pp. 266–70. 38. PP3:723; PP5:460; PP3:247. 39. On Arnold, see above. Peale wrote to his son Rembrandt (see below) about the importance of an outline in painting, claiming that a true outline could be filled up with a “Turd”; August 25, 1823, PP4:311. This betrays his anxiety about the disconnection between outward appearance and inward character. Filling an outline up with a “turd” was precisely what Peale’s portraits were not supposed to do. On Lavater generally, see Francis Haskell, History and Its Images: Art and the Interpretation of the Past (New Haven, Conn., 1993), pp. 150–55; Martin Kemp, The Science of Art: Optical Themes in Western Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat (New Haven, Conn., 1990), pp. 186–87; Ellen G. Miles, Saint-Memin and Neoclassical Profile Portrait in America (Washington, D.C., 1994), pp. 186–87; O. K. Danow, “Physiognomy: The Codeless Science,” Semiotica 50 (1984): 157–71. On Peale and Lavater, see PP2:816–17, 479, and on passions determining the face, see PP2:501. CWP’s strictures on the upright body are given in PP2:500–502. 40. Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” 10–12.

chapter 7. the struggle against dispersal 1. CWP, “Lecture on Natural History,” PP4:268, 270. 2. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, Mass., 1999), p. 47. On this question in general, see Christopher Lasch, Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged (New York, 1977). On how early industrialists attempted to reconcile the home and factory work (especially the work of women), see John Kasson, Civilizing the Machine: Technology and Republican Values in America, 1776–1900 (New York, 1976). A visual example of how aesthetics can camouflage reality comes from the career of Winslow Homer and his painting The Morning Bell (1871; Yale University), which shows workers arriving at a factory so benign and bucolic that for years it was taken for a schoolhouse; Nicolai Cikovsky, Jr., and Franklin Kelly, Winslow Homer Washington, D.C., 1995), p. 92. 3. Sellers, P&M, pp. 44–45. 4. For an influential study of how Peale attempted in his family life to adapt

Notes to Pages 138–42

•

219

to changing social mores and practices, see Sidney Hart, “Charles Willson Peale and the Theory and Practice of the Eighteenth-Century Family,” in The Peale Family: Creation of a Legacy, 1735–1885, ed. Lillian B. Miller (New York, 1996), pp. 109–10. 5. John Adams to Abigail Adams, August 21, 1776, in Lyman Butterfield, ed., The Book of Abigail and John: Selected Letters of the Adams Family, 1762–1784 (Cambridge, Mass., 1975), p. 156. The Peale Family Group has not been as well studied as other Peale paintings, especially Exhuming the First American Mastodon and The Artist in His Museum. See Sellers, P&M, pp. 157–58, for background and documents. 6. Sellers, P&M, pp. 157–58. 7. Pierre Grimal, A Concise Dictionary of Classical Mythology (1951; reprint, Oxford, 1990), p. 94; Thomas Bulfinch, Bulfinch’s Mythology (reprint, New York, 1970), p. 937. Lance Humphries, “Rachel Brewer’s Husband: Charles Willson Peale. The Artist in Eighteenth-Century Maryland Society” (M.A. thesis, University of Virginia, 1994), pp. 57–58, makes the important point about the reference to the Three Graces. For Freud’s discussion of the theme of the three sisters, see Sigmund Freud, “The Theme of the Three Caskets,” in Writings on Art and Literature (Stanford, Calif., 1997), pp. 116–18, especially for its comments on the denial of death and the transformation of linear time, in which the third sister of the Morae represents death. 8. Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting (1435; reprint, New York, 1991), p. 89. According to the art historian Maurizio Calvesi, the Three Graces, during the Renaissance, alluded iconographically to the development of trade and the rise of a market economy. As symbols of exchange and mutuality, they were part of a “free-trade metaphor whereby [they] represent the circulation of goods redounding to the benefit of its instigators.” Calvesi’s discussion of the Three Graces in Piero Della Francesca’s Baptism of Christ is quoted and summarized in Carlo Ginzburg, The Enigma of Piero: Piero Della Francesca (New York, 2000), pp. 7, 13. Also see Maurisio Calvesi, Piero Della Francesca (New York, 1998), pp. 101–2. 9. The Renaissance coin is discussed in Ginzburg, The Enigma of Piero, p. 8; CWP, “Lecture on Natural History,” PP4:266. Here is the tautological aspect of Peale’s explanation of nature: dogs had been domesticated for centuries, yet the naturalist is surprised by their dependence on their human masters. 10. CWP to ReP, September 11, 1808, PP2:1136; Sellers, P&M, p. 157; Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891; reprint, New York, 1992). 11. A genealogy of Peale’s children is in Sellers, CWP, pp. 438–39. It has been suggested that the child sitting on the table is Raphaelle, not Margaret, and that the infant’s aspect (especially his orientation toward the artistic side of the table rather than the feminine) as well as his prominent, dexterous hands indicates Charles Willson Peale’s intention for his eldest son; see Alexander Nemerov, The Body of Raphaelle Peale: Self and Selfhood, 1812–24 (Berkeley, Calif., 2001), pp. 166–67.This supports my argument about the naming of things, but the identity of the child must remain conjectural, since Peale probably started

220

•

Notes to Pages 143–46

the painting in 1771, Raphaelle was not born until February 1774, and the child in the painting is about a year old—meaning that Peale was still working on the figures in the winter of 1775. On the other hand, since infants are unindividualized figures, Peale might have decided to make the “girl” into the “boy” at some later date to visually reinforce the purposes of their names. While he details the other changes that he made as he reworked the picture, he never discusses the children at all. 12. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 211; Sellers, CWP, pp. 438–42; CWP to ReP, September 11, 1808, PP2:1136; Sellers, P&M, p. 157; Wilde, Picture of Dorian Gray. The idea that names are destiny is comically treated, in all seriousness, in Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy (1760; reprint, New York, 1980), p. 189: “christian names are not such indifferent things;—had Luther here be called by any other name but Martin, he would have been damned to all eternity.” (The serious joke, of course, is the satire of Luther’s “delusion” of Protestantism’s free will.) 13. Elizabeth DePeyster Peale to Titian Ramsay Peale, July 14, 1819, F:VIIIA/1C1–4. I do not want to make too much of Elizabeth’s characterization. Nonetheless, it is interesting that Elizabeth would see her father as a military commander surveilling his camp like a warden in the Panopticon. On supervision and the modern sensibility, see Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1977; reprint, New York, 1995), pp. 184–94. 14. For CWP’s characterization of his future daughter-in-law, see CWP to Rubens Peale, May 5, 1822, PP4:116. 15. Phoebe Lloyd, “Philadelphia Story,” Art in America (November 1988), pp. 154–71, 195–203, is the most extreme interpretation of the Peale family’s hostile tensions. For a more nuanced study that includes TRP’s supposed doodle of a decapitated CWP, see Kenneth Haltman, “Titian Ramsay Peale’s Specimen Portraiture; or, Natural History as Family History,” in Miller, The Peale Family, pp. 191–92. 16. CWP, 1806–1822 Daybook, American Philosophical Society, p. 34 (Rubens); pp. 1, 22 (Raphaelle and Rembrandt). The political economy of the Peale museum, Peale’s attempt to obtain government aid while retaining control over the institution, is an instructive case in the early history of strict construction of federal power. Jefferson had to tell Peale that the state could not aid private enterprise, a decision that Peale accepted while becoming all the more determined to hold what he had. See Sidney Hart and David C.Ward, “The Waning of an Enlightenment Ideal: Charles Willson Peale’s Philadelphia Museum, 1790–1820,” Journal of the Early Republic 8 (Winter 1988): 389–418, 405–12 for the political and constitutional problem. See PP2:51–52 for Peale’s surprised reaction on learning that Rembrandt had unexpectedly sailed home. 17. CWP, An Essay to Promote Domestic Happiness (Philadelphia, 1812), PP3:129, 140, 130, 133. See also CWP, An Epistle to a Friend on the Means of Preserving Health, Promoting Happiness, and Prolonging the Life of Man (Philadelphia, 1803), F:IID/27.

Notes to Pages 146–49

•

221

18. CWP, An Essay, PP3:129; see Chapter 6 of this book for the Hudson River courting scene. 19. Benjamin Henry Latrobe to Thomas Jefferson, September 13, 1805, PP2:889. 20. For secondary works on tension in the Peale family, see the works cited in note 15 above. Also see David C. Ward and Sidney Hart, “Subversion and Illusion in the Life and Art of Raphaelle Peale,” American Art 8 (Summer/Fall 1994): 97–119, and Nemerov, The Body of Raphaelle Peale, even though Nemerov eschews biography. The main source for the Peale family’s emotional history is the volumes of the Selected Papers, which remain largely unplumbed by historians of the family. One particular subject that might be mentioned here is the tension that arose between Peale and his sons after he turned eighty and the sons began to openly complain about his role in their lives (the question of the estate was on their minds as well ); see, for instance, PP4:180–81, 198, and especially CWP to TRP, May 1826, PP4:543–44, in which CWP bitterly answers his sons’ demands on him and asks, “[A]m I not entitled to live at my ease and to persue such employment as may please my fancy during the remainder of my life, without the censure of any of my family[?]” 21. The literature on Exhuming the First American Mastodon is voluminous. The starting point is the Peales’ own documents in PP2, including the reprint of ReP, An Historical Disquisition on the Mammoth (London, 1803), PP2:543–81; a headnote introduction to ch. 4 gives the scientific and paleontological background (including bibliography) to the problem presented by the remains and the existence of the “mammoth”; PP2:308–14. That chapter (PP2:308–79) also includes CWP’s Diary 19, which narrates his expedition to recover the bones. On the exhumation and/or CWP’s painting of it, see Lillian B. Miller, “Charles Willson Peale as History Painter:The Exhumation of the Mastodon,” American Art Journal 13 (Winter 1981): 30–51; Abraham Davidson, “Charles Willson Peale’s ‘Exhuming the First American Mastodon: An Interpretation,” American Quarterly 21 (1969): 620–29; Laura Rigal, The American Manufactory: Art, Labor, and the World of Things in the Early Republic (Princeton, N.J., 1998), pp. 91–113 (“Peale’s Mammoth”); Florike Egmond and Peter Mason, “Popular Knowledge: Skeletons on Show: Learned Entertainment and Popular Knowledge,” History Workshop Journal 41 (1996): 92–116; Susan Stewart, “Death and Life, in That Order, in the Works of Charles Willson Peale,” in The Cultures of Collecting, ed. John Elsner and Roger Cardinal (London, 1997), pp. 218–23. For Nemerov’s characterization of Peale working desperately, see Nemerov, The Body of Raphaelle Peale, p. 175. 22. Georges Cuvier’s 1806 reclassification of the mammoth was reprinted in “Sur le grand mastodonte,” in Recherches sur les Ossemens Fossiles de Quadrupedes, 4 vols. (1812; reprint, Paris, 1969), 2:n.p. CWP to Thomas Jefferson, April 3, 1809, PP2:1189, conveyed news of the reclassification and asked if Jefferson concurred with the French scientist. For Hughes on the “man with the axe,” see Robert Hughes, American Visions: The Epic History of Art in Amer-

222

•

Notes to Pages 150–53

ica (New York, 1997), p. 102. Actually, nineteenth-century Americans were a great deal more ambivalent about progress and the “man with the axe” than Hughes’s bluffly teleological account of the painting would have them. See especially Leo Marx’s discussion of the fusion of the pastoral and progress in his reading of George Inness’s The Lackawanna Valley (1855; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.), in which stumps populate the foreground of the painting; Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (1964; reprint, New York, 1977), pp. 220–21. 23. PP:325; CWP to Alfred William Grayson, May 20, 1805, PP2:835, for CWP’s erroneous classification of the mammoth as carnivorous. For ReP’s similar conclusion, which is reflected in the full title of his Disquisition, an Historical Disquisition on the Mammoth, or Great American Incognitum, an Extinct, Immense, Carnivorous Animal, Whose Fossil Remains Have Been Found in North America, see ReP, An Historical Disquisition, PP2:562–63; Rigal, The American Manufactory, pp. 105–6. Elizabeth DePeyster Peale’s cycle of births is in Sellers, CWP, pp. 438–39. 24. Peale adopted traditional technology in the wheel pump powered by men walking on a treadmill. Fernand Braudel, Capitalism and Material Life, 1400– 1800 (London, 1973), p. 359; Gerard Doorman, “Dredging,” in Charles J. Singer et al., History of Technology, 7 vols. (Oxford, 1954–78), 4:638–39. With the development of mechanical and steam-powered pumps, the human-powered wheel was used in prisons to inculcate regular habits among the inmates. 25. See Sellers, P&M Suppl., pp. 44–45, for Noah and His Ark, after Charles Catton, Jr., and pp. 43–44 for Retreat across the Delaware. 26. CWP to Titian Ramsay Peale, December 25, 1819, January 8, 1820, PP3:789; CWP to Charles Peale Polk, January 9, 1820, PP3:791; CWP to ReP, February 10, 14, 15, 1820, PP3:795. 27. Nemerov has discussed the instabilities of Sully’s painting of Washington crossing the Delaware and compared them to the control expressed by Peale’s own figure in The Artist in His Museum; Nemerov, The Body of Raphaelle Peale, pp. 178–82. This comparison reifies Peale by ignoring how he came to present himself as a dominant subject by working through and mastering personal and societal disorders, especially war. Moreover, while there is tension in the Sully painting, there is no doubt that Washington will overcome it; the point of the sublime is that disaster never arrives because of man’s controlling hand. See Exhuming the First American Mastodon, where Peale’s pose exemplifies man’s control of nature just as Washington’s pose in Sully’s portrait exemplifies control of the nation. Nemerov thinks that Peale might have reacted, in part, to the tension/uncertainty in Sully’s piece by painting The Artist in His Museum, but, more likely, Sully mimicked Peale’s painting of 1808, as he also argued against the subversive demythologizing of Peale’s Retreat. Peale was transcending his own insecurities in The Artist. In Peale’s Retreat (which Nemerov does not discuss), there is doubt about everything. Also Peale’s unfortunately lost painting may be one of the first accurate, as opposed to mythologized, romanticized, and heroicized, depictions (such as Sully’s) of the effect of battle;

Notes to Pages 153–58

•

223

see John Keegan, The Face of Battle (New York, 1976), for a classic discussion about how battle paintings distorted events for ideological purposes. On the “hunters of Kentucky,” see John William Ward, Andrew Jackson: Symbol for an Age (New York, 1955), ch. 1. In reality, the Battle of New Orleans was won by cannon fire, not individual sharpshooting, a reality that further proves Ward’s point about the power of myth and symbol; see Theodore Roosevelt, A Naval History of the War of 1812 (New York, 1882). 28. Genesis 6:11; PP5:424. For the contemporary documents in which Peale described the subject and his painting of it, see Noah, PP3:684, 715–17, 720, 781, 789, 790–91. For a brief consideration of Peale’s portrayal of Noah as a self-portrait, see David C. Ward, “An Artist’s Self-Fashioning: The Forging of Charles Willson Peale,” Word and Image 15 (April-June 1999): 121. Another point concerning CWP’s identification with Noah is that of longevity; Noah lived a total of 950 years (Genesis 9:28). David R. Brigham, in Public Culture in the Early Republic: Peale’s Museum and Its Audience (Washington, D.C., 1995), pp. 44, 45, emphasizes the Christian aspect of Noah, in contrast to the secular representations by Peale of his museum. See also Roger B. Stein, “Charles Willson Peale’s Expressive Design: The Artist in His Museum,” Prospects 6 (1981): 165. 29. Genesis 5–10. The element of preservation in Noah and His Ark is cited by Stewart, “Death and Life,” p. 219, although she compares it with Exhuming the First American Mastodon and emphasizes the element of familial preservation. See also Nemerov, The Body of Raphaelle Peale, p. 150. 30. PP5:424; Genesis 6:9, 7:1, 9:2–3, 8:21. 31. I failed to scrutinize Peale’s representation of himself as Noah in Ward, “An Artist’s Self-Fashioning,” p. 121.

chapter 8. “i bring forth into public view” 1. For a summary history of Peale’s self-portraiture, see P&M, pp. 158–63; also David C. Ward, “Celebration of Self: The Portraiture of Charles Willson Peale and Rembrandt Peale, 1822–27,” American Art 7 (Winter 1993): 9–15 (the original title of this article, which the editors changed, was “Standard Likenesses,” which I still prefer for its directness). 2. For the transition from retirement back to Philadelphia, see PP3:610–92. For CWP’s illness and Hannah’s death, see PP4:83–84; the “Introduction” to PP4:xxiii states that the cause of Peale’s move back to Philadelphia was the death of Hannah Moore Peale in 1821, but he had begun his reemergence in 1818–19; Peale also, contrary to the “Introduction,” was not “weak and rudderless.” Peale’s plans to reorganize his life and his trouble with his children run throughout PP4. See especially PP4:198, 302–3, 541; 543–44 for the dentistry dispute. Peale put the farm up for sale on November 27, 1821 (PP4:86) but was not able to sell it, probably due to the aftereffects of the Panic of 1819, until 1826 (PP4:514); in the meantime, he rented it out. For Peale’s incorporation of the museum, see PP4:1–2; Philadelphia Museum, Deed of Trust, December 11, 1820, F:IIA/65B3–12, C1–6; “An Act to Incorpo-

224

•

Notes to Pages 158–64

rate the Philadelphia Museum,” Philadelphia Museum Minutes, 1821–27, F:XI/6F5–G13; Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser, January 10, 1821. 3. The cultural climate of the 1820s is surveyed in Fred Somkin, Unquiet Eagle: Memory and Desire in the Idea of American Freedom, 1815–1860 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1967), 131–74. The “Compromise of 1820,” Jefferson’s “firebell in the night,” was the event that signaled the end of the “Era of Good Feelings.” See David Potter, The Impending Crisis (New York, 1976), pp. 1–17; William W. Freehling, The Road to Disunion, vol. 1, Secessionists at Bay, 1776–1854 (New York, 1990), pp. 144–61. 4. PP4:575. Alexander Nemerov, in The Body of Raphaelle Peale: Still Life and Selfhood, 1812–1824 (Berkeley, Calif., 2000), p. 74, seizes too quickly on Peale’s description of crossing rivers and takes it metaphorically as indicating Peale’s desire to communicate with the dead who have crossed over. What Peale is actually doing is more audacious: he is silencing the dead and will henceforth speak for them. 5. For the reconstruction of Peale’s text of his autobiography and a discussion of how he wrote it, see PP5:xvii–xxix; for contemporary documents, see PP4:500–514. Also see David C. Ward, “An Artist’s Self-Fashioning: The Forging of Charles Willson Peale,” Word and Image 15 (April-June 1999): 107, 121. 6. For Franklin and self-fashioning, see John William Ward, “Benjamin Franklin: The Making of an American Character,” in Red, White, and Blue: Men, Books, and Ideas in American Culture (New York, 1969), pp. 125–40. For a short statement on authorship, biography, and autobiography, see Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford, 1977), pp. 186–91; also see Paul John Eakins, Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in the Art of Self-Invention (Princeton, N.J., 1985), pp. 184–209. For Peale’s intention to market his autobiography, see PP4:524. 7. The “Penman” comment by Peale is in PP4:514; P&M, pp. 160–63. 8. CWP to ReP, August 10, September 9, 1822, PP4:173; CWP to ReP, July 23, 1822, PP4:164. 9. CWP to ReP, August 2, 1822, PP4:165–66; CWP to RuP, August 4, 1822, PP4:169–70; a summary account is in P&M, pp. 160–62. The best study of The Artist in His Museum is Roger B. Stein, “Charles Willson Peale’s Expressive Design: The Artist in His Museum,” Prospects 6 (1981): 139–85. 10. On the curtain, see Stein, “Peale’s Expressive Design,” pp. 170–73; for Peale as showman and impresario, see David Lubin, Acts of Portrayal: Eakins, Sargent, James (New Haven, Conn., 1985), p. 165 n. 43. On the Van der Myn, see PP5:451, 456; see PP5:468 for quotation and controversy over Peale’s acquiring the portrait; also see “Editorial Note: The Governors’ Portraits” for a summary with additional sources for this episode, PP5:446–47. 11. The competition between Zeuxis and Parrhasius is detailed in Dorinda Evans, “Raphaelle Peale’s Venus Rising from the Sea: Further Support for Another Change of Interpretation,” American Art Journal 14 (Summer 1982):

Notes to Pages 165–70

•

225

67–68. Evans also untangles the Peales’ misidentifications of the ancient artists involved in the still-life competition. See PP5:272 for “world in miniature.” 12. For Raphaelle’s career generally, see Nikolai Cikovsky, Jr., Linda Bantel, and John Wilmerding, Raphaelle Peale Still Lifes (Washington, D.C., 1989), p. 48; for the Venus, Nemerov, The Body of Raphaelle Peale, pp. 189–201. See also David C. Ward and Sidney Hart, “Subversion and Illusion in the Life and Art of Raphaelle Peale,” American Art 8 (Summer/Fall ): 116–19. For the sale of Venus, see PP4:207. See especially Nemerov, The Body of Raphaelle Peale, pp. 70–74, for Raphaelle’s autobiographical defacement and effacement in contrast to his father’s autobiographical presence. RaP’s Catalogue for the Use of the Room (c. 1812; unlocated) was shown at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Annual Exhibition of 1812; Anna Wells Rutledge, comp., “Cumulative Record of Exhibition Catalogues,” in The Annual Exhibition Record of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (Madison, Conn., 1988), p. 166. 13. CWP to RaP, June 26, 1818, PP3:593–94. The thesis that Raphaelle tried in carefully calibrated ways to efface himself, including not only his talk/attempt of suicide but also his use of ventriloquism and “coded” speech, is examined in Ward and Hart, “Subversion and Illusion,” pp. 97–121; see pp. 113–19 specifically for Raphaelle’s muteness. Raphaelle was not just passively mute as a historical subject in that his letters do not survive. His impulse toward self-effacement also governed his personal life and informed his decision to concentrate on still lifes; CWP to RaP, November 15, 1817, PP3:548. Nemerov, The Body of Raphaelle Peale, pp. 125–40. Benjamin’s comment is in Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 206. 14. CWP to RuP, August 5, 6, 1823, PP4:301–3; also CWP to ReP, August 25, 1823, PP4:310–11. On The Staircase Group, see P&M, p. 167. On Peale, illusionism, and trompe l’oeil, see Wendy Bellion, “Likeness and Deception in American Art at the Turn of the Eighteenth Century” (Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 2001). Bellion made a preliminary report of her findings in a presentation to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., on January 11, 2001. David Steinberg, “Charles Willson Peale: The Portraitist as Divine,” in New Perspectives on Charles Willson Peale, ed. Lillian B. Miller and David C. Ward (Pittsburgh, Penn., 1991), pp. 131–44, discusses Peale’s self-portrait with Angelica, which shows him painting his wife. 15. CWP to Rachel Morris, September 19, 23, 1823, PP4:329–30. On the step question, see Ward and Hart, “Subversion and Illusion,” pp. 112–13; also, “Celebration of Self,” pp. 13–14. 16. P&M, pp. 162–63; also CWP to Eliza Burd Patterson, April 18, 1824, PP4:396. 17. “But the light is extreemly [sic] bright on my bald pate & grey hairs,” CWP to RuP, August 4, 1822, PP4:170. 18. On the study with Titian and the lighting, CWP to ReP, August 2, 1822, PP4:166. The Philip Larkin poem is “Water,” in Collected Poems, ed. Anthony Thwaite (New York, 1989), p. 93.

226

•

Notes to Pages 170–76

19. CWP to ReP, August 2, 1822, PP4:166. 20. Stein, “Peale’s Expressive Design,” pp. 160–61. 21. Alexander Wilson, American Ornithology, 8 vols. (Philadelphia, 1807–), 4:96; see Richard Peters to CWP, August 25, 1825, PP4:487 for Peale’s use of a blowpipe to collect hummingbirds. For the bears, see Chapter 5 of this book. 22. John Adams to Abigail Adams, August 21, 1776, in Lyman Butterfield, ed., The Book of Abigail and John: Selected Letters of the Adams Family, 1762–1784 (Cambridge, Mass., 1975), pp. 156–57. Adams’s comment on his studying war so his sons could study the humanities and arts is in John Adams to Abigail Adams, May 12, 1780, p. 260. For Americans’ suspicions of the arts, see Neil Harris, The Artist in American Society (New York, 1966), pp. 28–53, and Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, rev. ed. (New York, 1983), pp. 82–83. 23. Susan Stewart, “Death and Life, in That Order, in the Works of Charles Willson Peale,” in The Cultures of Collecting, ed. John Elsner and Roger Cardinal (London, 1997), p. 295, spots the importance of this encounter but unfortunately confuses Peale and Frances Hopkinson, who was also present, and whom Adams attacked even more vehemently. Unfortunately, this kind of sloppy scholarship runs throughout Stewart’s article, marring her interesting thesis about Peale. 24. John Adams to Francis Van der Kamp, November 11, 1804, F:VI/B13–14. 25. For the order that the lusus naturae violated, see Herbert Leventhal, In the Shadow of the Enlightenment: Occultism and Renaissance Science in Eighteenth-Century America (New York, 1976), pp. 219–59. For Peale’s use of a curtain to hide powerful emotional scenes, see Stewart, “Death and Life,” p. 210; for Peale’s determination to keep “freaks” out of sight but to include them in his museum, see his broadside “My Design in Forming This Museum” (1792): “The articles of lusus natura claim a place in the Museum; but as such subjects are not always agreeable to the sight, they will necessarily be received with caution, and the subjects will be but few, until a room can be obtained for that use”; PP2:18. See Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Cambridge, Mass., 1990), p. 42. 26. Lubin, Acts of Portrayal, p. 165 n. 43. My assumption is that Lubin described Peale as a masturbator because he made a conscious or unconscious connection between Peale’s portrayal of himself and Rodin’s statue of Balzac. Rodin, underneath the bronze cloak of greatness, notoriously depicted a naked, masturbating Balzac; see Albert Elsen and Stephen C. McGough, Rodin and Balzac: Bronzes from the Cantor, Fitzgerald Collection (exhibition catalogue, Beverly Hills, Calif., 1973), especially p. 54. 27. Julian P. Boyd, ed., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson (Princeton, N.J., 1950–), 10:448–49; for a summary contextualization of this episode from 1786, see Dumas Malone, Jefferson and His Time, 6 vols. (Boston, 1951), 2:75–81. 28. The old history of Peale’s museum, which still has its uses, is Charles Coleman Sellers, Mr. Peale’s Museum: Charles Willson Peale and the First Pop-

Notes to Pages 177–79

•

227

ular Museum of Natural Science and Art (New York, 1980); the best modern history is David R. Brigham, Public Culture in the Early Republic: Peale’s Museum and Its Audience (Washington, D.C., 1995). Peale’s visual depiction of the museum needs to be supplemented with his voluminous writings, especially his first series of forty lectures, produced in 1799–1800, F:IID/2–26. 29. Stewart, “Death and Life,” p. 204; Benjamin, The Arcades Project, pp. 204–5. 30. William Parker Cutler and Julia Cutler, eds., Life, Journals and Correspondence of Rev. Manasseh Cutler, 2 vols. (Cincinnati, 1888), 1:219–22; Port Folio, November 7, 1807 (Philadelphia), n.s., 4:293; Brigham, Public Culture, pp. 13–20. Stewart, “Death and Life,” p. 216, uses a description of the Lombard Street museum, thereby missing a chance to improve her point: that Peale created order out of disorder with this move to the State House. 31. Williams, Keywords, p. 49. 32. On the museum cases, see Nemerov, The Body of Raphaelle Peale, pp. 50–51. For the ordering of physical space, which mirrored the museum’s cases, see Dell Upton, “The City as Material Culture,” in The Art and Mystery of Historical Archaeology: Essays in Honor of James Deetz, ed. Ann Elizabeth Yentsch and Mary C. Beaudry (Boca Raton, Fla., 1992), pp. 51–74, especially 53–55 for the urban grid. On the cycles of expansion and contraction that drive American society, see John Higham, From Boundlessness to Consolidation: The Transformation of American Culture, 1848–60 (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1969); obviously I am applying Higham’s conception to an earlier period. See also Robert H. Wiebe, The Opening of American Society: From the Adoption of the Constitution to the Eve of Disunion (New York, 1984), pp. 127–68. For how these societal changes affected the museum, see Stein, “Peale’s Expressive Design,” pp. 203–8. 33. Bentham is quoted in Peter Linebaugh, The London’s Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, England, 1992), p. 371. The modern scholarly revival of the Panopticon as an analytical tool derives from Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1977; reprint, New York, 1995), especially the chapter “Panopticism,” pp. 195–228. Peale had an actual example of the Panopticon under his eye while he was working on his self-portraits.The Pennsylvania Eastern Penitentiary (authorized 1821) was built from May 1823 to 1829 and was based on Bentham’s design, including single cells and the central observation tower; for a description, see J. Thomas Scharf and Thompson Westcott, History of Philadelphia: 1609–1884, 3 vols. (Philadelphia, 1884), 3:1834–35. Peale’s son-in-law Coleman Sellers was director of the building commission supervising the prison’s design and construction; PP4: 171–72. The art historian Alan Wallach describes the Panopticon as it was embodied in the “panoptic gaze” and “panoptic sublime” as a means of looking at landscape painting. However, by focusing on the “gaze” instead of actual power relationships between observer and observed, he decontextualizes and dehistori-

228

•

Notes to Pages 180–84

cizes the purposes and action of the Panopticon; following Wallach, all gazes from heights, from Petrarch on Mt. Ventoux to Tenzing Norgay’s on Everest, are the same. (A similar decontextualizing/dehistoricizing frequently occurs when art historians talk about the “male gaze.”) See Alan Wallach, “Making a Picture of a View from Mount Holyoke,” in American Iconology: New Approaches to Nineteenth-Century Art and Literature, ed. David C. Miller and Angela Miller (New Haven, Conn., 1993), pp. 80–91, especially 83–84. A useful reminder of the broad impact of the Panopticon on other areas of early-nineteenth-century social and institutional reform and the way that the Panopticon altered the urban landscape both conceptually and physically is contained in Benjamin Miller’s fascinating Fat of the Land: Garbage in New York. The Last Two Hundred Years (New York, 2000), pp. 23–27. 34. On the grids and city design, see Upton, “The City as Material Culture,” pp. 53–55; Benjamin, Arcades Project, p. 207; CWP, “Lecture on Natural History,” May 17, 1823, PP4:254. See T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Age of Manet and His Followers (New York, 1985), p. 9, for how aesthetic “naturalizing” normalizes social relations. 35. Marcia Pointon, Hanging the Head: Portraiture and Social Formation in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven, Conn., 1993), pp. 27, 34. A consideration of the implications of the portrait gallery for ideology and power is Alan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” October 39 (Winter 1986): 10–12. On synthesizing sculpture and painting, see Robin Simon, The Portrait in Britain and America: With a Biographical Dictionary of Portrait Painters 1680–1914 (Boston, 1987), pp. 86–89. 36. For “medicinal office of the mind,” see CWP to Andrew Ellicott, February 28, 1802, PP2:411. 37. CWP to ReP, August 10, September 9, 1822, PP4:173; the identification of Wilson occurs most recently in Laura Rigal, The American Manufactory:Art, Labor, and the World of Things in the Early Republic (Princeton, N.J., 1998), p. 110. 38. CWP to ReP, August 10, September 9, 1822, PP4:173; on contemporary concerns about young men, see Herbert Muscamp, “The Passages of Paris and of Benjamin’s Mind,” New York Times, Arts and Leisure section, January 16, 2000, p. 20. 39. The best study of Peale, parenting, and education is Sidney Hart, “Charles Willson Peale and the Theory and Practice of the Eighteenth-Century Family,” in The Peale Family: Creation of a Legacy, 1770–1870, ed. Lillian B. Miller (New York, 1996), pp. 101–17, especially pp. 106–7. See also C. W. Peale, Guide to the Philadelphia Museum (Philadelphia, 1807), F:XIA/5; David Steinberg, “Charles Willson Peale Paints the Body Politic,” in Miller, The Peale Family, p. 129. 40. Nini Borgerhoeff, of Princeton, N.J., to the author, December 25, 1999; on public entertainment and Quakers, see Brigham, Public Culture, pp. 21, 22–23, 72–73; for Quakers and the Atlantic economies, see David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1975), pp. 233–50.

Notes to Pages 184–89

•

229

Peale discusses his slightly conflicted view of women’s role as helpmates but also as people with the talent for careers in PP5:318–21. The actual and sociological extent of Peale’s audience is examined in Sidney Hart and David C. Ward, “The Waning of an Enlightenment Ideal: Charles Willson Peale’s Philadelphia Museum, 1790–1820,” Journal of the Early Republic 8 (Winter 1998): 396–404; also Brigham, Public Culture, pp. 71–72, which acknowledges the presence of women attendees but sees that presence as evidence that Peale had “limited expectations” of what women would get out of the museum experience. Brigham’s argument is of a piece with the moral perfectionism that pervades much contemporary historical writing, a perfectionism colored by the limits of identity politics as an analytical, as opposed to a public policy, tool. That is, Peale’s opening of a major public institution to women is ignored because he does not meet the historian’s twenty-first-century standard of liberation and enlightenment. On Peale and the dual spheres of gender, see Hart, “Charles Willson Peale,” pp. 106–7. 41. CWP to ReP, August 10, September 9, 1822, PP4:173; see Alaister Smart, “Dramatic Gesture and Expression in the Age of Hogarth and Reynolds,” Apollo 82 (August 1965): 82–83, for the gesture of raised hand(s). 42. Rigal, The American Manufactory, p. 112. 43. Ibid., p. 108. 44. Smart, “Dramatic Gesture and Expression,” pp. 92–93, writes how a single raised hand indicated surprise; two raised hands were all the more dramatic, especially when coupled with the splayed fingers, such as the “quaker lady’s,” which indicates horror and fright. 45. ReP, Disquisition on the Mammoth, PP2:567; Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein (1816; reprint, New York, 1965), p. 57. For further discussion of the woman, see Rigal, The American Manufactory, p. 110. 46. See CWP to Alfred William Grayson, May 20, 1805, PP2:835, for CWP’s erroneous classification of the mammoth as carnivorous. For ReP’s similar conclusion, which is reflected in the full title of his Disquisition, see ReP, An Historical Disquisition on the Mammoth, or Great American Incognitum, an Extinct, Immense, Carnivorous Animal, Whose Fossil Remains Have Been Found in North America, see PP2:562–63. 47. CWP to John Isaac Hawkins, September 6, 10, 1805, PP2:887. 48. CWP to RaP, September 7, 1805, PP2:884; WP to ReP, Sophonisba Peale Sellers and Rubens Peale, August 12, 1805, PP2:877; CWP to ReP and Rubens, August 13, 1805, PP2:877–78; CWP to John Isaac Hawkins, September 8, 10, 1805, PP2:887; for the courtship and marriage, PP2:867–79; CWP to John DePeyster, February 19, 20, 1804, PP2:637; for Elizabeth DePeyster Peale’s death in childbirth, Sellers, CWP, pp. 438–39. 49. For Peale’s sustained lecture to RaP, see the letter of November 15, 1817, PP3:548. On patriarchal power, see Rigal, The American Manufactory, pp. 105–6. See also CWP to RaP, February 2, 1818, PP3:569, for the “House of Rendevous.” 50. CWP to RaP, September 7, 1805, PP2:884. 51. PP5:325. 52. “Exhibition Review,” Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser, June 4,

230

•

Notes to Pages 190–92

1824; CWP to RuP, August 5, 6, 1823, PP4:302. Henry May, The Enlightenment in America (New York, 1976), pp. 358–62, summarizes the waning of the American Enlightenment in the 1820s. 53. See Sigmund Freud, Writings on Art and Literature (Stanford, Calif., 1997), pp. 206–7, for eyes and castration. Robert A. Ferguson, The American Enlightenment, 1750–1820 (Cambridge, Mass., 1997), concludes that “[t]he universally acclaimed success of the Revolution enters into an equally omnipresent possibility of pervading loss. . . . Everywhere the recognition of rapid change vies with the desire to appear in control of it, and over everything looms a vague nostalgia about what is passing or missing” (p. 191). 54. Nobody has pointed out that, despite its association with late-nineteenthcentury Paris, the first arcade was in America, rather than London or Paris, since impediments to capitalist expansion were fewer than in Europe; see “The Philadelphia Arcade,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 41 (1917): 378–80; PP5:531–33. On nostalgia, see Marc H. Miller, “Lafayette’s Farewell Tour of America, 1824–25: A Study of the Pageantry and Public Portraiture” (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1979), p. 115. Sellers, Mr. Peale’s Museum, p. 258, discusses the move to the arcade. 55. Rothko is summarized and Nietzsche quoted from The Birth of Tragedy in David Anfam, Abstract Expressionism (New York, 1999), p. 155.

index

Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. Barnum, P. T., 190 Baxandall, Michael, 205 n.20 Bellion, Wendy, 99, 101 Benjamin, Walter, 143, 167 Bentham, Jeremy, 179, 181 Bogart, Cornelius J., 52–53, 64 Bonaparte, Joseph, 175 Bordley, John Beale, 9, 27–28; Peale’s portrait of, 39, 40, 41–42 Bordley, Thomas and Matthias, 34, 35 Bourdieu, Pierre, 197 n.7 Bradford, Richard, 159–60, 189 Breen, T. H., 57 Brewer, Eleanor Maccubbin, 78, 79 Brewer, Joseph, 78 Brigham, David R., 229 n.40 Brodsky, Joseph, xxii Brown, Charles Brockden, 95–96 Burr, Aaron, 58

Adams, John, 71–72, 82, 138, 172–74, 180 Alberti, Leon Battista, 140 Andre, John, 87 Appeles, 163, 164 Arbuckle, James, 25, 26 Argus (dog), 139, 141 Arnold, Benedict, 58, 85–87, 88, 130 The Artist in His Museum (Charles Willson Peale), xvii, xix, xx, 155– 56, 177, 189, 190, 192, 222 n.27; as attack on Raphaelle Peale, 165; celebration of man’s power over nature in, 171, 176, 179, 180, 181; curtain as organizing device in, 163, 164, 165, 178, 188, 191; female figure in, 184–86, 188; lighting in, 169–70; male background figures in, 181–83; Peale’s description of, 162, 170; Peale’s head and hands in, 170, 171, 174, 176; preliminary versions of, 54, 161; projection of Peale’s figure in, 162, 167; symbolic representation of the market in, 104, 178 artists: John Adams on, 71; as tradesmen, 16–17

Cadwalader, John and Elizabeth Lloyd, 17, 18, 136 Calhoun, John C., 158 Calvert, Benedict, 8 Calvert, Benjamin, 28 Calvesi, Maurizio, 219 n.8 Carroll, Charles (Barrister), 26, 27, 28, 32–33 Carroll, Charles (of Carrollton), 28 Carson, Anne, 114 Catton, Charles, 150, 151, 153

Badger, Joseph, 16 Bailyn, Bernard, 33, 39, 42, 84, 105–6 Baines, Paul, 5

231

232 Chase, Samuel, 80 Clark, T. J., 59, 195 n.4 Clay, Henry, 158 Clerc family, 175 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 197–98 n.10 colonial power: visual representation of, 202 n.11 Columbianum, 99, 101 Committee of Safety, 76 Copley, John Singleton, xviii, 15, 17, 21, 24, 57; Boy with a Squirrel, 59; on Peale’s William Pitt, 37 Cosway, Maria, 175 Crèvecoeur, Hector St. John de, xxiii Cutler, Manasseh, 177 Cuvier, Georges, 148–49, 186 David, Jacques-Louis, 149 Delaney, Daniel, 28 De Loutherbourg, Phillipe: Eidophusikon, 92–93 de Man, Paul, 197 n.8 De Moivre, Abraham, 146 Dickinson, John, 38, 39, 45 Digby hoax, 19–21, 51, 116, 194 Durgan, Peggy, 138 Eagleton, Terry, 30, 174 Eichholz, Jacob, 16 Ferguson, Robert A., 194 n.3, 230 n.53 Fielding, Henry, 102, 137 forgery, 3–4, 5, 20 Fort Wilson Riot, 74, 76 Foucault, Michel, 197 n.9 Franklin, Benjamin, 44, 90, 121, 160, 161; Peale’s portrait of, 85 Freud, Sigmund, 140, 190 Gainsborough, Thomas, 34 George III, 29 Gittings, Mr. and Mrs. James: Peale’s portrait of, 50, 58, 59, 60, 66, 206 nn.21–22 Goldsborough family, 136–37 Greenberg, Clement, 214 n.5 Gresham, Sir Thomas, 217 n.33

•

Index Habermas, Jürgen, 136 Hamilton, Alexander, 84, 180 Harris, Neil, 195 n.6 Henry, Patrick, 152 Hertz, Neil, 194 n.3 Hesselius, John, 25 Hockney, David, 205 nn.15–16 Homer, Winslow, 218 n.2 Hopkinson, Joseph, 168 Hughes, Robert, 149 Humphries, Lance, 19, 20, 140 Isaac, Rhys, 7 Jackson, Andrew, 158 Jefferson, Thomas, 104–5, 106–7, 146, 173, 220 n.16; “Head and Heart” letter of, 175, 176; Peale’s portrait of, 124, 180 Jenifer, Daniel of St. Thomas, 28 Jenings, Edmund, 35, 82, 139 Kalb, Johann, Baron de, 83, 85, 180 Kellog, Susan, 216 n.24 Kemp, Martin, 211 n.38 kitsch, 67, 107 Laming, Benjamin and Eleanor Ridgely: Peale’s portrait of, 48, 49, 59–60, 61, 64, 141 Larkin, Philip, 170, 225 n.18 Lasch, Christopher, 136 Latrobe, Benjamin Henry, 146–47 Lavater, Johann Kaspar, 130 Leutze, Emmanuel: Washington Crossing the Delaware, 152 Lewis and Clark expedition, 106, 178 “Lex Angli,” 41–42 Linnaeus, Carolus, 177 Lloyd, Robert, 28, 196 n.6 Long, Stephen A., 178 Lubin, David, 163, 175 Madison, James, 108 Maleuvre, Didier, 102 May, Henry, 209 n.17 McKean, Thomas, 137, 138

Index Miles, Ellen, 65, 66 Miller, Lillian B., 195–96 n.6, 206 n.21 Milton, John, 13, 15, 93 Mintz, Steven, 216 n.24 Morris, Gouverneur, 79–80, 81 Morris, Robert, 79–80, 81, 88 Muscamp, Herbert, 182 museums, 102–3; as markets, 104. See also Philadelphia Museum Nemerov, Alexander, 104, 148, 222 n.27 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 191–92 Noah: Peale as, 154, 155, 188 Novak, Barbara, 149 O’Donnell, John, 50 Paine, Thomas, 37, 39, 43, 64, 88 Panopticon, 179, 181, 227–28 n.33 Peale, Angelica (daughter), 129 Peale, Benjamin Franklin (son), 120, 215 n.19 Peale, Charles (father), 3, 4–9, 12, 29 Peale, Charles Willson (biography): born, 6; father dies, 6, 8–9; as apprentice saddler, 9–11; has dispute with master, 11; searches for bride, 10, 19, 22; sets up business and gets heavily in debt, 12–13, 16, 23; begins painting, 16, 17; in debt, 16; marries Rachel Brewer, 19, 22; “receives” Digby letter, 19–21; purchases slave, 23; takes apprentice, 23; served writs and flees to Massachusetts, 23–24; takes up painting as profession, 24–25, 26; obtains first important patron, 25; returns to Annapolis, 26; receives support for study in London, 28–29; in England, 29–43; studies with West, 32, 33–34; portrait painted by West, 30, 31, 32; exhibits work, 34–35; writes selfcritical letter, 37; develops new aesthetic, 39, 43; moves to Philadelphia, 44–45; in Revolutionary War, 72–74, 209 n.14; is politically active, 74, 76–78; has emotional crisis, 78–

•

233 79, 81, 87; withdraws from politics, 78, 81–82; involved in Philadelphia civic ceremonies, 88–92; during yellow fever epidemic, 95, 96–97; shifts from painting to science, 98, 99; founds Philadelphia Museum and Columbianum, 98, 99; “Blackberry Ramble,” 111–12; retires to Germantown farm, 112, 130; experiments with machinery, 112–13; wife Rachel dies, 116, 118; courts Molly Tilghman, 99, 116–19; charged with bigamy, 119; marries Betsey DePeyster, 112, 114, 146; wife Betsey dies, 122, 150; falls from ladder, 128; marries Hannah Moore, 122, 146, 187; wife Hannah dies, 157; returns to Philadelphia, 158, 223 n.2; moves museum to Philadelphia Arcade, 190; dies, 122. See also Philadelphia Museum Peale, Charles Willson (characteristics): American culture, interpreter of, 82, 159, 176; bodily energy of, 111–12; and body, commitment to, 121, 123–26; disposition of, vii, 120; and enemas, use of, 125–26; handwriting of, 21; individualism of, xxii–xxiii; John Adams on, 71, 172– 73; perseverance of, 89–90, 102; and sentiment, importance to, 102; signature of, 51, 74, 75; and speed, concern with, 112–13; and tracing and copying machines, interest in, 55– 56, 205 n.16; and writing, commitment to, xvii–xviii, 114–16, 194 n.3 Peale, Charles Willson (ideas, beliefs, and opinions): on the body as a machine, 122–27; on debt, 129–30; distrust of the wealthy by, 14–15, 60–62, 64–65; on family, sex, and marriage, 11, 12, 121–22, 136, 145– 46, 175–76, 187–88; on guns, 207 nn.5–6; on health and reform, 97– 98, 101; on his father, 8–9; on innate vs. acquired talent in the arts, 45; on natural history, 179–80; on natural

234 Peale, Charles Willson (ideas, beliefs, and opinions) (continued) world and human society, 107–10, 135–36; on new American man, 105; religious beliefs of, 81, 101, 108, 209 n.17; on slavery, 67; on woman’s role, 145–46; on work, 127–29 Peale, Charles Willson (family), xxiii; advice to sons, 1, 113; and autobiography, general absense from, 120, 143; marriages, 122, 146–47; naming of children, 142–43; patriarchal authority of, 143–46; support of sons by, 144, 145; tensions in family of, 144, 221 n.20 Peale, Charles Willson (as artist): allegorical and historical references used by, 37, 41–42; family portraits of, 136–42, 150, 183; on importance of outline in painting, 57, 218 n.39; income of, 49–50; itinerancy of, 48, 50; and kitsch, 67; and mechanics of painting, disinterest in, 48, 53; miniature portraits of, 24, 32, 33, 34, 35, 49, 52–53, 79, 115, 202–3 n.15; moving pictures of, 92–94, 99; naturalism of, 39, 41, 43, 58–60; newspaper review of, 189; oval heads of, 54, 141, 209 n.16; painting methods of, 54–57; portraits by, xviii, xx, 44, 48, 50, 57–58, 64, 65, 67–68, 79, 163; on portraiture, 56–57; self-portraits by, xvii, 24, 143, 155–57, 159, 161–62, 168, 175, 176, 189; sitters’ reactions to portraits by, 52–53 Peale, Charles Willson (artistic works): Agrippina Landing at Brundisium with the Ashes of Germanicus, 34; Alexander Hamilton, 84, 180; Benjamin and Eleanor Ridgely Laming, 48, 49, 59–60, 61, 64, 65– 66, 141; Benjamin Franklin, 85; Benjamin Rush, 61, 62, 64, 65; Boy with a Toy Horse, 34, 35; Charles Carroll, Barrister, 26, 27; Charles Willson Peale, 117; Clerc family portrait, 175; Cornelius J. Bogart

•

Index miniature, 52–53, 64; daughter of Richard Tilghman, portrait of, 119; David Rittenhouse, 61, 63; The Devil and General Arnold, 85–86; Domestic Happiness, 187; Eleanor Maccubbin Brewer portrait, 78, 79; The Elie Valette Family, 50–51, 137; Exhuming the First American Mastodon, 66, 147–48, 149, 150, 155, 182, 183, 189, 190–91, 222 n.27; George Washington in the Uniform of a British Colonial Colonel, 44, 46, 47; George Washington at Princeton, xxi, 54; The Goldsborough Family, 136–37; Gouverneur Morris and Robert Morris, 79–80, 81; Hannah Moore Peale portrait, 56; James Wilkinson, 83, 84; Johann, Baron de Kalb, 83, 85, 180; John Adams, 72, 173, 180; John Beale Bordley, 39, 40, 41– 42, 45; John Dickinson, 38, 39, 45; Joseph Bonaparte portrait, 75; Judge James Arbuckle of Accomac, 25, 26; The Long Room, Interior of the Front Room in Peale’s Museum, 169, 170; Major Tilghman portrait, 119; Mary (“Molly”) Tilghman, 116, 119; The Means of Preserving Health, 187; “Miss Harvey” portrait, 180; Mr. and Mrs. James Gittings and Granddaughter, 50, 58, 59, 60, 66, 206 nn.21–22; Mrs. James Russell and Grand Daughter, 34; Noah and His Ark, 150, 151, 153–54, 155, 189; Our Saviour Healing the Sick at the Pool of Bethesda, 128; The Peale Family, 137–38, 139, 140–42, 143, 147, 149, 219–20 n.11; John and Elizabeth Lloyd Cadwalader and Their Daughter Anne, 17, 18, 136; Raphaelle Peale, 165; The Retreat across the Delaware, 150–53, 154; Robert Morris and wife portraits, 79; Self-Portrait (1821), 168, 170, 171–72; Self-Portrait, “For the

Index Multitude,” 156, 158, 168, 189; Self-Portrait, “In the Character of a Painter,” 156, 157, 168; SelfPortrait in Uniform, 73; SelfPortrait, “Painted in the EightyFirst Year of His Age without Spectacles,” 157, 159; Self-Portrait, Study for “The Artist in His Museum,” frontispiece; Self-Portrait with Spectacles, 156; The Staircase Group (Portrait of Raphaelle Peale and Titian Ramsay Peale), 99–100, 143–44, 167; The Staircase SelfPortrait, 167–68, 189; “Temple of Independence” transparency, 88– 89, 93; Thomas and Matthias Bordley, 34, 35; Thomas Jefferson, 124, 180; Thomas McKean and His Son, 137, 138; Triumphal Arch, 90–91, 92; wife and daughter, ca. 1782–85 painting of, 167; William Pitt, 35, 36, 37, 39, 41, 45, 82, 139, 176; William Smith and His Grandson, 60. See also The Artist in His Museum Peale, Charles Willson (written works): account of life written for Tilghmans, 19, 116–18, 119, 215 n.13; autobiography of, xvii– xviii, 8–9, 11, 17, 19, 20, 53, 60– 62, 64, 78, 98, 99, 115, 119–20, 143, 160–61; diary of, 48, 53, 72, 73, 79, 119, 120; Epistle to a Friend on Preserving Health, 123–27; Essay to Promote Domestic Happiness, 120–23; Guide to the Philadelphia Museum, 183 Peale, Eleanor (daughter), 139, 142 Peale, Eleanor (daughter-in-law), 145 Peale, Elizabeth (Betsey) DePeyster (second wife), 111, 112, 114, 122, 146, 149–50, 187, 188, 220 n.13 Peale, Eliza LaForgue (daughter-inlaw), 144 Peale, Hannah Moore (third wife), 56, 122, 146, 157, 186–87 Peale, James (brother), xxii, 78–79, 138, 139, 157, 209 n.14

•

235 Peale, Margaret Triggs (mother), 6, 9 Peale, Margaret Van Bordley (daughter), 139, 142 Peale, Martha McGlathery (daughterin-law), 144, 187 Peale, Mary Jane (sister), 138–39 Peale, Rachel Brewer (first wife), 10, 19, 22, 24, 116, 117, 122 Peale, Raphaelle (son), 99, 120, 145, 219–20 n.11; A Catalogue for the Use of the Room, 165; death of, 196 n.6; meets John Adams, 174; muteness of, 225 n.13; portraits of, by father, 100, 101, 165; rebuked by father, 1, 121, 187; Venus Rising from the Sea: A Deception (After the Bath), 164–65, 166, 188 Peale, Rembrandt (son), 20, 98, 99, 113, 144, 149, 185, 212 n.8; Charles Willson Peale, 172, 173; father’s support of, 144, 145 Peale, Rubens (son), 90, 144, 145, 156 Peale, Sophonisba (daughter), 143, 144 Peale, Titian Ramsay, 101, 144, 157; The Long Room, Interior of the Front Room in Peale’s Museum, 169, 170; portraits of, by father, 99–100, 106 Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 156, 168 Philadelphia Arcade, 190–91 Philadelphia Museum, xx, 97; admission fees to, 103–4; attendance figures for, 103; founding of, 98; “freaks” in, 226 n.25; gallery of notable Americans in, 82–83, 87–88, 105, 108–9, 180, 181, 210 nn.22,29; goal of, 101–3, 104–5; and government aid, Peale’s attempt to obtain, 220 n.16; grizzly bears at, 106–7; historicity of, 176–77; as institution of public health, 98, 111, 181; moved to Philadelphia Arcade, 190–91; moved to Philosophical Hall, 101; patriotic goals of, 104–5; as “world in miniature,” 102, 164, 170. See also The Artist in His Museum physiognomy, 130–31

236 physionotrace, 55 Pike, Zebulon, 106, 178 Pine, Robert Edge, 204 n.12 Pitt, William: Peale’s portrait of, 35, 36, 37, 39, 41, 45, 82, 139, 176 Pocock, J. G. A., 4 Pointon, Marcia, 180 Port Folio, 177, 178 portraits: as complicity between artist, sitter, and audience, 56–57; didactic role in museum of, 105, 110; as sign of status, 17. See also under Peale, Charles Willson (as artist) Priestley, Joseph, 125 Prown, Jules, 206 n.23 Ramsay, Allan, xx Ramsay, Nathaniel, 98 Rather, Susan, 15 Reinhardt, Leslie, 65, 66 Reynolds, Joshua, 25 Rigal, Laura, 149, 185 Ringgold, Thomas, 28 Rittenhouse, David, 61, 63 Robespierre, Maximilien-FrançoisMarie-Isidore de, 76 Robinson, Alexander, 120, 129, 144 Rodin, Auguste, 226 n.26 Rothko, Mark, 191 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 13–14 Rush, Benjamin, 97, 98, 101, 125; Peale’s portrait of, 61, 62, 64, 65 Russell, Mrs. James, 34 Sekula, Allan, 58, 84 Sellers, Charles Coleman, 51, 52, 56, 80–81, 136, 195 n.6 Sharpe, Horatio, 28 Shelley, Mary, 185–86 Silverman, Kenneth, 76 slavery/slaves, 6, 58, 66–67 Smallwood, William, 204 n.12 Smibert, John, 24 Smith, Adam, 107

•

Index Smith, William, 60 Society of Artists, 34 South Seas exploring expedition, 178 Spring, Thomas, 28 Stein, Roger, 170 Steinberg, David, 183, 205 nn.21–22, 209 n.16 Sterne, Laurence, 102, 137, 220 n.12 Stewart, Susan, 78, 79, 226 n.23 Stuart, Gilbert, xx, 163 Sully, Thomas, 168; Crossing of the Delaware, 152, 222 n.27 Tasker, Benjamin, 28 Tasso, Torquato, 65, 66 Three Graces, 140–41, 219 n.8 Tilghman, James, 12, 117 Tilghman, Mary (Molly), 99, 116, 119 Tilghman, Robert, 117 Trilling, Lionel, xxiii, 127 Valette, Elie, 50–52, 137 Van der Myn, Herman: Charles Calvert, Fifth Lord Baltimore, 163, 164 Wallach, Alan, 227–28 n.33 Washington, George, 45–46, 87, 88; Peale’s paintings of, xx, xxi, 44, 46–47, 54, 82, 150–53, 162, 163 Waters, Nathan, 9, 11, 12 West, Benjamin, xviii, 29, 57, 139; Charles Willson Peale, 30, 31, 32; The Death of General Wolfe, 35; Peale’s work with, 32, 33–34; SelfPortrait, 32 Whorton, James C., 126 Wilkinson, James, 83, 84 Williams, Raymond, 172 Wilson, Alexander, 171, 177, 182, 183 Wistar, Caspar, 121, 160 Wollaston, John, 57 Wright, Joseph, 34 Zeuxis, 163, 164

Compositor: Integrated Composition Systems Indexer: Andrew Christenson Text: 10/13 Aldus Display: Aldus Printer and Binder: Thomson-Shore, Inc.