Rembrandt Peale

Painter of portraits and history paintings, founder and administrator of arts organizations, and author of works on travel and art, Rembrandt Peale brought the lofty ideals of the academic art tradition to the new realities of art-making in an age of mechanical reproduction. Peale was one of several multi-talented children born to American painter and polymath Charles Willson Peale (1741–1827), under whose direction he began painting portraits at the age of thirteen. In 1802, he traveled to London to study with famed expatriate American artist Benjamin West (1738–1820), and he exhibited his portraits at the prestigious Royal Academy. Peale returned to America in 1803 and settled in Philadelphia, where he was one of the founders of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1805. To fulfill commissions for his father's Philadelphia museum of historical portraits and natural history specimens, he traveled to New York, Boston, and Washington, D.C., and visited Paris in 1808 and again in 1809.

Peale moved to Baltimore in 1814 to establish his own museum of historical portraits and natural history in emulation of his father. With the financial success of his great multi-figural work The Court of Death (1820; Detroit Institute of Arts), which he exhibited on tour, Peale left the museum in the care of his brother Rubens and opened a studio in New York. During a stay in Philadelphia, he painted the first of the so-called "porthole" portraits of George Washington for which he is best remembered; in addition to painting some eighty repetitions of the portrait, he reproduced it in lithography, a relatively new print medium in which he was one of the first American artists to work. On his return to New York in 1825, Peale was elected president of the American Academy of Fine Arts. He was also an early member of the National Academy of Design.

Peale revisited Europe in 1828–30, spending much of his time in France and Italy copying Old Master. After a final trip to Europe in 1832–33, he settled permanently in Philadelphia. He spent his final years painting portraits of Washington and traveling around the country to lecture on life portraits of the first president, illustrating his talks with his own original works as well as copies of likenesses by other artists. In 1835, Peale published a highly popular manual on drawing and penmanship, after which he was appointed to the newly created position of drawing master at Philadelphia's Central High School. He also published a book on travel and an anthology of poetry. He was planning publication of a volume of artistic reminiscences and practical advice when he died in Philadelphia at the age of eighty-two.