Art: The First Family

Charles Willson Peale, for all his fame as a portrait painter, was a practical soul. He started his adult life in the 1760s as a saddle maker and clock mender, switched to portraiture only after he discovered that he could earn as much as £10 per painting, which was much “better than with my other trades.” When he went to London to perfect his technique with Benjamin West, he was irritated by the highflown esthetic palaver that he heard. “It is generally an adopted opinion,” he noted disdainfully, “that genius for the fine arts is a particular gift and not an acquirement.”

Determined to disprove such nonsense, he returned to Philadelphia and taught his brothers, sons, daughters and, eventually, his grandchildren to paint. They in turn taught their children, thus founding the U.S.’s first dynasty of painters. The fruits of their endeavors have now been assembled by the Detroit Institute of Arts, where last week more than 200 works by Charles Willson Peale and 19 of his kith and kin were on display (see color pages).

Hypnotic & Glossy. Just as Charles W. ruled over the family, so the show is dominated by the near-Olympian progenitor who completed more than 1,000 pictures and sired 17 offspring by three successive wives (he died at 85, busy courting a fourth). A man of plain-spun charm, he had fought and wintered at Valley Forge, painted George and Martha Washington, Hamilton, Franklin, Lafayette and many of the other great men of the day in a style renowned for its affable simplicity. Like his lifelong friend Thomas Jefferson, he was an enthusiastic naturalist and inventor, experimented with everything from doorbells to apple-peeling machines. In 1786, he opened the nation’s first natural-history museum, run by the Peale family and displaying the reassembled bones of a mastodon they had unearthed near Newburgh, N.Y., together with 100,000 other stuffed animals and objects.

At first Peale relied principally on his youngest brother, James, to aid him in his flourishing portrait studio: C. W. did the full-length oils; James specialized in precise but ethereal miniatures. Then James’s younger daughter, Miriam, came along to become the U.S.’s first professional woman painter. Six of Charles Willson’s children died in infancy, but among the survivors, ambitiously christened for the Renaissance greats, were Rembrandt, Rubens, Titian and Raphaelle. Both Rembrandt and Raphaelle went into the family business. Rembrandt traveled extensively in Europe, acquiring a glossy, Continental technique, became highly successful and portrayed the likes of Dolley Madison and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Raphaelle, a seeming failure, had drunk himself to death by 1825, at the age of 51. Only in this century have his hypnotic trompe-l’oeil still lifes belatedly captured the public eye.

Cheerful & Talented. Though their styles differed, the Peales shared a common delight in painting one another. Husbands painted wives, daughters did fathers, nephews did uncles, everyone did in-laws. Charles Willson Peale painted one picture of James studying a miniature done by James’s daughter Anna of Rembrandt’s daughter Rosalba (herself a landscapist). He did another of James at work, probably on the portrait of his first wife Rachel, in miniature. “There was a happy cheerfulness in their countenances,” observed old John Adams, viewing an early portrait by C. W. Peale of his family. It was a cheerfulness and talent that enlivened the family gallery down to the third and fourth generation.