Rembrandt Peale

Rembrandt Peale (1778-1860), American artist, was born in Bucks county, Pennsylvania, on the 22nd of February 1778, the son of Charles Willson Peale. He studied under his father, under Benjamin West in London (1802-1803), and in Paris in 1807 and 1809. As early as 1795 he had begun from life a portrait of Washington. Of this he made many replicas, the latest in 1823, purchased by the United States government in 1832, and now in the Capitol of Washington. Peale was one of the first of American lithographers. He was an excellent draughtsman, but in colour his work cannot rank with his father's. In 1843 he devised for the Philadelphia public schools a system of teaching drawing and penmanship. His portraits include those of President Jefferson, Mrs Madison, Commodores Perry, Decatur, and Bainbridge, Houdon, the sculptor, General Armstrong, and an equestrian portrait of General Washington, now in Independence Hall, Philadelphia. His "Court of Death" (1820) is in the Detroit Art Gallery. In 1825 Peale succeeded John Trumbull as president of the American Academy of Fine Arts (founded in 1802 as the New York Academy of Fine Arts), and he was one of the original members of the National Academy of Design. He wrote several books, among them Notes on Italy (1831), Reminiscences of Art and Artists (1845). He died in Philadelphia on the 3rd of October 1860.

A brother, Raphaelle Peale (1774-1825), was one of the earliest of American still-life painters; and another brother, Titian Ramsey Peale (1800-1885), made numerous drawings, some of them in water-colour, in illustration of animal life.

See "Rembrandt Peale," partly autobiographical, in C. E. Lester's The Artists of America (New York, 1846).1846).