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Author: Peale, Rembrandt

Biography:

PEALE, Rembrandt (1778-1860: ANBO)

Pseudonym Solomon Ivory, Esq.

He was born on 22 Feb. 1778 in Bucks County PA, the third of at least four surviving children of Charles Willson Peale (1741-1827) and his first wife, Rachel Brewer (1744-90). His father was an artist and the owner of Peale’s Museum in Philadelphia PA; among Rembrandt’s siblings and half-siblings, eight in all, were Raphael, Rubens, Rembrandt, Titian, and Angelica Kauffman. Most of the boys were educated by their father and followed him to become professional artists and museum-keepers themselves, with Rembrandt the most successful. He painted his first portrait of George Washington—one of many—in 1795, in which year he contributed paintings for the first time to an exhibition and began to seek portrait commissions. With his brother Raphael he established a museum for portraits and natural-history displays in Baltimore MD (1796-8). On 12 June 1798 he married Leonora (not Eleanor) May Short in Philadelphia; they went on to have nine children. After her death in 1836 he married another artist, Henrietta Christina (not Harriet) Cany (1799-1869), in 1840; there were no children from that marriage. As his career went from strength to strength, moving on from portraiture to history-painting, Peale sought out opportunities to study and work in Europe (England 1802-3, France 1808 and 1809-10, Italy 1828-30). He established a gallery in Philadelphia, where he was elected to the board of the Academy of Fine Arts and appointed Professor of painting at the Society of Artists. Then in 1814 he built a new museum in Baltimore, but had to sell it in 1822 (to his brother Rubens) after making bad investments. From 1822 to 1837 in New York City where he was a founding member of the National Academy of Design in 1826, in Boston, and in Washington DC where he served as President of the American Academy of Fine Arts (1836-8), he rebuilt his fortune. After his second marriage he returned to Philadelphia. The poem in this bibliography is an anomaly among his writings, most of which belong to the 1830s and later: Notes on Italy (1831), Graphics: a Manual of Drawing and Writing (1834), and autobiographical sketches in 1846 and 1855-6. He died at home in Philadelphia on 3 or 4 Oct. 1860 and was buried in Woodlands Cemetery there. (ANBO 5 Sept. 2023; ancestry.com 5 Sept. 2023; Sunday Dispatch [Philadelphia] 8 May 1870)

 

Books written (1):

Philadelphia: printed by Francis and Robert Bailey, 1800