cover image The Peale Family: Creation of a Legacy 1770-1870

The Peale Family: Creation of a Legacy 1770-1870

. Abbeville Press, $65 (320pp) ISBN 978-0-7892-0206-2

As this splendid catalogue of a traveling exhibition reveals, the Peale family's artistic legacy features hundreds of works of great beauty, variety and human interest. Philadelphia portrait painter, museum founder, inventor and paleontologist Charles Wilson Peale (1741-1827), who fought with General Washington's army, made allegorical paintings defending American resistance to British rule. His underrated brother, James Peale (1749-1831), excelled at oil portraits, landscape, history and genre scenes. Among Charles's 17 children were Rembrandt Peale (1778-1860), who painted wonderfully romantic views of Niagara Falls; rebellious Raphaelle Peale (1774-1825), who drank too much and worked themes of overindulgence into his remarkably fresh canvases; and artist-naturalist Titian Ramsay Peale (1799-1885), precise painter of the American West. Politicians and diplomats faced the incisive brush of Sarah Miriam Peale (1800-1885), James's daughter; her sister, Anna Claypoole Peale (1791-1878), did naturalistic miniature portraits. Miller, editor of the Peale Family Papers at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery, leads a team of art historians in tracing the family's checkered path from the Enlightenment to the Victorian era. (Oct.)