Charles Willson Peale
(1741-1827)
THE INGENIOUS MR. PEALE
CHARLES WILLSON
PEALE
harles willson
peale was the last and the greatest of
the! Colonial craftsmen painters who, like Feke and Badger, practised art together with several other
trades. An extreme example of the ingenuity developed in pioneer civilizations by the fact that every
homestead had to manufacture its own needs, he could mend anything, construct anything, do a thousand useful
tricks; he made a fine watch and painted a fine portrait. However, so transcendent was his genius, so
versatile his mind, that he seems to fall less into the humble tradition of his predecessors than into the
select company of men like Franklin and Jefferson, He also took a prominent part in the revolution, and
his interests were as various as theirs; like them he left an enduring mark on almost every field he
touched. He was the Yankee Jack of all trades turned eighteenth-century gentleman, a craftsman so able that
he became a universal genius. Yet he never lost the humble directness of the American craft approach. Two
years spent in England only threw him more passionately back onto his American roots; always he remained the
ingenious settler of an isolated clearing who, for lack of a more conventional instrument, uses his native
wits to solve the problems with which he is faced. Like the pioneer who struggles with a hostile forest, he
found no time for abstract reasoning; he even developed the crotchety peculiarities typical of strong minds
expanding in loneliness. Yet Peale lived most of his life in Philadelphia, America's greatest city, and
numbered among his friends such accomplished cosmopolitans as Washington, Franklin,
Jefferson;
i7i
while Lafayette and Baron von Humboldt frequented his
studio.
His life is a connecting link between America's past
and America's
future.
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