The characters of Charles Willson Peale: Portraiture and social identity, 1769-1776

After his return from two years of study in London in 1769 and before his permanent move to Philadelphia in 1776, Charles Willson Peale painted over two hundred portraits in Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. This prodigious production suggests that Peale successfully gauged and met local expectations about portraiture. By examining a number of his works from this period in light of biographies, prototypical portraits, and written evidence about colonial pictorial culture and self-presentation, it is possible to articulate the manifold ends towards which Peale directed his efforts. Peale not only fashioned his commissioned portraits to record individual appearances for posterity, but also to shape current opinion about sitters. He augmented the reputation for reliable service fostered by his commissioned work with a series of portraits produced independently of the marketplace. Representing public figures and family members, these paintings identified Peale as a public-minded citizen who sought to advance a Whig agenda for the public\u27s constitution. Peale nurtured recognition of his tie to the venerable tradition of the Fine Arts with select public relations gambits and the esoteric iconography of his group portrait of his own family. Painting pictures intended to bring viewers to identify specific people with particular, conventional social roles, Peale participated in currents of both continuity and change in the intellectually turbulent period immediately preceding the physical turbulence of the American Revolution