1741-1827
Painter and museum founder. After serving as a saddler's apprentice in Annapolis, MD, from 1754 to 1761, he worked at various trades, including painting signs and portraits. In 1766 some prominent Marylanders underwrote his studies in London with Benjamin West, from whom he absorbed the fundamentals of the British portrait tradition. Peale probably attended the informal life classes offered at St Martin's Lane Academy, precursor to the Royal Academy Schools, and drew from casts in the Duke of Richmond's collection in Whitehall. He visited the studios of such important British portrait painters as Joshua Reynolds, Francis Cotes and Allan Ramsay and studied the techniques of miniature painting, sculpture and engraving. In London he executed his first major commission Related Paintings of Charles Willson Peale :. | Portrait of the Peale Family | Charles Pettit | Rachel Leeds Kerr | Self-portrait | Meriwether Lewis | Related Artists:
George Henry Hall1825-1913
American painter. Brought up in Boston, he began his career as an artist at the age of 16. In 1849 he travelled with his friend Eastman Johnson to D?sseldorf. Hall studied at the K?nigliche Akademie for about a year, and after a further two years of study in Paris and Rome he returned in 1852 to New York where he settled. However, he remained an enthusiastic traveller and spent a total of more than 20 years abroad.
RAEBURN, Sir HenryScottish Romantic Painter, 1756-1823
Scottish painter. He is perhaps the best known of all Scottish painters, with a critical reputation rivalling that of Allan Ramsay. He was almost exclusively a portrait painter, and his work did much to define Scottish society in a period of immense vigour and intellectual distinction. The demand for his work was sufficient to sustain a career wholly in Scotland, although he occasionally regretted his lack of first-hand knowledge of portrait painting in London. His working life, which was largely confined to Edinburgh
Henry WallisBritish
1830-1916
1916). English painter, writer and collector. He first studied at F. S. Cary academy and in 1848 entered the Royal Academy Schools, London. He is also thought to have trained in Paris at some time in the late 1840s or early 1850s, first in Charles Gleyre atelier and subsequently at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. He specialized in portraits of literary figures and scenes from the lives of past writers, as in Dr Johnson at Cave, the Publisher (1854; untraced). His first great success was the Death of Chatterton (London, Tate), which he exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1856. The impoverished late 18th-century poet Thomas Chatterton, who while still in his teens had poisoned himself in despair, was a romantic hero for many young and struggling artists in Wallis day. He depicted the poet dead in his London garret, the floor strewn with torn fragments of manuscript and, tellingly, an empty phial near his hand. The painting was universally praised, not least by John Ruskin who described it as faultless and wonderful, advising visitors to examine it well, inch by inch. Although Wallis was only loosely connected with the Pre-Raphaelite movement, his method and style in Chatterton reveal the importance of that connection: the vibrant colours and careful build-up of symbolic detail are typical Pre-Raphaelite concerns. The success of Chatterton was such that, when exhibited in Manchester the following year, it was protected from the jostling crowds by a policeman. It was bought by another artist, Augustus