Who is rembrandt peale

It was this ideal Washington that Peale felt he had fallen short of in each new portrait he attempted. Peale's family began to believe him obsessed, perhaps dangerously so and his father told him bluntly that the task was impossible.

Nevertheless, in Peale decided to make one last effort. Peale was inspired by many different sources, including the works of his father and the bust portrait by Jean-Antoine Houdon. What Peale created, however, was something quite different, an image of Washington that was as much icon as likeness.

Peale painted Washington in bust pose, facing left and framed by the massive stone oval that gave rise to the title "Porthole" portrait. Beyond the subject's head and shoulders drifted the clouds of some republican Olympus. For weeks following the completion of the portrait, Peale's studio was crowded with hundreds of visitors eager for a glimpse of what was already said to be a remarkably faithful likeness of George Washington.

The artist himself was anxious to solicit the opinions of men who had actually known Washington and soon collected a series of glowing endorsements that he later copied into his memoir, including from Washington's nephew Bushrod Washington and Chief Justice John Marshall. At sixteen he became a professional portraitist. In he had his first portrait sitting with President George Washington, which was the beginning of a lifelong interest in an ideal image of the great man, culminating in his often-replicated Patriae Pater portrait of about Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia.

He painted in South Carolina in and then in Baltimore and again in Philadelphia. In he married Eleanora Mary Short. In he accompanied his father to Newburg, New York, where he assisted with the exhumation and reconstruction of two mastodon skeletons. In and again in he visited Paris; here his mature style began to coalesce under the influence of French neoclassicism. In he opened in Baltimore a museum of painting and natural history and in helped to found the Gas Light Company of Baltimore.

In he sold the museum to his brother Rubens and returned to painting full time. In the following years he traveled to New York, where he became a founding member of the National Academy of Design, and to Boston, where he experimented with lithography.

The stone oval derives from the seventeenth-century European fashion for tromp l'oeil stone casements, a format Peale may have observed during periods of study in Europe. Due to rights restrictions, this image cannot be enlarged, viewed at full screen, or downloaded.

As part of the Met's Open Access policy , you can freely copy, modify and distribute this image, even for commercial purposes. Title: George Washington. Date: ca. Culture: American. Medium: Oil on canvas.