Charles Willson Peale: Art and Selfhood in the Early Republic

by David C. Ward

Son of a convicted felon whose early death left the family impoverished, Charles Willson Peale (1741–1827) went on to lead a staggeringly full and successful life. A portrait painter who produced an unparalleled body of work, including the iconic The Artist in His Museum, Peale was also a revolutionary soldier, a radical activist, an impresario of moving pictures, a natural historian, an inventor, and the proprietor of one of the first modern museums. His many other interests included a lifelong preoccupation with writing; in fact, his autobiography is one of the first examples of the genre in the United States. David C. Ward's engaging book, richly textured with references to the history and culture of the time, is the first full critical biography of Peale. It links the artist's autobiography to his painting, illuminating the man, his art, and his times. Peale emerges for the first time as that particularly American phenomenon: the self-made man.

Before Peale's time, autobiographies had been written mainly as religious and confessional documents. Peale, however, produced his secular work to describe, not how God made him, but how he worked to make himself. This compelling study, drawing extensively from Peale's extraordinary autobiography, shows how Peale's life itself documents the development of American independence and individualism. Ultimately Ward addresses Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur's great question, "What then is the American, this new man?" as he sheds light on one of these new men and on the formative years in which he lived.

Genres: Nonfiction

260 pages, Hardcover

First published July 10, 2004

Reviews

[John Ward · Rating 5 out of 5]

Through the history of Charles Wilson Peale, we see an emerging American society and the development of the arts. If you are interested in Art and the Early Years of the Republic, this book is very informative.

[Justinian]

2016-11 - Charles Willson Peale: Art and Selfhood in the Early Republic. David Ward (Author) 2004. 260 Pages.

This is a book that had been long on my wish list and that I stumbled upon on the library Free Shelf. At its root it is a standard biography of Charles Wilson Peale. You need not know much about him or his role in the Founding to benefit from the read, however if you know more than average it will put a lot of his works and ethos into perspective. His ethos contributed to his role as a documenter and former of our image of that era and those titans who moved through it. With his own art work, his museum, and the subsequent careers of his own children … he left a large and formative stamp on our nation. He was a self-conscious man who strove to conform his inner reality to the public exterior he wished to portray … he battled depression, post battle PTSD and used narcotics, labor, and self-developed theories on nutrition and exercise as methods to overcome or at least re-direct his inner demons. To that end this book moves beyond standard biography and really seeks to search the inner man as best we can for he wrote a lot of it down. I fear though that this is not a general public tome, mostly because it deals with concepts of meaning and motivation and cultural implant more than just a litany of accomplishments, dates, events, and who he met along the way. A worthy read if you wish to better understand the early republic and the revolutionary concepts swirling around before they became mythologized and formalized by public presentation and memory.