Works by the Peale Family: Creating American Traditions

Join Carol Eaton Soltis as she guides us through a close look at artworks by Charles Willson Peale, James Peale, Margaret Angelica Peale, Sara Miriam Peale, and Raphaelle Peale – all on view in Making American Artists: Stories from PAFA, 1776 - 1976.  Soltis will share stories about the lives of the talented Peale family – how the artists and their works are related.  Soltis, a leading scholar on the Peale family's legacy in American art, will deepen our appreciation of the paintings, which range from the monumental and public to the more modestly scaled and intimate. Don't miss this rare opportunity to learn from a widely recognized Peale scholar and curator. 

Carol Eaton Soltis is Project Associate Curator in the Department of American Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She received her doctorate in the History of Art from the University of Pennsylvania and, as author of the first substantive catalogue and exhibition on Rembrandt Peale, Rembrandt Peale, A Life in the Arts (Historical Society of Pennsylvania), she joined the Smithsonian’s Peale Family Papers, where she assembled a catalogue raisonné of Rembrandt’s work and co-curated the National Portrait Gallery’s exhibition, Rembrandt Peale, 1778-1860, In Pursuit of Fame. Her most recent book, The Art of the Peales, Adaptations & Innovations, published by Yale University Press, is an in-depth catalogue of the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s unparalleled Peale Collection, which contains oil portraits, watercolor on ivory miniatures, still life pictures, landscapes, drawings and prints by fifteen different Peale artists spanning the 1770’s into the 20th century. She is also presently a consultant to the U.S. Department of State to study a work by Charles Wilson Peale in the Residence of the U.S. Ambassador in Paris, France.

Image: Sarah Miriam Peale (1800-1885), Anna Maria Smyth, 1821, Oil on canvas, framed: 41 3/4 x 33 x 3 in. (106.045 x 83.82 x 7.62 cm.); 35 15/16 x 27 7/16 in. (91.28125 x 69.69125 cm.), Gift of Mrs. John Frederick Lewis (The John Frederick Lewis Memorial Collection).