In fact, Rembrandt scarcely consulted his own youthful effort. Rembrandt was flattering his father: Only the last of the elder Peale’s seven different likenesses of Washington, painted beside his son in 1795, has any similarity to Rembrandt’s work, and then perhaps mainly in the elegant ruffled shirt. He stated publicly that he had based the new image on his 1795 portrait, his father’s portraits, and Houdon’s portrait.
#GEORGE WASHINGTON PORTRAIT PAINTER WHO HATED HIM HOW TO#
Peale’s extraordinarily difficult problem had been how to use the best sources to reinvent an image of Washington that could mediate among them. Not just a simple sky, it has the effect of placing Washington, if not precisely in eternity, then (in Thomas Jefferson’s words) in “everlasting remembrance.” Within this “porthole,” as it was soon dubbed, Peale placed the bust-length figure of Washington with an extraterrestrial background of clouds and shadows. The oak was sacred to Jupiter, and it also had a long Christian tradition as a symbol of virtue and endurance in the face of adversity. The window is decorated with a garland of oak leaves, and it is surmounted by the “Phydian head of Jupiter” (Peale’s description) on the keystone. He settled on a format roughly twice the size of a standard portrait, within which he painted a strikingly illusionistic stone oval window atop a stone sill engraved with the legend “PATRIAE PATER” (Father of His Country). Rembrandt Peale had invented a composition that presented the hero in a symbolic manner, blending portraiture with history painting.
Peale decided that a composite of the best likenesses was most likely to result in the icon he hoped to produce.Ĭonfining himself to his studio for three months, he painted in a “Poetic frenzy.” When completed, the portrait was given the blessing of the elder Peale, who, Rembrandt reported, judged it the best he had ever seen. This last he considered the finest of all portraits of Washington, an opinion still widely held. To realize this likeness–-to invent it, really–-he reviewed paintings of Washington by John Trumbull, by Gilbert Stuart, and, of course, by his own father, as well as the famous sculptural portrait by Jean-Antoine Houdon. In 1823, following the highly successful tour of his huge allegorical painting, The Court of Death, Peale began contemplating a new project: an image of George Washington that would, he hoped, become the “Standard likeness” of the first president. But unlike Stuart, who painted his “Athenaeum” head of Washington the following year and replicated it more than 70 times, Rembrandt Peale soon stopped copying his life study.Ī quarter century after the 1795 effort, Peale set out to create a new portrait of Washington that would show his “mild, thoughtful & dignified, yet firm and energetic Countenance.” In his privately printed essay, “Lecture on Washington and his Portraits,” the artist recounted “repeated attempts to fix on Canvass the Image which was so strong in my mind, by an effort of combination, chiefly of my father’s and my own studies.” Visits to France (1808-10) had exposed him to the neoclassical style then fashionable in Paris, and these ideals thenceforth competed with the innate realism that informed his earlier work. The intention behind the sittings had been, in fact, to supply the young artist with a model that could serve for future replicas. The younger Peale was never fully satisfied with his resulting life portrait, though he soon produced 10 copies from it. For the sittings with Washington, the Peales alternated with portraitist Gilbert Stuart–-the Peales painted Washington one day and Stuart, the next. While the elder Peale painted beside him (“to calm my nerves”), Rembrandt created a rivetingly realistic head of the president. This rare opportunity had been arranged by Rembrandt’s father, Charles Willson Peale, who had already painted Washington from life more often than any other artist. In 1795, at the age of 17, Rembrandt Peale painted a life portrait of George Washington during the president’s second term.
0 kommentar(er)
