1741-1827 Charles Wilson Peale Galleries Finding that he had a talent for painting, especially portraitures, Peale studied for a time under John Hesselius and John Singleton Copley. Friends eventually raised enough money for him to travel to England to take instruction from Benjamin West. Peale studied with West for two years beginning in 1767, afterward returning to America and settling in Annapolis, Maryland. There, he taught painting to his younger brother, James Peale, who in time also became a noted artist. Peale's enthusiasm for the nascent national government brought him to the capital, Philadelphia, in 1776, where he painted portraits of American notables and visitors from overseas. His estate, which is on the campus of La Salle University in Philadelphia, can still be visited. He also raised troops for the War of Independence and eventually gained the rank of captain in the Pennsylvania militia by 1777, having participated in several battles. While in the field, he continued to paint, doing miniature portraits of various officers in the Continental Army. He produced enlarged versions of these in later years. He served in the Pennsylvania state assembly in 1779-1780, after which he returned to painting full-time. Peale painted in the trompe l'oeil style,[1] and was quite prolific as an artist. While he did portraits of scores of historic figures (such as John Hancock, Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton), he is probably best known for his portraits of George Washington. The first time Washington ever sat for a portrait was with Peale in 1772, and there would be six other sittings; using these seven as models, Peale produced altogether close to 60 portraits of Washington. In January 2005, a full length portrait of "Washington at Princeton" from 1779 sold for $21.3 million dollars - setting a record for the highest price paid for an American portrait. Peale had a great interest in natural history, and organized the first U.S. scientific expedition in 1801. These two major interests combined in his founding of what became the Philadelphia Museum, and was later renamed the Peale Museum. This museum is considered the first. It housed a diverse collection of botanical, biological, and archaeological specimens. Most notably, the museum contained a large variety of birds which Peale himself acquired, and it was the first to display North American mammoth bones. The display of the mammoth bones entered Peale into a long standing debate between Thomas Jefferson and Comte de Buffon. Buffon argued that Europe was superior to the Americas biologically, which was illustrated through the size of animals found there. Jefferson referenced the existence of these mammoths (which he believed still roamed northern regions of the continent) as evidence for a greater biodiversity in America. Peale's display of these bones drew attention from Europe, as did his method of re-assembling large skeletal specimens in three dimensions. The museum was among the first to adopt Linnaean taxonomy. This system drew a stark contrast between Peale's museum and his competitors who presented their artifacts as mysterious oddities of the natural world. The museum underwent several moves during its existence. At various times it was located in several prominent buildings including Independence Hall and the original home of the American Philosophical Association. The museum would eventually fail in large part because Peale was unsuccessful at obtaining government funding. After his death, the museum was sold to, and split up by, showmen P. T. Barnum and Moses Kimball.  Related Paintings of Charles Wilson Peale :. | Man | Georg Washington | The Peale Family | Portrait of a lady | Disinterment of the Mastodon |
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Eustache Le Sueur
French Baroque Era Painter, 1616-1655. French painter and draughtsman. He was one of the most important painters of historical, mythological and religious pictures in 17th-century France and one of the founders of French classicism. He was long considered the 'French Raphael' and the equal of Nicolas Poussin and Charles Le Brun. His reputation reached its zenith in the first half of the 19th century, but since then it has been in decline, largely as a result of the simplified and saccharine image of the man and his art created by Romantic writers and painters. Nevertheless, more recent recognition of the complexity of his art has resulted in a new interest in him and in his place in the evolution of French painting in the 17th century. Despite the almost total absence of signed and dated works, the chronology of Le Sueur's oeuvre can be established with the aid of a few surviving contracts, dated engravings after his paintings and the list of works published by Le Comte in 1700.
Jean-Pierre Norblin de La Gourdaine
(in Polish, Jan Piotr Norblin; 15 July 1745 - 23 February 1830) was a French-born painter, draughtsman, engraver, drawing artist and caricaturist. From 1774 to 1804 he resided in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, where he obtained citizenship. He is considered one of the most important painters of the Polish Enlightenment. He achieved great success in Poland. Given many commissions from some of the most notable families of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, he stayed there for many years, not returning to Paris until the early 19th century. His style showed the influence of Antoine Watteau, and combined the Rococo tradition of charming fates galantes and fetes champetres with a panorama of daily life and current political events, captured with journalistic accuracy. He created a gallery of portraits of representatives of all social classes in the last years of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
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