An artist's self-fashioning: the forging of Charles Willson Peale

Abstract

In May 1735, Charles Peale, a functionary in the London Post Office, pled guilty to five indictments of theft and forgery. He was sentenced to death. Perhaps because he pled the charge, the sentence was commuted to the living death of transportation to the colonies. It was a sentence duly carried out: Charles Peale found himself in 1736 in Virginia and then, around 1740, on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where he settled permanently and lived out the rest of his short (he died at 40), unhappy life as a schoolteacher, his aspirations of gentility unfulfilled. He was the father of Charles Willson Peale (1741–1827), best known now as an artist but also an Enlightenment polymath on the model of Benjamin Franklin: artisan, revolutionary, soldier, inventor, natural historian, and founder of America's first great museum, as well as the patriarch of painters, artisans, inventors, naturalists and explorers. The very listing of the son's achievements diminishes his father all the more. But Charles Willson Peale's biography should not be dictated by the career he created through his portraits or by the rich Peale archive that has survived — as Peale intended when he created it. Instead, we need to look at the process by which Peale forged his identity and sense of self and out of which he created his art (Figure 1).1