Hungarian Rhapsody

At the end of the nineteenth century, artists from all over Europe flocked to Paris to learn and, perhaps more importantly, literally breathe in the new spirit of the arts. Traveling all the way from Hungary, Jozsef Rippl-Ronai lived in Paris from 1887 to 1901 before returning to his native land. While in Paris, Rippl-Ronai encountered many of the greats of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. Born May 23, 1861, Rippl-Ronai’s Nude on a Balcony (above, from 1909) shows the influence of Edgar Degas’ nudes on Rippl-Ronai’s style. Rippl-Ronai knew Degas’ work quite well, eagerly listening to stories of the artist from his friend Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, the only member of the younger artists’ circle brave enough to approach Degas. The shakiness of the line Rippl-Ronai uses in Nude on a Balcony, however, reflects the influence of Les Nabis, the “prophets” of modern art who based their art on the primal energy exemplified by Paul Gauguin, whom Rippl-Ronai met and championed when few others knew Gauguin’s work.

“He had recently returned for the first time from Tahiti,” Rippl-Ronai writes in his memoirs of his first meeting with Gauguin. “That is, he was already almost the real Gauguin.” Along with an artist friend, Rippl-Ronai learned “to love Gauguin's art, not every single item, naturally, but the artist as he was.” Spreading Gauguin’s around Paris, “where they either reviled him or thought he was mad,” Rippl-Ronai and his friend took credit as “the first to improve [Gauguin’s] reputation.” In Painter with Models (above, from 1910), Rippl-Ronai strikes a Gauguin-esque pose, placing himself among a gaggle of nude models just as Gauguin traveled to mingle with the scantily-clad Tahitian ladies. Rippl-Ronai clearly admired Gauguin “as he was,” and not necessarily Gauguin’s style of painting, hoping to emulate the antiestablishment radicalism that helped Gauguin break away from conventionality and find his true voice.

As much as Rippl-Ronai envied Gauguin’s freedom, he envied Degas for his technique. In Zorka (above, from 1923), Rippl-Ronai draws his favorite model in pastel, the medium Degas had almost single-handedly given respectability in the late nineteenth century. The nude woman’s unwavering stare at the viewer is pure Gauguin—shameless and powerful—but the stylized human figure, composed of pure gesture, reminds me of Degas’ later work featuring bathers in unconventional poses, configured more as abstract sculpture than living, breathing women. Gauguin and Les Nabis win credit for Rippl-Ronai’s bold palette and sensuous line, which won him fame upon his return to Hungary, but the influence of Degas, himself nearly blind when Rippl-Ronai encounters his work, clearly contributes to the eye-opening brilliance of the Hungarian’s art.

Setting the Stage

God needs the Devil, like Superman needs Lex Luthor or Sherlock Holmes needs Professor Moriarty. Without the tension of opposite forces pitted against each other, there is no story, just drab, monotonous perfection. When Giorgio Vasari mapped out his Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, he knew his ultimate destination—the perfection of human artistry embodied by Michelangelo. “In our age the Divine Goodness has created for us Michelangelo Buonarroti,” Vasari writes in his preface to that landmark of art history. Knowing that unabashed praise of the master would lack drama, Vasari devised an entire journey through the history of Italian art from the late thirteenth century to his own sixteenth century painted with the chiaroscuro of bright good and dark evil artists. In Victims and Villains in Vasari’s Lives, the late Andrew Ladis demonstrates the importance of Vasari’s “bad guys” who helped define genius through their flaws and made the stars of the Renaissance shine all the brighter. Vasari, Ladis believes, casts the heroic Giotto (depicted above in a woodcut from Vasari’s 1568 edition of the Lives), Masaccio, and others versus a series of contemporary foils in “a great morality play in which sacred virtues, such as humility, charity, and faith, vie against the base motives that perpectually threaten Vasari’s sacred brotherhood.” Vasari, who, Landis writes, “appreciated the rhetorical power of anecdotes, whether true or not,” never lets the facts get in the way of the greater mission of paving the way for the “messiah” Michelangelo.

Ladis’ work presents an often forgotten side of Vasari’s Lives. Most modern abridged translations leave out the minor figures, preferring to give the major names full coverage. Ladis shows how those “minor” figures play a significant role in the Lives as a whole. The Lives lives more fully through the completeness of the opposition Vasari intended. Giotto’s exemplary life becomes humanized through the story of Buffalmacco, who becomes “an extended counterdemonstration of what it takes to be a true artist, a cautionary example of how not to lead one’s life.” Most of Buffalmacco’s works were already gone in Vasari’s day, damaged much like Buffalmacco’s The Triumph of Death (above, from 1355), a visual correlative to the self-destructive impulses of the artist himself. One of the few works of Buffalmacco that Vasari does see intact is a depiction of the suicide of Judas Iscariot, the template for self-destruction. Such “coincidence” always play right into the hands of Vasari as he weaves his narrative.

Ladis not only analyzes the bad painter—good painter dynamic of Vasari’s text, but also shows how Vasari took creative liberties to portray the “heroes” in the specific heroic manner that suits his higher purpose. In the case of Masaccio, Ladis writes, Vasari “ignored chronology and structured the life so that it comes to a climax with the Brancacci Chapel, still regarded as the painter’s greatest work. Making the Brancacci Chapel a kind of shrine and leading the viewer on a symbolic pilgrimage to it, Vasari compresses all of his story into the narrow confines of that sacred space, the holy of holies of the new art.” Images from the Brancacci Chapel, such as St. Peter Baptizing the Neophytes (above, from 1425), thus prefigure the ultimate sacred space of the Sistine Chapel , the site of Michelangelo’s greatest triumph.

While deconstructing the rhetorical life Vasari breathed into his history, Ladis himself shows a flair for vivacious prose. Vasari “turns Perugino into an avatar of avarice,” Ladis writes, “felled by the same thing that had lifted him up: Florence itself.” Ladis uses the case of Perugino to make the distinction between villains and victims. Perugino’s avarice makes him a villain, but the double whammy of being eclipsed by both Raphael, his student, and Michelangelo makes Perugino an unfortunate victim whose reputation has never fully recovered from those blows. Perugino once stood high enough in the art world that he placed frescoes such as The Delivery of the Keys (above, from 1482) in the Sistine Chapel. Later, however, some of his work was destroyed to make room for Michelangelo’s Last Judgment. Such erasure of an artist, however, is acceptable to Vasari as long as it serves to make way for the star of the Renaissance show.

Just before Michelangelo, the ultimate hero, steps into the spotlight, Vasari presents the ultimate villain, Baccio Bandinelli, whom Ladis calls “a larger-than-hell villain.” With the exception of Vasari’s life of Michelangelo, Bandinelli’s life takes up more pages than any other, including all the other good guys going back to Giotto. In life, critics measured Bandinelli’s accomplishments against those of Michelangelo, a contest that Bandinelli himself welcomed. Bandinelli’s Hercules and Cacus (above, from 1543) not only stood as a rival to Michelangelo’s David but physically stood near the David in Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio. Bandinelli’s villainy reaches it’s height when he, according to Vasari, destroyed Michelangelo’s cartoon for The Battle of Cascina, one of the great lost works of the master. Vasari presents Bandinelli as a great artist whose lack of character denies him the same magnitude of genius that the virtuous Michelangelo achieves. Even in death, Bandinelli’s sinister character as embodied in his art shows how greatly he differs from Michelangelo. The tomb Bandinelli sculpted for himself contains a self-portrait of himself as Nicodemus holding the dead Christ. That self-portrait as Nicodemus characteristically upstages the fallen savior—one final demonstration of Bandinelli’s hubris. Ladis remarks that Bandinelli stole the idea of a pieta from Michelangelo’s Pieta, but I’d argue that a closer source might be Michelangelo’s Florentine Pieta, in which Michelangelo cast himself in the role of Nicodemus, but in a much more servile role than Bandinelli’s Nicodemus. These dueling Nicodemi exemplify the larger story Vasari, and Ladis, tell.

You cannot come away from Victims and Villains in Vasari’s Lives and not want to go back to the source and read it again with Ladis’ ideas lurking in the back of your mind. Just as Herodotus’ Histories and Plutarch’s Parallel Lives can be seen equally as literature and history, Vasari’s Lives deserves to be seen as a masterpiece of Renaissance infotainment, but with a purpose. Michelangelo descends from heaven in Vasari’s eyes to redeem the world through art. Vasari, himself a painter, accepts the role of evangelist and spreads the word of Michelangelo’s majesty. Perhaps Ladis’ work will lead to a reappraisal of those minor figures so blithely excised from the abridged versions of Vasari’s work, whose flaws are more fascinating and human than those artistic god that once walked among us. Although Vasari always sided with the angels, he knew the value of the fallen angels to his story. Andrew Ladis’ Victims and Villains in Vasari’s Lives gives the devils their due, just as Vasari intended.


[Many thanks to the University of North Carolina Press for providing me with a review copy of Andrew Ladis’ Victims and Villains in Vasari’s Lives.]

North and South

When Albrecht Durer fled Nuremberg (and the plague) in 1494 for the sunny lands of Italy, his art took on a whole new dimension inspired by the Italian Renaissance. Born May 21, 1471, Durer took the lessons he learned from his time in Italy and brought them back to Germany, helping propel the Northern Renaissance and spreading humanist ideals further across Europe. Durer’s The Adoration of the Magi (above, from 1503) shows the compositional balance and harmony the Renaissance employed as a visual counterpart to their idealism. The amazing draftsmanship and inventive etching technique, however, are wholly Durer’s. Although Durer painted many great works, they remained largely in private collections. Durer’s prints, however, helped spread word of his talent across Europe and the world, winning him a name as the greatest printmaker of his time and egging other artists on to try to follow his example.

Durer’s Adam and Eve (above, from 1504) remains perhaps my favorite work by the artist. Durer liked it, too, proudly signing the image in Latin, ALBERTUS DURER NORICUS FACIEBAT 1504 (in English, “Albrecht Durer of Nuremberg made this engraving in 1504”). The white bodies of the first man and woman (with strategically placed flora deftly preserving their modesty) stand out against the darkness of the garden of Eden behind them, where the animals all peacefully coexist, beginning with the cat and mouse at the foot of the picture. Eve’s figure has that classic Renaissance look, that is, the unreality of a man’s body appended with wider hips and two small breasts lumped onto the chest like scoops of ice cream. Durer, like Leonardo da Vinci with his Vitruvian Man, saw the male physique as the apex of all creation and more fitting for study than that of the female form, a bias continued today in the dearth of medical studies concentrating on women in relation to the number of those focused on men. Despite that classic “flaw,” Durer’s Adam and Eve pulsates with life and drama as the serpent goads Eve into eating the forbidden fruit and upsetting the entire applecart of paradise.

Durer’s meticulous attention to detail pays off in that he’s never stodgy or studied. His mathematical approach became part of a strain of art continuing all the way through the pseudoscientific approach of Thomas Eakins, who based his methodology of drafting on mathematical principles ala Durer. Durer’s drybrush technique and detail-rich drawing style inspired the young Andrew Wyeth to try his hand at matching the master. As fascinating as that exactitude is in action, I find Durer’s imaginative rendering of The Rhinoceros (above, from 1515) just as fun. Durer never actually saw a rhinoceros in person. Working from another artist’s sketch and verbal description, Durer created his own idea of an armor plated beast. The original animal belonged to a now-extinct species from India, but it’s doubtful that Durer’s version comes even close to the real thing. Such flights of fantasy hint at the magic realism of Durer’s religious works and allegorical prints, which bring a sense of the otherworldly to the human element of the Renaissance and bridge the gap between fact and fiction and north and south in Renaissance Europe.

Custom Made

Henri Rousseau, known in the art world during and after his death as Le Douanier, or “The Customs Officer” in French, must have seemed a truly odd character. Born May 21, 1844, Rousseau was anything but bohemian, working at his conventional government job and raising his family. Rousseau was the classic dabbler, a man who showed a love of drawing and music since childhood but who could never make a living at it. In the 1880s, Rousseau took up painting seriously, getting some advice from professional artists such as Jean-Léon Gérôme but for the most part teaching himself. In 1893, Rousseau retired from his job and indulged himself in his hobby. During his lifetime, critics laughed at his efforts, such as The Sleeping Gypsy (above, from 1897), but today that painting hangs in the MoMA. The Naive or Primitive style Rousseau stumbled upon while trying to paint in the classical tradition made him one of the true originals of Post-Impressionist painting.

Even today, Rousseau’s work looks childlike. In terms of simplicity, Rousseau and Edward Hicks run neck and neck. Part of the charm of Rousseau’s painting is that he wanted desperately to engage art history and the great painters of the past and present but lacked the formal training to copy them closely. Instead, Rousseau’s unique spin on subjects such as War (above, from 1894), with the female figure boldly riding the ragged-looking horse across the image, deconstructs the patriotic fervor of nationalistic works by Delacroix or David. We want to laugh at Rousseau’s poor draftsmanship, but part of that laughter soon gets directed towards the subject of war itself. Picasso and others who followed Rousseau would learn the lessons of Le Douanier the way that the Customs Officer learned the real lessons of his predecessors.

Gerome, Delacroix, and others all fostered a taste for the exotic in French painting, which many artists, including Renoir, tried to capitalize on at one point or another. Rousseau’s Orientalism comes second hand, based on those other artists’ imagery rather than first-hand experience. Because of that distance, Rousseau’s exotic works become dreamlike and mysterious. The Sleeping Gypsy (top of post) and The Snake Charmer (above, from 1907), among many other scenes of lions, tigers, monkeys, and other creatures in strange jungles and deserts, look amazingly modern today. What seemed amateurish and childlike at the turn of the century just a couple decades later seems a precursor of Surrealism. Le Douanier remains an inspiration to all amateur artists who take their love of art and create a unique style despite all the naysayers.

Stop the Clocks

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He is Dead.
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the woods;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

“Funeral Blues” by W.H. Auden

We know Frida Kahlo primarily through her self-portraits, which are strung together across the painful abyss of her life like beads on a rosary of resolve in the face of physical and emotional anguish. In Frida Kahlo: The Still Lifes, Salomon Grimberg proves that the approximately 40 still lifes Kahlo painted reveal Frida’s internal life just as intensely as the approximately 80 self-portraits she completed. As in his other recent book, Frida Kahlo: Song of Herself (which I reviewed here), Grimberg brings his psychological training as well as his exhaustive research into Kahlo and her world to provide a fascinating new look at this underappreciated aspect of her art. “I paint flowers so they will not die,” Kahlo told her last lover, Josep Bartoli. Grimberg sees this death-defying, time-freezing impulse in all of Kahlo’s still lifes. None of Kahlo’s still lifes express this time fetish as much as The Broken Hours (above, photographed by Lola Alvarez Bravo in 1954), a three-dimensional still life Kahlo created in her home featuring one clock frozen at the time Diego Rivera asked for a divorce in 1939 and another clock frozen at the time they remarried in 1940. “Separation anxiety shaped every moment if her life,” Grimberg writes of Kahlo, “and, obsessed with avoiding inevitable partings, Kahlo painted still lifes with the intention of bringing time to a stop, of holding on to the attachments that nurtured her and the objects that linked her to them. These works became visual representations of her struggle to master the fear of loneliness and of confronting death.” With Grimberg as a guide, Frida Kahlo: The Still Lifes decodes the language of things that the artist used to reveal her innermost self.




Using what Hayden Herrera calls in her foreword “the author’s wonderfully inventive analytical process,” Grimberg delves deeply into the structure of many of Kahlo’s still lifes to reveal the meanings left hidden right there in the open. For example, in Kahlo’s Self-Portrait With Bonito (above, from 1941), which is technically a self-portrait, the still life Kahlo surrounds herself with speaks in a secret language of insects and mythology. “The butterfly, caterpillar, and cocoon are symbols of Christ’s Resurrection,” Grimberg asserts, “the cocoon represents the tomb, the caterpillar life on earth, and the butterfly the beautiful form emerging from the tomb and rising toward glory.” The death-obsessed meaning of this painting, done shortly after Kahlo’s father’s death, becomes even clearer when Grimberg connects Bonito, Kahlo’s beloved parrot, with “Horus, a falcon-headed diety from Egyptian mythology best known for avenging the death of his father, Osiris, and redeeming him with eternal life.” Perhaps Kahlo envisioned a similar redemption for her father, himself an amateur painter, through her art. By teasing out the intricacies of Kahlo’s still lifes, Grimberg proves not only his own prowess as an art history detective but also the depth and width of Kahlo’s personal mythology, which goes beyond the self-fashioned persona of the self-portraits.



Understandably, many of Grimberg’s readings of Kahlo’s still lifes centers around Kahlo’s personal issues with sexuality and childbirth. Her Still Life (tondo) (above, from 1942) shows a scene teeming with flowers in which “a uterus-shaped, seed-filled halved squash” sits as a Polyphemus moth flits above it. “Painted with the quiet, even colors of twilight, representing the time of life when we become reflective about the passage of time and the imminence of death,” Grimberg writes, this tondo frankly states Kahlo’s thoughts on her childlessness. The squash serves as an obvious double for Kahlo’s own damaged reproductive organ, but the subtle key to the piece is the moth. Grimberg deftly explains how the Aztecs believed that such moths, whose coloring resembles flames, were the reincarnations of men who died by fire. He then links that death association to sex through the moth’s physiological loss of needing to eat during the caterpillar stage. “Instead, sex is her only requirement,” Grimberg says of the moth, asserting that Kahlo knew such facts also, “and that is how she will spend her limited time and energy until she dies.” Like the moth, Kahlo flitted from relationship to relationship throughout her life, choosing to spend her limited time and energy on empty sexual recreation since fruitful procreation was impossible. Such subtle, profound use of flower and insect imagery recalls usage in Renaissance and Dutch Golden Age art, demonstrating Kahlo’s grasp of art history while still adding her own native land’s baroque mythology to the mix.

In her Flower of Life (above, from 1944), Kahlo literally turns that history of still life flower language on its head. Kahlo’s “flower of life” is a mandrake, the magical plant of lore that could reportedly cure infertility through its phallic power. Flipping the flower phallus end down, Kahlo shapes “its ‘body’ to resemble her internal sexual organs,” Grimberg shows, “adding arteries to feed the vaginal walls, and turn[s] the ‘arms’ into fallopian tubes from which the ovaries are missing.” Minus those egg-bearing ovaries, this “flower of life” is ironically barren. “This flower is Kahlo’s self-portrait as an incomplete woman,” Grimberg concludes, “available to gratify a man’s desire but unable either to conceive or to experience sexual pleasure.” Whereas the “official” self-portraits show us the Frida she wanted us to see, almost always in control despite all obstacles, such still lifes as Flower of Life are where Frida truly reveals herself and her insecurities to those who look deeply enough. In another still life, from 1951, Kahlo places a weeping face on a coconut—the agonized visage behind the masquerades of the self-portraits. Rarely did Kahlo allow herself such moments of complete, uncalculated frankness in her art, but such rare moments most often appear in the still lifes.

Frida loved things in her life, as demonstrated by the pride in which she poses above in a 1940 photo before a part of her collection of native crafts. In addition to setting elaborate dinner tables and sending a flower-strewn lunch basket to Diego each day he was working, Frida created still lifes all around her home of fresh fruit and flowers. Along with painting, such things became the tools through which she expressed her inner life, making the painting of still lifes a natural intersection of those impulses. The Frida of popular culture and Fridamania is primarily the persona of the self-portraits, and understandably so thanks to the expressive power of those works. However, as Salomon Grimberg proves in Frida Kahlo: The Still Lifes, the “real” Frida’s self-portrait may actually lie within the flowers and fruit of the still lifes, calling us to find her again and to stop the clocks that counted out her tragic life once more, so that Frida, like her painted flowers, will not die.


[Many thanks to Merrell Publishers for providing me with a review copy of Salomon Grimberg’s Frida Kahlo: The Still Lifes and for the images from the book.]

Serving a Higher Power

Most people know Sandro Botticelli, who died May 17, 1510, for his masterpieces of Renaissance classicism—The Birth of Venus and Primavera. Born in 1445, Botticelli has become, through those two works, associated with a delicate, almost porcelain type of beauty that inspired Robert Downey, Jr.’s character in The Pick-up Artist to complement women with the question, “Did anyone ever tell you that you have the face of a Botticelli and the body of a Degas?” Few people know that those two works were created for the rich and powerful House of Medici, Botticelli’s patrons. Even Botticelli’s earliest religious pictures, such as his Madonna and Child with Six Saints (aka the Sant'Ambrogio Altarpiece ; above, from 1470) , serve the Medici family, in this case by presenting Lorenzo il Magnifico and Giuliano Medici kneeling in front of the Virgin Mary and Baby Jesus. After studying with Fra Filippo Lippi, Botticelli no doubt developed a highly secularized, non-aesthetic view of religion, which allowed him to stomach placing such ruthless types as the Medici comfortably within a sacred setting.

Soon, however, Botticelli fell under the influence of the charismatic religious reformer Savonarola. Like Michelangelo, Fra Bartolomeo, and other artists, Botticelli found Savonarola’s brand of reformed Christianity, stripped of the worldly excesses and corruption of the papacy’s connections to secular power, attractive. Botticelli and Michelangelo allegedly threw some of their pagan-themed paintings into Savonarola’s infamous "Bonfire of the Vanities." Regardless of whether Botticelli actually committed any of his works to the flames, it is clear that his subject matter takes on a more serious, deeply religious tone in works such as Lamentation over the Dead Christ with the Saints Jerome, Paul and Peter (above, from 1490). The casual insertion of powerful patrons disappears as the complete focus centers on the dead Savior and the reactions of such world-rejecting aesthetics as Saint Jerome.

Although Savonarola lost control (and his life) in 1498 and the Medici regained their position of influence over society, Botticelli continued to follow the same devotional path. Botticelli’s Mystic Nativity (above, from 1500), one of the few works Botticelli signed, may have been a private work Botticelli painted for his own meditation. As in the years 1000 and 2000, 1500 was a year in which many believed the Day of Judgment was at hand. In the Mystic Nativity, Botticelli abandons all the classical realism and proportion of his early works and indulges in an almost surreal world in which a giant Virgin Mary and Baby Jesus dominate the center of the picture. Episodes from the Gospel of Saint John come to life throughout the painting. After Savonarola’s death, Botticelli simply dropped from view and little is known of his life. That departure from the world helped Botticelli’s memory fade, virtually erasing him from the mainstream of art history (with the notable exception of the work of Giorgio Vasari) until the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Between 1900 and 1920, a Botticelli renaissance made him one of the most written about artists of the time. Although the Medici-supported works continue to make Botticelli’s name in our culture, choosing Savonarola over the Medici may have led to a short-term loss but a long-term gain in art history appreciation.

All in the Family

The youngest daughter of James Peale and the niece of Charles Willson Peale, Sarah Miriam Peale was literally born to be a painter. Born May 20, 1800 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Sarah learned the family trade from her father and later from her cousin, Rembrandt, but, as with all the Peales, Charles Willson’s influence is unmistakable. Sarah’s Self-Portrait (above, from 1818) shows the classic Peale touch, warm and colorful, that always captured the twinkle of spirit in the sitter’s eye. Up until 1818, Sarah had concentrated on still lifes and miniatures, the permitted purview of women artists, but three months of intense study with Rembrandt gave her the confidence to tackle portraiture. That confidence, however, comes up short in this self-portrait in that it doesn’t identify her as a painter at all. At just eighteen years of age, Sarah had decades to prove to herself and the world that she was truly an artist worthy of her family’s legacy.

Although still life was considered a “safe” genre for women, i.e., lacking the dangers of the nude model that men could withstand, the still life in the Peale family achieved a higher quality than that of any other artists then working in America. Sarah’s Still Life with Watermelon (above, from 1822) abounds with the vibrant juiciness of the subject. Both Sarah’s cousins Raphaelle and Rubens excelled in the Dutch tradition of still life and undoubtedly guided Sarah’s progress. The same love of nature that led Sarah’s Uncle Charles to become the first great American naturalist can be seen in this faithful reproduction of red, ripe fruit. Sarah and her sister Anna Claypoole became the first women to join the PAFA in 1818, a landmark in the ascent of women in the arts in America.

Sarah’s growing prowess as a portraitist soon gained her a national reputation, pulling her away from her native Philadelphia to work in the social circles of Baltimore, Maryland, Washington, DC, and St Louis, Missouri, before returning to Philadelphia for the last eight years of her life. While in Washington from 1840 through 1843, Sarah painted the portraits of many politicians and dignitaries, including then Secretary of State Daniel Webster. Sarah’s portrait of then Viriginia congressman Henry Alexander Wise (above, from 1842), later the governor of Virginia who signed John Brown’s death warrant and a brigadier general for the Confederate Army during the American Civil War, shows the facility with which she could paint the politically powerful. Sarah carried on the family tradition through her work but not through later generations of Peales, never marrying and having no children. Sadly, the same dedicated pursuit of her art that led her to a nomadic existence conflicted with the possibility of family, a price that many women artists still pay today. Although Sarah never received a colorful artistic name like her cousins Rembrandt, Raphaelle, and Rubens, her name belongs within the great tradition of the Peale family and their place in American art history.