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(1) Charles Willson Peale
(b Queen Anne’s Co., MD, 15 April 1741; d Philadelphia, PA, 22 Feb 1827). Painter and museum founder. After serving as a saddler’s apprentice in Annapolis, MD, from 1754 to 1761, he worked at various trades, including painting signs and portraits. In 1766 some prominent Marylanders underwrote his studies in London with Benjamin West, from whom he absorbed the fundamentals of the British portrait tradition. Peale probably attended the informal life classes offered at St Martin’s Lane Academy, precursor to the Royal Academy Schools, and drew from casts in the Duke of Richmond’s collection in Whitehall. He visited the studios of such important British portrait painters as Joshua Reynolds, Francis Cotes and Allan Ramsay and studied the techniques of miniature painting, sculpture and engraving. In London he executed his first major commission, a full-length allegorical portrait of William Pitt, Lord Chatham (1768; Montross, VA, Westmoreland Co. Mus.), from which he engraved a mezzotint.
Part of the Peale family
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