ExclusiveMary Jane Peale: The Last of America’s First Art Family

Welcome to American Legends. My name is Tiffany Brannan. Each culture has its legends and that could be myths or different stories, but here in America our greatest legends are the wonderful heroes who are right from our history pages. Now some of these heroes are very famous and some are obscure, but each person deserves to be discovered because each man or woman stands as a great example of how we can be better Americans in our daily lives. Anyone who's studied American history may recognize the surname Peale. If you've seen the famous portraits of the great men and women of the early days of the United States, you definitely will recognize some of his works because Charles Wilson Peale was the most famous portraitist of the revolutionary period. Nevertheless, it wasn't just the paintings which he himself created which made his legacy. He was the head of a huge artistic dynasty considered the first family of art in the United States. His siblings, nephews, nieces, children, and grandchildren were all inspired by the painting and other arts which he encouraged them to pursue as well as pursuing himself. The last member of this family to be a professional artist was one of his granddaughters. This young lady was inspired by the legacy of her relatives and spent her whole life crafting her own artistic talents to inspire later generations. Charles Wilson Peale had 17 children in all. His fourth son from his first marriage was named Rubens Peale. Like most of Mr. Peale's children, Rubens was named after a great artistic master, Peter Paul Rubens, and he was raised in an environment of art. However, because of his weak eyesight, he was not trained to paint like his brothers were. Instead, he learned a different art, the art of museum curation since his father founded what is considered the first museum in the United States, Peale's Philadelphia Museum. Rubens also studied natural sciences like taxidermy. Rubens had seven children of his own. Of these seven children, there was one daughter and her name was Mary Jane. His wife's name was Elizabeth Bird Patterson. Mary Jane was born in 1827, just three months before her famous grandfather would die. Although her father was not an artist himself, she grew up deeply entrenched in the world of art. While Philadelphia was the town which most of the Peales called home, Mary Jane was born in New York because her father was the director of the New York branch of the Peale Museum at that time. She spent her first 10 years there, but when she was 10, they moved back to Philadelphia. In her teenage years, Mary Jane began to show the artistic inclination that seemed to run in the Peale family's blood. At age 15, she began studying art at school. She clearly was a natural, as is evidenced from letters which she wrote to her parents. In one letter she said, my teacher wanted to know how long I had learned and was surprised when I told him I had not learned at all. By age 20, she knew that she wanted to be a professional artist and she wrote in her journal, for it will be more profitable to make my living in that way than in any other. Certainly more agreeable. This very practical bit of planning was quite noteworthy for the 1840s. This shows that by age 20, an age at which many young ladies were already married for multiple years, that she had neither married nor was she really planning to do so because she was intending to have an artistic career, not just for personal enjoyment, but to actually support herself. And while she did receive multiple marriage proposals throughout her life, Mary Jane never married. This also shows how the greater Peale family was very supportive of daughters having a rich arts education. Her aunt, Sophonisba Peale, was trained alongside her brothers in the arts and although she did choose the vocation of marriage and having a family, she learned alongside her brothers. At age 22, Mary Jane left the family farm in rural Pennsylvania, to which her father had retired by that point, to move to Philadelphia. There she received her formal art training at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. She studied with a member of the Academy of Fine Arts, George Cochran Lambden, who was indebted to her father, and she also studied with someone who was a little closer to home, Rembrandt Peale. He was her uncle and the most successful portraitist out of Charles Wilson Peale's children. He began by giving her some advice and instruction in letters, and then he took to having her watching him paint in his studio and giving her private coaching. As was the common custom for learning art at the time, she would copy him as he painted. In the letters they exchanged, there is some very practical advice on how to use certain shading for creating skin tones and other effects, and he sent her a diagram of the kind of palette of colors that he used to be most effective in beginning a portrait. In one letter, Rembrandt wrote, as you seem now determined to be a painter, I hasten to send you the simplest arrangement of tints I have ever used. She also received encouragement from another member of the Academy of Fine Arts, who was a relative, Sarah Miriam Peale. That was her cousin. Sarah Miriam Peale was one of the first women to be a member of the Academy of Fine Arts, and she wrote in a letter that she felt Mary Jane had a great deal of talent. While her much younger cousin didn't necessarily agree, she was encouraged by the support of both her uncle and her cousin, and she studied with great dedication at the Academy. By age 25, she felt that she had enough skills to really put her dreams into action, and she wrote in her journal on her 25th birthday, this day I have made up my mind to furnish a room and commence painting professionally to begin life for myself. Nevertheless, Mary Jane moved back to the family farm, Woodhill Farm, in Skykill County three years later. By this point, her parents were aging and they needed help taking care of the farm, as well as some personal care, so she returned and helped them manage the farm. She didn't give up her art, though. She continued painting, and she began to encourage a rather unlikely person, her own father, to become a later in life artist. Rubens was 71 at this point, and although there isn't a definite record of it in any of his writings, it seems obvious that he had always had a secret desire to be a painter, like most of his other family members. At this point, his eyes were no doubt much worse than they had been as a young man, but he didn't paint from sight. He painted from memory and a lifetime of observation. During the last 10 years of his life, Rubens produced over 130 excellent still life landscape and nature paintings. He painted farm animals, fruit, plants, all from his keen observation, oftentimes taking several weeks to complete one painting, but he wouldn't have even started if not for the encouragement of his daughter. He had encouraged her when she was just beginning to study at age 15 and throughout her training, so now it was her turn to encourage him. They would often paint side by side, finishing each other's work, offering suggestions, and some people believe that she may have actually helped or even largely painted many of the works which were attributed to him. In any case, it's clear that she helped him gain a little bit of that polish because he had never studied formally, but he no doubt had learned a lot through osmosis, having curated a museum as well as having a father, brothers, and then a daughter, all of whom painted. In 1864, Mary Jane's mother died, so she and her father moved to Philadelphia together. There, they shared an art studio and greatly enjoyed painting side by side. After he died the next year, Mary Jane completed all the paintings that he had left unfinished. After her parents' death, Mary Jane had no real commitments or obligations. She was now in her mid-30s and a fairly independent young woman, so she decided to travel to Europe to expand her horizons abroad. She spent a few years visiting the great galleries and studios in Luxembourg, Paris, Geneva, and other art capitals. Now approaching the age of 40, she spent some time studying in Paris in the late 1860s. Back in the United States, she mingled and hobnobbed with some of the finest minds in the intellectual cultural set of the nation's capital. She became good friends with many scientists and deep thinkers who were associated with the Smithsonian Institute. These included naturalists, taxidermists, and museum curators, indicating that although there's no definite record of her having studied these natural sciences herself, she may have shared that interest with her father. Mary Jane spent her last years in her childhood home in Skykill County, which she named Riverside. There she had the walls filled with paintings produced by herself, as well as her beloved family members, even portraits from the Revolutionary War by her grandfather. She enjoyed being surrounded by all this art and the family memories which every painting evoked for her. Not as much is known about Mary Jane Peale as some other members of this family, but most of what we know comes from her collection of letters, notes, and journals, which is held by the American Philosophical Society. The Philosophical Society is located in the Philosophical Hall, which is the historic building where the original Peale Museum was located. It also served as the original Peale family home, where Rubens himself was raised, as were many of his siblings, and that collection continues to have a lot of important materials about the family. She died at age 75 in 1902, bringing the Peale family legacy into the 20th century. Today, Mary Jane Peale's paintings are on display at the Pennsylvania Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Sheldon Museum of Art, and the Westmoreland Museum of Art. She painted landscapes, still lifes, and portraits, and of her work, her realistic paintings of fruit and flowers are considered her very best works. Upon her death, her obituary referred to her as a well-known portrait painter of the celebrated family of artists and said that she was the last of this great family. Although neither her name nor her individual works produced are as recognizable as those of her Mary Jane left a colorful and impressive legacy, drawing on the inspiration of those who came before her, and painting the way for not only people in her own family, like her beloved father, but other young artists, both male and female, who could study her work as she left a great many beautiful paintings, capturing the American spirit, both in what she actually painted and in the life she forged for herself. Thank you for spending this time with me, and I hope you'll join me next time for more American Legends.