![]() ![]() Miller, ed., The Collected Papers of Charles Willson Peale and his Family, Microfiche Edition (Millwood, N.Y.: Kraus Microform, 1980), VIA/14A9–11. Rembrandt Peale to President James Buchanan, 20 March 1860, Philadelphia Historical Society, reproduced in Lillian B. ![]() ![]() ![]() In 1860, Peale recalled that he “retouched” and “improved” the painting on his return from Italy in 1830. See memo from Jennifer Carson, Research Fellow, to Registrar’s Office, 7 December 2007, CGA Curatorial Files. After its exhibition in the Rotunda of the United States Capitol in the winter of 1825, he reworked it in his New York studio. Peale began to work on the Corcoran’s picture in the summer of 1824 and finished it by December of that year. The hearty mullein weed by the horse’s right foreleg likely alludes to Washington’s might and integrity as well as to the new nation, emerging whole and ready to bloom after the war. Flanked by his officers-at left, Henry Knox, Benjamin Lincoln, and Comte de Rochambeau behind the Marquis de Lafayette, and, at right, Alexander Hamilton-Washington gives the command to complete crucial defensive trenches at Yorktown, Virginia. Peale’s representation of the esteemed army general and future American president on his steed at a dramatic moment near the end of the Revolutionary War placed the work in the grand European tradition of the equestrian portrait. A member of Philadelphia’s extraordinary Peale family of artists, Rembrandt Peale painted this monumental image of Washington with the (unfulfilled) hope that it would be purchased by Congress and hang in the Capitol Rotunda. During these years, Peale dedicated himself to establishing his portrayals of George Washington as the “Standard Likeness,” despite stiff competition from his contemporaries such as Gilbert Stuart. In the decades following his death in 1799, numerous American artists created commemorative images of the nation’s first president. ![]()
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