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Reviews in American History 33.1 (2005) 23-28



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A Question of Temperament

David C. Ward. Charles Willson Peale: Art and Selfhood in the Early Republic. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. xxiv + 236 pp. Fifty black-and-white illustrations, notes, and index. $49.95.

The artistic monograph—a full-length study of a single artist—has long dominated scholarship on the art of the early American republic. From the outset David Ward is clear about what his monograph on the artist, naturalist, inventor, and museum director Charles Willson Peale (1741-1827) will offer, writing in the preface that his is "not an empirically all-encompassing biography of Peale," presumably a reference to Charles Coleman Sellers's 1949 publication that serves as the only full-length chronicle of the artist's life to date, but "a biographical interpretation of [Peale's] life and art" (p. xxii). Ward keeps his promise, dividing the book into eight chapters that, while organized in rough chronological order, function primarily as thematic essays. Throughout these chapters Ward creates memorable interpretive frameworks for Peale's manifold activities, titling the first chapter "Forging," for example, a reference both to the embezzlement conviction that drove Peale's father to immigrate to America and to the lengthy process by which Peale fashioned a professional life that eventually brought him financial stability and public acclaim. Subsequent chapters trace Peale's emerging career as a portraitist, based first in Maryland and then in Philadelphia, his military and civic service during the Revolution and its aftermath, his founding and orchestration of the Philadelphia Museum, his establishment of a family dynasty of artists, and his attempts in his later years to ensure his lasting reputation as an enlightened public servant. In the notes to the book, Ward describes the trajectory of his own scholarship on Peale over the years as proceeding from "an archival to a more analytical emphasis" (p. 197n6). The book bears out this characterization; the text and notes document Ward's attempts to engage a critical literature that extends beyond documentary sources.

The issue of the monograph hovers around Ward's fluent study of Peale. At one point, he describes Peale's worldview in the following terms: "Peale's mind's eye ordered his perceptions according to the rising order of causality—from [End Page 23] the personal, to the natural, to the national" (p. 146). This statement not only provides a brief outline of the main thematic threads of the book, but it also neatly encapsulates Ward's analysis of his subject—working from the biographical outward. While art historians adopting this approach have uncovered valuable information about key figures within the art world of the period and scrutinized their artistic productions, the choice to focus on the life and career of one individual often has the side effect of limiting investigations into larger systems of cultural meaning. By convention, the genre of the monograph discourages its adherents from asking and answering certain questions, questions that have the potential to offer fresh insights into the discursive nature of the creation and reception of art. Because Ward navigates both the details of Peale's life and his cultural milieu skillfully, we learn much about each, but Peale the man remains the author's focus. Throughout Charles Willson Peale: Art and Selfhood in the Early Republic, Ward makes the implicit argument that it was personal—even psychological—need that drove Peale's ambitions while his immediate historical and social contexts gave him the framework within which to evaluate and channel his impulses. According to Ward, Peale struggled continually to master himself and thereby discovered a model of discipline that he believed was equally relevant to an ordering of the natural and social worlds. While this tight focus on Peale lends a remarkable consistency to the book, it also precludes extensive consideration of how his art and various activities signified within the larger art world and visual culture of his day.

Ward's emphasis on the inner necessity driving Peale offers one approach to the question of constructing selfhood during the early republic. The...

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