1741-1827 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  Related Paintings of Charles Willson Peale :. | painted by Charles Willson Peale | The Artist in his Museum | William Clark | George Washington at Princeton | Rachel Leeds Kerr |
Related Artists:
Mortimer Menpes
British Painter, 1855-1939 was a war artist and engraver, author, printmaker and illustrator. Menpes was born at Port Adelaide on 22 February 1855, the second son of property developer James Menpes, who with his wife, Ann, had settled in Australia in 1839. Educated at a private school, he attended classes at the Adelaide school of design, but his formal art training began at the South Kensington School of Art in 1878, after his family had moved back to England in 1875. Edward Poynter was a fellow student at the school. Menpes first exhibited at a Royal Academy exhibition in 1880. Over the following 20 years 35 of his paintings and etchings appeared at the Academy. He set off on a sketching tour of Brittany in 1880 and thereby met James McNeill Whistler, becoming his pupil and at one stage sharing a flat with him at Cheyne Walk on the Embankment in London. Here he was taught etching by Whistler, whose influence, together with that of Japanese design, is evident in his later work. His 1887 trip to Japan led to his first one-man exhibition at Dowdeswell's Gallery (1878-1912) in London. Menpes bought a property at 25 Cadogan Gardens in Sloane Square in 1888 and decorated it in the Japanese style. Whistler and Menpes quarreled in 1888 over the interior design of the house, which Whistler felt was a brazen copying of his own ideas. The house was sold in 1900, and Menpes retired to Kent. In 1900, after the outbreak of the Boer War, Menpes was sent to South Africa as a war artist for the weekly Black and White. With the war's end in 1902 he travelled widely, visiting Burma, Egypt, France, India, Italy, Japan, Kashmir, Mexico, Morocco, and Spain and producing illustrated books of those countries. His book on the Delhi Darbar of illustrated Curzon's grand spectacle of 1903. He married Rosa Mary Grosse in London in 1875. She too, was from Australia and died 23 August 1936. They produced a son, Mortimer James (b. 1879) and two daughters, Rose Maud Goodwin and Dorothy Whistler. Dorothy, Whistler's godchild, married a Mr. Flower and died in Minehead in July 1973 aged 89.
WERTINGER, Hans
German painter (b. 1465, Landshut, d. 1533, Landshut) German painter and woodcutter. An artist as ambitious as Lucas Cranach I, he became one of Germany's first accredited court painters, working for the Dukes of Landshut in the triangular area defined by Ingolstadt, Straubing and Munich. The son of a functionary working for the Dukes, he was probably first taught by a certain Sigmund Gleism?ller (c. 1449-1511). Hans Mair (Mair von Landshut), who had come from Augsburg and had settled in Landshut, seems to have prompted him to work as a journeyman in Augsburg. His acquisition of citizen's rights in Landshut in 1491 suggests he was a master by that date. Mair seemingly procured him a series of commissions between 1497 and 1499 from Prince Bishop Philipp of Freising (1480-1541). The only work to survive from this period, however, is the large panel of the Life of St Sigismund (1498) in Freising Cathedral. It retains the deep tones associated with Augsburg painting, and its shape, with a pointed arch at the top, must also have been developed in Augsburg. As in Mair's work, several scenes are assembled in the arch and the side sections, creating a cramped Late Gothic framing architecture,
Jan Philip van Thielen
(Mechelen, 1618 - Mechelin, 1667) was a Flemish Baroque painter who specialized in flowers. Van Thielen was the son of a minor nobleman and eventually assumed the title of Lord of Couwenberch. In 1631 or 1632 he began studying at the age of thirteen with his future brother-in-law, the history painter Theodoor Rombouts (1597-1637), and in 1641 he commenced his studies with the flower painter Daniel Seghers (1590-1661). According to Houbraken (who mistakenly wrote his birth year as 1681 instead of 1618), his reputation during his lifetime was such that he received patronage from the Spanish crown,