America's founding artist returns to Annapolis and you've never seen him like this before

Hester Baldwin Chase was one of four beautiful sisters in Annapolis who married into money and power.

John Beale Bordley was a patron of the arts and planter who spent winters in Annapolis and summers at his Eastern Shore estate.

Elizabeth Beale Dorsey was the daughter of a prominent Colonial politician.

They had family and friends in common, part of the close-knit landed elite that controlled Annapolis and Maryland in the days before and after the Revolution. And they were all painted by Charles Willson Peale, a self-made man who spent a lifetime crafting not only an image of himself but also the very notion of an American artist.

Peale taught himself to paint when his saddle-making business faltered and used it as a path into a powerful society that lived and worked in Annapolis in the late 18th century. He traveled muddy roads on horseback, knocking on the doors of the palatial townhomes and sprawling plantations to sell something new and powerful.

A portrait of respectability.

“Peale essentially is an American story, right? He comes up from nothing,” said Rachel Lovett, curator and assistant director of the Hammond-Harwood House Museum. “A humble saddle maker, yet he has the ears of all these Maryland gentry because his father ... came here with this mysterious background but claimed this elite heritage. The Maryland Gentry liked that and they liked him.”

Peale is most famous for his work after moving to Philadelphia in 1776. He painted his friend George Washington more than 100 times, fought in the Revolution and captured the Revolutionary generation on canvas. He invented the American museum and was the genesis of a generation of Peales who had their own careers in the arts.

But his story began in Annapolis, where the young son of a convicted forger and failed schoolmaster had to figure out how to live his life after his father died.

For the first time, 19 portraits commissioned from Peale in Annapolis – once treasured heirlooms for families eager to advertise their success – have returned to the capital of Maryland for the first exhibit of its kind. They have never been seen together before, and the exhibit is a unique chance to examine the work of a historic Annapolis artist and an era that remains a major part of the city’s identity.

“Ambition: Charles Willson Peale in Annapolis” opens tonight with a preview for members and a lecture by Peale biographer David Ward. When the general public sees it starting April 1, it will mark the opening of the largest art exhibition ever staged at the Hammond Harwood House. A Maryland Day weekend tour is available by reservation on Saturday.

The paintings will be on display through December 2023, a major achievement for the staff and supporters of the historic landmark as they work to establish a center of art and preservation. The driving force behind the exhibit is Lovett, a Harvard-trained museum professional who moved here from Boston with something exactly like this in mind.

“I specifically wanted to work with the Peale collection,” she said. “So this is kind of a culmination of my work here ...”

The show follows Peale's Annapolis commissions chronologically, including work from the Hammond Harwood collection plus eight loans from institutions like Yale University Art Gallery, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the state of Maryland. It also includes important privately owned paintings, two of which have never been on public display, and mixes in paintings by Peale’s brother, niece and one of his accomplished sons.

Even with the 19th-century dresses, knee breeches and fancy waistcoats, the portraits depict faces that look remarkably familiar, someone you might bump into on Maryland Avenue just outside Hammond Harwood. Peale wasn’t trying to paint some ideal of truth and beauty, but the people paying him.

“He'll try to paint exactly what he saw,” Lovett said. “So I think to the best of his ability, if he knew what a modern-day photograph looks like, I think that's what he was striving for.”

Descendants of Elizabeth Beale Dorsey, at least, still are in Annapolis. Mollie Ridout helped identify the subject of the painting, correcting its place in the timeline of Peale’s work. It's Lovett's favorite painting in the exhibit.

Peale wasn’t the best painter of his early America and not the first, even in Annapolis. He had talent but not the education or training needed to make good painters great. He had the incentive, though, to be the first who would make it a profession.

“We have to also think that he was trying to make a living,” Lovett said. “He had 17 children, 11 survive to adulthood. So he is striving to support his family.”

After Peale started painting portraits to supplement his income as a saddle maker, John Beale Bordley recognized his potential. A childhood student of Peale’s father, Bordley raised money from some of the wealthiest Annapolis residents to send the young painter to England for study with the famed Benjamin West. West was born in the Colonies but was part of a trans-Atlantic Britain who succeeded by establishing himself in London.

Peale discovered that he wasn’t good enough to be another West. He knew he could never match the historical works considered the most valuable commissions. Instead, he decided to focus on what he did have, strength, a willingness to work hard and a market – the people who supported his study wanted portraits.

People like Charles Carroll of Carrollton wanted a court painter to document and validate Maryland’s rich and famous. Many of them became the founders of the United States, Carroll was a signer of the declaration, and Peale captured their essential generation.

Ward, author of “Charles Willson Peale: Art and Selfhood in the Early Republic,” said Peale is significant for that, but more. Out of necessity and ambition, he invented a new version of himself in the years before the Revolution, just as colonies were beginning to see themselves as independent.

“What Peale is doing, in the 1750s, there was no painting in America,” said Ward, senior historian emeritus of the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.

He asked, “how do I make my way in the world” while men like Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine asked it of themselves and the British colonies in America.

The answer was that Peale’s identity evolved simultaneously with the nation's, what Ward described as a kind of “call and response.” He helped create the American culture of ambition, social mobility and anxiety about failure.

Annapolis was a center of culture and success in the 1760s through the end of the Revolution. There were palatial brick homes, including the William Paca House and the Hammond Harwood House. There were grand churches, boarding houses, ballrooms and a magnificent State House. Dancing, horse racing, and the social connections that wealthy and powerful Americans of the day craved were tied up with politics and commerce.

Zoom out from that small city on the Chesapeake Bay or Williamsburg, Virginia, or even Philadelphia, and the surrounding countryside was in many ways a wilderness, Ward said. Indigenous nations still controlled vast territories, travel was difficult, and life was restricted to family networks bordering on feudal.

Some art historians dismiss Peale as a hack. His paintings can be flat, and it doesn’t take an expert to see how the tricks he learned to imitate perspective and depth on a two-dimensional surface.

But to Ward, this is missing the point.

Peale was an itinerant painter, traveling those impossible roads through all kinds of weather. He packed his portable easel and brought paints and brushes to the plantations. If his paintings were rushed, it was because wealthy merchants and planters weren’t interested in feeding him for months so he could sketch careful studies of his subjects.

So there are no sketches and studies for the Annapolis commissions. He did it all in one go. If it was, as Ward describes, quick and dirty, it was the path of something new. He had to produce a painting to get paid.

“Then he gets back on his horse and slogs through the mud to the next house,” Ward said. “It must have been miserable.”

On occasions where Peale takes his time, Lovett said the artist can be brilliant.

“But you also see some portraits – certainly earlier on – were kind of mass-produced, right?” she said. “Where he's just trying to make a living.”

The exhibit explains the works and their significance but also deals directly with what Peale did not paint. You won’t see the enslaved people whose labor made possible the lifestyle the artist was paid to capture.

One of the paintings is a portrait of Elizabeth Tasker Lowndes, the widow of one of the largest and wealthiest slave traders in the Chesapeake region. Another was Samuel Spragg, a governor of Maryland after the Revolution who had a child with an enslaved woman – and a grandson who would fight with Black troops in the Civil War.

Peale was paid for some of his works with enslaved people, and although he freed his enslaved people eventually, it wasn’t out of concern for their well-being but of the harm slavery did to the owners and poor whites. Lovett said the exhibit works to show the reality of Peale as a person.

“It's not whitewashing history. We're acknowledging the past and what happened and all the sitters, you know, largely made their fortunes from enslaved labor,” Lovett said. “So they wouldn't have had the estates the clothes, the lifestyle, if not for the slave labor.”

Peale’s view of slavery, if still reprehensible by modern standards, evolved faster than the nation’s. After the revolution, he and Thomas Paine collaborated on the Pennsylvania state constitution – outlawing slavery. It was a radical document for its day.

For the Annapolis period of his life, however, slavery was a fact of an economy where controlling the labor force was the tool used to build prosperity for a few. The tragedy shaped the first half of U.S. history and continues to resonate today, but that’s not what Peale saw.

“You can read Peale’s paintings as a statement about the exclusion of African Americans if you want to,” Ward said. “It’s a tragedy but that’s what it was.”

Although it is pictured in the exhibit, Peale’s only known painting of a Black American isn’t present.

Yarrow Mamout was captured in Guinea by slavers and brought to Annapolis for sale. He spent the rest of his life in Georgetown for 44 years until he purchased his freedom and then that of his son.

Peale painted him in 1819 as part of a study on the traits that lead to a long life. The painting is considered a rare representation of ethnic and religious diversity in early America, Mamout was a Muslim literate in Arabic. It is one of the brilliant paintings.

Peale changed through his life, and the exhibit at Hammond Harwood House is divided into four chapters to reflect that change. Even after he left Annapolis for greater fame in Philadelphia, Peale returned to the city of his childhood for more commissions and to reconnect with the society he was desperate to join as a young man.

Ward said the artist kept reinterpreting his own story and selling it to the increasingly democratic public through those years. He was an elitist when that was what his clients wanted. He was a revolutionary and a radical when that was what America wanted.

Ward’s favorite Peale painting is on the cover of his book. It shows the old man of the Revolution, a serious man looking out from the painting, glasses perched on his forehead. He doesn’t appear to have a sense of humor – Ward said Peale probably told only one joke in his life – or much time for foolishness.

His hands were busy his whole life, making saddles, painting, inventing and creating. He was constantly trying to answer that question from the start of his life, how would he make his way in the world.

“He really does become an exemplar of his times,” Ward said.

“Ambition: Charles Willson Peale in Annapolis” runs April 1 through Dec. 31, 2023. Hammond Harwood House is open at 19 Maryland Ave. in downtown Annapolis. Visit https://hammondharwoodhouse.org for more information. Reservations are encouraged. Email info@hammondharwoodhouse.org for details.

Correction: This story has been updated to correct the names in the portrait of Sarah Buckland Callahan and her infant daughter, Anna.

Rick Hutzell is a nationally recognized journalist. He lives in Annapolis. Contact him at meanwhileannapolis@gmail.com.