Anna Claypoole Peale, Portrait of a Woman, ca. 1835

Chicago:

Aimee Marcereau DeGalan, “Anna Claypoole Peale, Portrait of a Woman, ca. 1835,” catalogue entry in Aimee Marcereau DeGalan, Blythe Sobol, and Maggie Keenan, The Starr Collection of Portrait Miniatures, 1500–1850: The Collections of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, vol. 1, ed. Aimee Marcereau DeGalan (Kansas City, MO: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2024), https://doi.org/10.37764/8322.5.3216.

MLA:

Marcereau DeGalan, Aimee. “Anna Claypoole Peale, Portrait of a Woman, ca. 1835,” catalogue entry. Aimee Marcereau DeGalan, Blythe Sobol, and Maggie Keenan. The Starr Collection of Portrait Miniatures, 1500–1850: The Collections of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, edited by Aimee Marcereau DeGalan, vol. 1, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2024. doi: 10.37764/8322.5.3216.

See the artist’s biography in volume 4.

While the identity of this young woman with dark, upswept curls is unknown, she was most certainly a lady of fashion and likely the wife of a member of the ascendant merchant or military class in Philadelphia. Transmitting beauty and status were prerequisites of a successful portrait painter, and Anna Claypoole Peale found her services in high demand among wealthy American patrons. Critics praised her efforts, stating “in force and precision: her likenesses are better, her finish firmer and more resolute, and her lace and muslin truer” than those of her competitors.¹ Indeed, her ability to communicate the different textures of fabric in paint are a testament to her skill. Peale placed her subject in an interior setting against a column and mauve velvet swagger curtain, whose tassels mimic the sitter’s jewel-encrusted pendant earrings. She exquisitely renders her subject’s opulent black evening dress, contrasting the soft, shimmery, pleated folds of its silk bodice with the harder surface of its gilt metallic edging where it joins the sleeves.² The style of the drop-shouldered gown, coupled with an interior artist inscription, place the miniature around 1835.

Although Peale typically signed and dated her miniatures on the front, an artist inscription found on the inside backing card behind the miniature helps refine the date and secure its attribution. It reads: “Painted by Mrs. A. C. Staughton, late Miss Peale, 22 Spruce St Philadelphia” (Fig. 1). In 1830, Peale moved into her family home on Spruce Street (after the death of her first husband, William Staughton, in December 1829), and she remained there until she remarried in 1841.³ She painted most of her miniatures while she was unmarried, during the period between her two marriages, and after she was widowed. Her use of the name Staughton on this miniature indicates she painted it sometime between 1829 and 1841.⁴

Typical of Peale’s style, regardless of when she painted the portrait, are the sitter’s elongated neck, sloped shoulders, large head and eyes, exaggerated Cupid’s bow, and high forehead. These were less likely specific to the individual, but rather generalized characteristics of beauty embedded within the romantic conventions of the period.⁵ Peale also equated beauty with moral goodness and focused on physical traits that implied character, a practice linked to the study of phrenology.⁶ One of phrenology’s founding principles equated the size of one’s eyes and forehead with intellectual prowess, thus encouraging women to expose their foreheads by pulling their hair back.⁷ This pseudoscience fascinated many, including Peale, who attended lectures on the shape of the human skull by Pennsylvania physician Samuel Calhoun.⁸

Peale emphasizes the size and prominence of her sitter’s forehead as well as its verticality through wiry strokes of paint that follow the hairline up and off the face into an assemblage of curls at the top of her head. Peale contrasts these strokes of paint with the smooth pallor of her sitter’s complexion. Instead of exploiting the translucent qualities of the ivory to approximate the sitter’s skin, Peale loaded up her brush with dark jewel tones and glazing to approximate the visual effect of oil paint. Over time, many of these rich colors have likely faded—as has interest in phrenology⁹—yet her sitter’s prominent features, shaped by ideals of beauty and pseudoscience, remain.¹⁰

Notes

1. American Commercial and Daily Advertiser (Baltimore), October 25, 1822, quoted in Anne A. Verplanck, “Facing Philadelphia: Social Functions of Silhouettes, Miniatures, and Daguerreotypes, 1760–1860” (PhD diss., College of William and Mary, 1996), 133.

2. Dresses during the 1830s often featured voluminous sleeves. Known in French as the gigot sleeve (or in America as the leg-of-mutton), they tapered to a tight fit from the elbow to the wrist. These distinctive sleeves first appeared in the 1820s and became popular between 1825 and 1833. However, by the time Queen Victoria ascended the throne in 1837, she ushered in a more subdued style. Gigot sleeves returned to prominence during the 1890s, growing to their fullest proportions around the middle of the decade. See “Gigot Sleeve,” RetroSpective, exhibition at the Museum at FIT, 2013, accessed May 27, 2022, http://sites.fitnyc.edu/depts/museum/RetroSpective/Gigot-Sleeve-1.html.

3. For general biographical details, see Anne Sue Hirshorn, “Peale, Anna Claypoole,” American National Biography Online (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), accessed May 22, 2022, http://www.anb.org/articles/17/17-00653-article.html.

4. Several scholarly sources cite this period of inactivity during her marriage. See, for example, Anne Sue Hirshorn, “Anna Claypoole, Margaretta, and Sarah Miriam Peale: Modes of Accomplishment and Fortune,” in The Peale Family: Creation of a Legacy, 1770–1870, ed. Lillian B. Miller, exh. cat. (Washington, DC: Trust for Museum Exhibitions, 1996), 234–35. In the Annual Exhibition Record of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts from 1820 to 1830, Anna uses the address 228 Spruce Street for her submissions. Could the “8” be missing from the NAMA inscription? It does not appear so from the spacing. Another miniaturist and profile painter had a studio at 39 Spruce Street, so it is possible that Anna lived nearby at 22 Spruce Street, and that the 8 was a typesetting mistake. I am grateful to Blythe Sobol, Starr Research Assistant, for pointing out this discrepancy.

5. For more on this association with specific features and romantic conventions of beauty, see Hirshorn, “Anna Claypoole, Margaretta, and Sarah Miriam Peale,” 234.

6. Elizabeth Frances Ellet, Women Painters in All Ages and All Countries (London: Richard Bentley, 1859), 267.

7. Viennese physician and founder of phrenology, Franz Joseph Gall, first noticed that classmates who could memorize long passages with ease had prominent eyes and large foreheads. From this, he inferred that an organ of verbal memory must live behind the eyes. If one ability could be indicated by an external feature, he felt that others could too. Gall’s protégé and former student Johann Kaspar Spurzheim went on a six-month lecture tour in the United States in 1832, right at the moment when Anna Claypoole Peale painted this portrait. Similar lecture tours by others extended phrenology’s reach, making the country “cranium conscious.” See Minna Scherlinder Morse, “Facing a Bumpty History: The Much-Maligned Theory of Phrenology Gets a Tip of the Hat from Modern Neuroscience,” Smithsonian Magazine (October 1997): https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/facing-a-bumpy-history-144497373/.

8. Fellow artist Thomas Sully offered Peale tickets to attend a series of lectures by Samuel Calhoun in 1819. Calhoun was a staff doctor at Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia. Peale hoped to attend all fifteen lectures and was especially keen to learn what Calhoun had to say about phrenology; see Anne Sue Hirshorn, “Portraits in Miniature,” Antiques (February 2002): 83n20. For another example of an artist employing phrenology in their work, see Charles Colbert, “‘Each Little Hillock Hath a Tongue’: Phrenology and the Art of Hiram Powers,” Art Bulletin 68, no. 2 (1986): 281–300.

9. When phrenology spread to the United States in the 1830s, it was used to prove prevalent, yet baseless hypotheses about the inferiority of non-white races. It coincided with a period in American history as the country struggled to justify the continuation of slavery in the face of a growing abolitionist movement.

10. Peale was known as a colorist, so it is likely that the original tone of the curtain may have been a much richer red. If she used light-sensitive red lake fugitive pigment, like her uncle Charles Willson Peale did, the curtain may suffer from fade. For more on Charles Willson Peale’s palette, see Charles Coleman Sellers, “Portraits and Miniatures by Charles Willson Peale,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 42, no. 1 (1952): 12.

Mr. John W. (1905–2000) and Mrs. Martha Jane (1906–2011) Starr, Kansas City, MO, by 1958;

Their gift to The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, 1958.

The Starr Foundation Collection of Miniatures, The Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, December 8, 1972–January 14, 1973, no cat., no. 223, as Unknown Lady.

Ross E. Taggart, The Starr Collection of Miniatures in the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery (Kansas City, MO: Nelson Gallery-Atkins Museum, 1971), no. 223, p. 73, (repro.), as Unknown Lady.