Rembrandt Peale was one of Charles Willson Peale’s most enterprising and ambitious children. Trained by his father, by 1795 he was making copies of portraits of Revolutionary heroes in his father’s gallery in order to open a second (and ultimately unsuccessful) Peale museum in Baltimore. A trip to London to display the mastodon skeleton he and his father had excavated and assembled and to study with Benjamin West (see B.67.26 and B.67.25) soon followed. The wartime climate of Europe forced the young artist home to Philadelphia, where he became a founding member of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1805. After a successful journey to Paris in 1808–9 and again in 1810 to paint French luminaries and to study Old Masters in the Louvre, Rembrandt returned home. In 1814, with Henry Robinson (1775 or 1784–1848) as a backer, Rembrandt opened the first building specifically designed to be a museum, the Baltimore Museum and Gallery of Paintings on Holliday Street; in 1822, he sold the museum to his brother Rubens Peale and moved to New York, where he eventually became president of the American Academy of Fine Arts.

Family tradition suggests that this portrait of Robinson was painted for his family as a token of gratitude for looking after Rembrandt Peale’s daughter Rosalba Carriera Peale (1799–1874) during his trips abroad. More likely Peale painted the portrait for Robinson in thanks for his support of the Peale Museum and for gas illumination for the museum and for the city of Baltimore, which led to their partnership to form the Baltimore Gas Company. The painting appears to be related to a gesture of partnership and friendship, not unlike the gift of portraits to Robinson that Thomas Sully (see B.81.11) made in 1821 in exchange for Robinson’s hospitality.

The Bayou Bend portrait probably dates to c. 1816–20, as this encompasses the period during which Robinson supported Rembrandt Peale’s endeavor, both the museum itself and the Baltimore Gas Company. In addition, the sitter wears garments of the teens and 1820s, although dating a portrait by costume cannot be definitive. The Bayou Bend painting is one of three portraits of Robinson by Peale. The picture’s freshness and intensity suggest that it was completed first, followed by the portrait of Robinson in the Washington County Museum of Fine Arts, Hagerstown, Maryland, and a posthumous portrait signed and dated 1849 in a private collection.

Related examples: Attributed to Rembrandt Peale, Portrait of Henry Robinson, 1816(?), Washington County Museum of Fine Arts, Hagerstown, Maryland; Rembrandt Peale, Portrait of Henry Robinson (1849, private collection, New Jersey). In medium and format, this portrait is similar to Rembrandt Peale’s portrait of Richardson Stuart, who also backed Peale’s museum (c. 1815, NGA). Thomas Sully also painted Henry Robinson (1846, location unknown) and his wife, Rosa Maxwell Robinson (1849, Indianapolis Museum of Art).

Book excerpt: David B. Warren, Michael K. Brown, Elizabeth Ann Coleman, and Emily Ballew Neff. American Decorative Arts and Paintings in the Bayou Bend Collection. Houston: Princeton Univ. Press, 1998.