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'Art conceal'd': Peale's double portrait of Benjamin and Eleanor Ridgely Laming
Art Bulletin, The, March, 1996 by Ellen G. Miles, Leslie Reinhardt
Charles Willson Peale's Benjamin and Eleanor Ridgely Laming [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED! has long been regarded as one of the artist's finest images.(1) The double portrait of a Maryland merchant and his wife has frequently been described as an outstanding example of Peale's realistic style. The painting, to one commentator, is the response of a practical American artist to the scene before him as he "faithfully recorded the faces of most of the prominent individuals living in the Middle States at the time."(2) To another viewer, the double portrait has "a particularly appealing openness and informality, characteristic of Peale's adaptation of English high styles to the more unpretentious and practical personalities of America's growing merchant class."(3) This was accomplished by "rendering faces with a straightforward realism, posing figures in relaxed postures, and placing them in familiar surroundings."(4) The unusual composition became, to a third, a practical solution to the difficulty "of placing a large man with a small woman without permitting his figure to dominate hers."(5) Other writers have noted that Peale's design seems to incorporate Hogarth's serpentine line of beauty.(6)
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The emotional intensity and sensual charm of the picture have also stirred comment. The image has been described as one of "conjugal fidelity."(7) Laming's posture and intense, adoring gaze and his wife's dreamlike, passive state have led to the suggestion that the painting expresses the late eighteenth-century "popularity of love matches and a new acceptability of public demonstrations of private affection. . . . We need only to read Benjamin Laming's telescope and Eleanor's peaches as anatomical analogues (as the artist seems to suggest) in order to see the intensity of this new social and personal vision."(8) The telescope becomes, "particularly given Mr. Laming's more lustful than merely affectionate gaze, something more than an image of 'conjugal felicity' - or at any rate, a special condition of it."(9)
Many of these observations have contributed valuable insights to our understanding of the painting. However, in emphasizing Peale's realism or in focusing on one or two elements of the work, they have overlooked some of its unusual aspects. The unorthodox composition has not been adequately addressed. If it was used to accommodate a large man to a small woman, presumably a consideration in many double portraits, why did Peale, or indeed other artists, never repeat it? If the painting is an example of American realism at its most direct, why does Eleanor Laming wear a style of dress that cannot be described as current fashion? Other aspects of the portrait that have largely been ignored include the contrasting directions of the sitters' gazes, and the parrot depicted prominently at the left, next to Laming.
The supposition that Peale had a literary source in mind and that he posed his sitters as Tasso's Rinaldo and Armida, which is explored in this article, provides a coherent explanation of many of the portrait's different elements. It also accounts for the painting's unusual emotional force. The identification expands the current reexamination of Peale's reputation as a literal painter, confirming his place in the eighteenth-century British tradition of allegorical portraiture. It also points to new directions for the understanding of the content and allusions of late eighteenth-century American portraits by showing that the contemporary English concept of painting and poetry as sister arts could have been central in the making of these works. This relationship is summed up in the phrase from Horace's Ars poetica, "Ut pictura poesis" - "as is painting, so is poetry."(10)
The Painting
Peale's double portrait, painted in September and October 1788, depicts Benjamin Laming (ca. 1750-1792) of Baltimore and his wife Eleanor (ca. 1760-1829). The daughter of John Ridgely (ca. 1724-1771), a member of one of Baltimore's most prominent families, she married Benjamin Laming in January 1784.(11) Laming, who may have been from the West Indies, was a prosperous Baltimore merchant at a time when the city was on the rise as a prominent port. He sold sugar, rum, and wine from his store on Commerce Street and from Bowley's Wharf.(12) In 1787, the Lamings purchased Darley Hall, a house with extensive grounds a few miles outside of the city.(13)
In the portrait, the couple is seated in an open landscape, on a rise in the ground. Laming, dressed in a green coat, an embroidered white waistcoat, and tan breeches, leans toward his wife and looks at her adoringly. Propped on his left elbow, his body in an almost recumbent position and turned toward the viewer, he occupies about two-thirds of the foreground of the painting; the horizontal direction of his languorous pose is emphasized by the line of the telescope in his lap, which points directly toward his wife on the right. Her softly draped, low-cut white dress, which reveals her pale skin, is set off by a nosegay of red flowers tucked into the bodice. Her brown hair, decorated with pearls, flows loosely over her shoulders. A blue sash with gold threads encircles her waist, one gold-fringed end falling to the side. With her left hand she holds three ripe peaches in her lap. She looks out of the painting to the viewer's left, away from her husband, but shows her affection for him by resting her right forearm on his left; in her right hand she holds sprigs of red clover blossoms. At the extreme left is a green parrot, perched on the ground. Behind Mrs. Laming is a large tree; at the edge of a field is a row of smaller trees, and beyond Mr. Laming is a sapling. In the distance, past open fields, lies the harbor of Baltimore. A tinge of orange colors the leaves of the trees behind Mrs. Laming.
