Featured White Papers
- Enterprise PBX comparison guide (VoIP-News)
- Hosted CRM buyer's guide (Inside CRM)
- PCI DSS therapy for the smaller retailer (McAfee)
Content provided in partnership with
'Art conceal'd': Peale's double portrait of Benjamin and Eleanor Ridgely Laming
Art Bulletin, The, March, 1996 by Ellen G. Miles, Leslie Reinhardt
Although Tasso may not have been widely known, it is clear that the themes expressed in the garden episode were indeed popular. In the 1780s Baltimore newspapers frequently published romantic and sentimental poetry, written in classical or pastoral form. In 1788, the year that Peale painted the Lamings, poetry published in the Maryland Journal and Baltimore Advertiser described the joys of pastoral retirement with words that echo Tasso's theme: "Among the murm'ring crystal streams, / The groves, and flow'ry fields, / . . . There, far from all the busy world, to thee alone I'll live." Domestic happiness was praised as "thou only bliss / Of Paradise that has surviv'd the fall" and love was described as a garden. The beloved was an enchantress: "Doras! . . . Me thy virtue hath enchanted / Me thy sweetness hath enthralled"; or a queen: "My heart's mighty empire bright Celia possest, / And reign'd a most absolute Queen in my breast."(88) It seems that even if a Baltimore patron were unfamiliar with Tasso, the theme of the scene in the garden would have been known and appreciated.
Peale's Approach to Portraiture
The interpretation of the Lamings' portrait as a transplantation of Rinaldo and Armida to Maryland adds a new dimension to our understanding of Peale's portraiture. Recent scholarship has begun to revise the view of him as a literal painter concerned primarily with satisfactory likenesses. Peale first used a system of emblematic imagery in his early portraits of William Pitt (1768), John Dickinson (1770), and John Beale Bordley (1771 ), which carry specific political messages.(89) He continued to use this mode of expression in his ephemeral political works, such as his designs for triumphal arches and broadsides made during the Revolutionary War era. In the Laming portrait Peale has departed from the emblematic, turning instead to poetic allusion. Some of his imagery is similar to that found in his exactly contemporary double portrait, William Smith and His Grandson (Virginia Museum of Fine Arts), also painted in October 1788 in Maryland. Smith's sittings began on October 11, about a week after Peale had completed those for the Laming portrait. For this painting Brandon Fortune has posited a complex of meanings, including references to the works of Horace and Virgil on the "virtues of retirement," as well as to similar themes found in the poetry of James Thomson, whose Seasons (1726-30) is one of the books displayed on the table in the painting.(90) In the Smith portrait, the theme of rural retirement is part of a picture of generational connection, continuity, and republican virtue. The Lamings' portrait presents it as the setting for the pursuit of romantic love.
The identification of a poetic allusion in the Lamings' portrait invites a closer look at Peale's other portraits. It can be suggested, for example, that Peale used a dress similar to Mrs. Laming's as part of the characterization whenever such an allusion occurs in a woman's portrait. A loosely flowing white dress, for example, is worn by Mrs. Jonathan Dickinson Sergeant (1789) and by Mrs. Maskell Ewing (ca. 1788), each of whom holds a copy of Thomson's Seasons.(91) Mary Sterett, painted in 1788 shortly before her marriage to Richard Gittings, Sr., wears a similarly styled pale pink dress with a gray sash.(92) In the portrait (Baltimore Museum of Art) the sitter opens the door of a bird cage, where a mockingbird sits, between the inside and the outside; the text of an open book below the cage includes the words "I can't get out" in bold letters. The bird cage is probably an emblem for a voluntary prisoner of love, and as such the symbol of a betrothed or married sitter.(93)
