Portraits in miniature: Anna Claypoole Peale and Caroline Schetky

Magazine Antiques, Feb, 2002 by Anne Sue Hirshorn

A small number of important eighteenth-century drawings and portrait miniatures by American women contribute to our understanding of colonial portraiture, but it was not until the early nineteenth century that such artists as Anna Claypoole Peale and Caroline Schetky actively began to seek patronage. From 1818 to 1826 they submitted portrait miniatures concurrently to exhibitions at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia and later encountered each others work in Boston exhibition halls. The two artists were only a year apart in age, and although it is dear that they knew of each other, whether they considered themselves to be competitors is an open question.

Schetky (Pl. IV) was born in Edinburgh in 1790, the youngest of eleven children of Maria Reinagle (d. 1795), a singer and miniaturist, and Johann Georg Christoph Schetky (1737-1824), a composer and cellist of Hungarian descent. Two of her brothers were artists, one of whom (probably John Christian) instructed Caroline. Surrounded by art and music, Caroline was proficient in both. She arrived in Philadelphia on December 28, 1817, accompanied by her brother J. George (1776-1831), also a cellist. (1)

Anna Claypoole Peale (Pl. I) was born in Philadelphia in 1791, the fourth child and third daughter of Mary Claypoole (1753-1829) and James Peale. The city was then the largest in the United States and its established tradition of art patronage attracted many visiting British and American miniaturists and sustained resident painters, among them Thomas Sully (1783-1872), Charles Willson Peale (1741-1827), and his brother James. All of them were skilled miniaturists but derived most of their income from full-sized portraits.

For the most part the muses had smiled rather dimly on American women artists. Mary Roberts (d. 1761) of Charleston, South Carolina, who may have received some training in England before her arrival in America, probably painted the first portrait miniature in watercolor on ivory in the American colonies. (2) The miniaturist Esther [Hetty] Sage Benbridge (d. 1777), trained by Charles Willson Peale, is known to have worked in Philadelphia and Charleston, but few portraits can be attributed to her with certainty. (3)

Anna Claypoole Peale's entrepreneurial inclinations were evident at the age of fourteen, when she copied two French landscapes and sold them at auction for a good price. (4) This initiated a five-year apprenticeship with her father, in whose studio she was later joined by her sisters Sarah Miriam (1800-1885) and Margaretta Angelica (1795-1882). Anna must have been about sixteen when she painted Girl with a Book (Pls. V, Va). This portrait communicates the artist's pleasure in the act of painting, which is revealed in a lambent play of light on the figure. The subject holds a book on which the artist's name is substituted for the title on the cover. From about 1810 Peale's paintings are generally signed, and as the artist adapted a professional persona, she added the initial C, an acknowledgement of her mother's family, the Claypooles, to her signature.

Anna exhibited her first group of three miniatures at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts annual exhibition in 1814, two years after her father showed his last miniatures there. This was a signal to the public that Anna would assume commissions for portrait miniatures that her father would henceforth decline. But these expectations proved to be unrealistic when the War of 1812, fought mainly at sea, moved closer to home. On August 24 British troops marched into Washington, D.C., and within twenty-four hours systematically torched major government buildings. The shell of the President's House was depicted by the miniaturist George Munger (P1. VI). As the British advanced on Baltimore, the annual exhibition at the Pennsylvania Academy had just concluded.

At the outset of the War of 1812, George Schetky, who had first settled in Philadelphia in 1792, returned to Scotland, for he was reluctant to fight against his native country. He subsequently returned to Philadelphia in 1817, this time bringing his sister Caroline. Before the war, he had briefly taught music at Madame Rivardi's Seminary for young women in Philadelphia. Caroline's education was not dissimilar to what was offered at Madame Rivardi's. She had been largely educated at the Edinburgh school for young women founded by her mother and sustained by other family members. Artistic pursuits at such schools were models for their American counterparts such as Madame Rivardi's Seminary or the durable Boston Young Ladies Academy of Susanna Rowson (c. 1762-1824). (5) Art teaching at these schools was associated with the now obsolete term amateur, describing upper-class men and women who, as collectors and patrons of the arts, could theoretically develop more discriminating taste by learning to draw In England , there was little to prevent upper-class amateurs from profiting from their talents, (6) but in the United States an amateur's portfolio of drawings was compiled for pleasure and status rather than for profit.