| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.1

You have not been recognized as a subscriber to JAH online. About 250 words from this article are provided below; about 364 words remain.

If you are a individual member of the Organization of American Historians, you may:: • login here if you have already registered for online access.; • Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
• Set up your online account for the first time.
If you are not a member of the Organization of American Historians, you can:: • Join the OAH and receive many member benefits including print and electronic issues of the Journal of American History.
• Purchase a research pass to gain two-hour access to the entire History Cooperative web site. You will have full access to current issues of the Journal of American History (86.1-present). Note: the Research Pass does not provide access to JSTOR's holdings of the Journal of American History.
Instititutions can:: • Subscribe to this journal and receive print and electronic issues.
• Activate your existing subscription so that we recognize your IP number ranges.

| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Charles Willson Peale: Art and Selfhood in the Early Republic. By David C. Ward. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. xxiv, 236 pp. $49.95, ISBN 0-520-23960-1.)

Historians of art, science, politics, and the family have a proprietary interest in Charles Willson Peale: officer at Valley Forge, Philadelphia radical, museum founder, exhumer of a mastodon, court artist to the Founding Fathers, and sire of a dynasty of female and male artists. Fortunately, he left thousands of documents, including diaries, correspondence, and a manuscript, "The Life of Charles Wilson Peale," collected at the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution. Despite this trove, Peale's only biographer has been a descendant, Charles Coleman Sellers, whose most recent volume appeared in 1969. David C. Ward's welcome critical biography interprets the artist through his 1825 autobiography, especially as that "Life" explains Peale's art. Indeed, Ward, a deputy editor of the Peale Papers, calls the autobiography the "longest museum label ever written" (p. xvii) and argues that the acts of description and invention in Peale's writings were intimately tied to his other "pencil"—the paintbrush—as means for achieving autonomy. Such deliberate self-creation was necessary for throwing off the "terms" of the father (p. 194, n. 3): the values of Peale's real father, but also the more general assumptions that constrained the revolutionary generation. In this account Peale's famous 1822 self-portrait, The Artist in His Museum, emerges as an assertion of male potency and will to define the self that Ward asserts typified American individualism.

. . .

There are about 364 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.