Reviews of Books

	Raphaelle Peale, "Venus Rising from the Sea—A Deception (After the Bath)," circa 1822. Oil on canvas, 29 1/4 by 24 1/8 in.; 74.3 by 61.3 cm. Reprinted courtesy of The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri (Purchase: Nelson Trust) 34–147.

The Philadelphia artist Raphaelle Peale (1774–1825) is best known for his enigmatic Venus Rising from the Sea--A Deception, painted around 1822. Drawing on a familiar mythological theme in European painting, Peale took the title from a work (circa 1772) by the English painter James Barry and appropriated a few elements of the original as well. A nude Venus stands at the center of Barry's canvas. Peale borrowed her right foot and raised left arm; the rest of the body, including the face, he covered with a white napkin depicted so skillfully as to appear real; hence, the "deception" in this stunning example of trompe l'oeil. The physical image of the nude persists, its general contours pressing into the folds of the cloth, sensuous yet ghostly. Peale's witty perspective on the mythological tradition at once reveals and conceals. Unlike his better-known artist-father, Charles Willson Peale, who proudly lifts a curtain to exhibit his long gallery of natural history and patriotic portraiture in the famous self-portrait The Artist in His Museum (1822), Raphaelle refuses to show and tell. In the center of his Venus painting he draws a blank sheet, the equivalent of a curtain that never gets raised. While it serves to hide Venus's body yet trace her lines, the napkin is not altogether unmarked; the lower right border bears the artist's signature, as if embroidered into the fabric, in a curious embodiment of his self.

1

The father-son relationship and its repercussions for self-constitution on a blank canvas lie at the heart of The Body of Raphaelle Peale, Alexander Nemerov's inquiry into the artist's still life paintings, the genre in which he worked most successfully. Raphaelle, the eldest son, was one of several children Charles Willson Peale named after artists and who followed the family business of painting. Initially, he showed much talent as a painter of portraits, his father's metier, exhibiting several examples at the 1795 Columbianum show in Philadelphia. By the 1810s, however, he was devoting his talent almost exclusively to the still life, a genre that ranked low in the traditional hierarchy of subjects. The shift was part of a larger divergence between father and son. In the father's estimate, Raphaelle never quite grew up professionally or personally. The boy, he allowed, had a good heart but was undisciplined and dominated by lower passions. In fact, Raphaelle was an alcoholic whose heavy drinking, combined with painful physical ailments (gout and arthritis), plunged his family into financial distress and dependence on Charles Willson Peale.

. . .