This autobiography, written by Peale when he was in his eighties, spans American history from the 1740s to the 1820s, an era in which Peale was a primary actor in many of the young nation’s significant cultural and political events.Peale begins by describing his difficult early years as an apprentice to a saddlemaker, and he then tells how he became an artist, one who eventually painted more than one thousand portraits of the generation that won American independence and established the Republic. He writes of his service in the Philadelphia militia during the American Revolution and of his fighting at the Battle of Princeton. He explains his involvement in Philadelphia’s radical republican politics and the difficulties this caused his family. He discusses his involvement in the founding of such cultural institutions as the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and his museum of natural history and art, the latter an institution he hoped would be his legacy. He recounts his experiences as a farmer and agrarian reformer and as an inventor (of fireplaces, a vapor bath, and the first American bridge design). Finally he includes a great deal of material on his wives and children, providing a matchless account of an American family in the early Republic.

The Selected Papers of Charles Willson Peale and His Family: Volume 5 The Autobiography of Charles Willson Peale

Ward, David C.

History

Yale University Press

An entirely new interpretation of modern American portraiture based on the history of sexual difference. Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture, companion volume to an exhibition of the same name at the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, traces the defining presence of same-sex desire in American portraiture through a seductive selection of more than 140 full-color illustrations, drawings, and portraits from leading American artists. Arcing from the turn of the twentieth century, through the emergence of the modern gay liberation movement in 1969, the tragedies of the AIDS epidemic, and to the present, Hide/Seek openly considers what has long been suppressed or tacitly ignored, even by the most progressive sectors of our society: the influence of gay and lesbian artists in creating American modernism. Hide/Seek shows how questions of gender and sexual identity dramatically shaped the artistic practices of influential American artists such as Thomas Eakins, Romaine Brooks, Marsden Hartley, Georgia O'Keeffe, Charles Demuth, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Andrew Wyeth, Andy Warhol, Robert Mapplethorpe, and many more—in addition to artists of more recent works such as Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Glenn Ligon, Catherine Opie, and Cass Bird. The authors argue that despite the late-nineteenth-century definition and legal codification of the “homosexual,” in reality, questions of sexuality always remained fluid and continually redefined by artists concerned with the act of portrayal. In particular, gay and lesbian artists—of but not fully in the society they portrayed—occupied a position of influential marginality, from which vantage point they crafted innovative and revolutionary ways of painting portraits. Their resistance to society's attempt to proscribe them forced them to develop new visual vocabularies by which to code, disguise, and thereby express their subjects' identities—and also their own. Bringing together for the first time new scholarship in the history of American sexuality and new research in American portraiture, Hide/Seek charts the heretofore hidden impact of gay and lesbian artists on American art and portraiture and creates the basis for the necessary reassessment of the careers of major American artists—both gay and straight—as well as of portraiture itself.

Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture

Arts & Photography

Katz, Jonathan D.

History & Criticism

Smithsonian Books

Work always has been a central construct in the United States, influencing how Americans measure their lives and assess their contribution to the wider society. Work also has been valued as the key element in the philosophy of self-improvement and social mobility that undergird the American value system. Yet work can also be something imposed upon people: it can be exploitative, painful, and hard. This duality is etched into the faces of the people depicted in the portraits showcased in The Sweat of Their Face: Portraying American Workers. This companion volume to an exhibition at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery examines working-class subjects as they appear in artworks by artists including Winslow Homer, Elizabeth Catlett, Danny Lyon, and Shauna Frischkorn. This richly illustrated book charts the rise and fall of labor from the empowered artisan of the eighteenth century through industrialization and the current American business climate, in which industrial jobs have all but disappeared. It also traces the history of work itself through its impact on the men and women whose laboring bodies are depicted. The Sweat of Their Face is a powerful visual exploration of the inextricable ties between American labor and society.

The Sweat of Their Face: Portraying American Workers

Moss, Dorothy

Fagg, John

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

The work of a historian who understands how environments and events—on a personal or a national scale—shape and change us, this poetry compilation explores the moral and psychological consequences of actions against the vast canvas of history. An outstanding critic of modern poetry, Ward responds to it with attentive originality, incorporating verse into his prose with unexpected intensity. Drawing inspiration from his time at the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian, Ward offers a portrait of the United States that will appeal to those interested in contemporary poetry and American history.

Internal Difference

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

Lintott Press

Reports of its death were exaggerated but persistent in the art world; in mid-twentieth century America, everyone seemed to agree that portraiture was finished as a progressive art form.
A groundbreaking reassessment of the reinvention of portraiture in America between 1945 and 1975—the period when the abstract expressionists reached international prominence—this new volume presents fifty-five innovative portrait paintings, drawings, prints, and sculptures. It features works by Joan Brown, Alice Neel, Elaine de Kooning, Larry Rivers, Marisol Escobar, Alex Katz, Romare Bearden, Fairfield Porter, Jamie Wyeth, and Andy Warhol, amongst others.
 Features a poem by leading New York School poet John Ashbery specially commissioned for this book.

Face Value: Portraiture in the Age of Abstraction

Reaves, Wendy Wick

Fortune, Brandon Brame

GILES

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Ward, David C.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Ward, David C.