Wizard Lush

The first and best of American still-life painters was honored with his first one-man show, 134 years after his death in 1825. The exhibition, at Manhattan's Knoedler Galleries this week, afforded a 38-picture survey of Raphaelle Peale, the troubled son of a great father.

In an introduction to the catalogue, Historian Charles Coleman Sellers notes that Peale's paintings "are of our own time more truly than of his. They have a peculiarly modern appeal in their very personal motivation and in their use of realism as an escape from reality. That other painters regarded [still life] as fit only for school work or amateurs may have encouraged him to take it as his own, to develop it with his wonderful virtuosity and to find in it a little province of personal supremacy, of surprises and satisfactions, of no money value but of solace and always of escape. The world in which he moved from place to place so laughingly had not been kind to Raphaelle Peale."

Charles Willson Peale, portraitist, scientist and revolutionary idealist, had the same expansive spirit as his good friend Thomas Jefferson. He raised his children to be geniuses, saw them more or less painfully sink to the level of ordinary men and women. Young Raphaelle found solace, as he sank, in parlor games, ventriloquism, a pretty shrew of a wife, his art, and the bottle. He turned restlessly to science. He patented a preservative for ships' timbers and a system for heating houses, developed a "new theory of the universe" which attributed the movement of astral bodies in space to electrical attractions and repulsions. He was an immensely likable lush, and a wizard at the easel. But his pictures never sold well. They lacked extravagance and high polish; for all but the quietest of dining rooms they spoke too softly of small delights. At the end, his wife was forced to take in boarders to support the family. As his last job before he died at 51, Raphaelle Peale was reduced to writing "lovesick poems" for a baker to put in cakes.

"There had been bred within this painter," says Sellers, "a call to the lofty and obscure and an artist's sensitive pride. He had seen from within himself what held the sun and stars and planets in their courses, but could not find his way and purposes among the nearer things. He had to have, somewhere in the world, a place of perfection of his own, though it should be only the little one of laughter, of surprise, only the illusion of fruit upon a table rich with the juices of summer."

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