HARRIET CANY PEALE (American, 1800-1869). Agatharkhis, 1848. Oil on canvas. 24 x 20 inches (61.0 x 50.8 cm). Signed and ...

Description

HARRIET CANY PEALE (American, 1800-1869)
Agatharkhis, 1848
Oil on canvas
24 x 20 inches (61.0 x 50.8 cm)
Signed and dated lower right: Harriet C. Peale / 1848

PROVENANCE:
Private collection, Oklahoma.

Best known as the student and later wife of the early 19th-century American portraitist Rembrandt Peale, Philadelphian Harriet Cany Peale was a highly competent artist in her own right, mastering still-life, genre, portrait, and landscape painting. Unlike most women artists of her time, she continued to paint and exhibit actively after her marriage; for example, in 1848 she showed Peasant Girl and Fancy Portrait at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and in 1850, she exhibited copies of works after Rembrandt Peale. She also collaborated with Rembrandt on replicas of his famous "Porthole" portrait of George Washington. Evidencing her deft handling of line and light is her 1848 interpretation of Agatharkhis, a classical Greek maiden whose portrait by a skilled, "Promethean" painter is described in an epigram by the 4th-century B.C.E. poetess Erinna.

Harriet's other notable works include Still Life with Lowestoft Bowl, 1857 (Memphis Brooks Museum of Art); Woman at the Window (Washington County Museum of Fine Arts, Hagerstown, Maryland); View of the Catskill Mountains, 1858; and Ideal Portrait (McMullen Museum of Art, Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts), likely a self-portrait based on Rembrandt's copy of Domenichino's 1622 Cumean Sibyl. Her paintings can also be found in the Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; and Newark Museum.


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