atmosphere of that Colonial time, with the reserve and self-respect of its men and the virtue and propriety of its women. He did not go abroad until he was thirty-seven years old. In England he was well received, and had many commissions. He was made an A. R. A. in 1777, and a full academician in 1779. Shortly after this he was commissioned to paint “The Siege of Gibraltar.” His son, Baron Lyndhurst, became lord chancellor, and collected many of his father’s works.

THE AMERICAN ACADEMY

By Matthew Pratt, in the Metropolitan Museum, New York.

THE PEALES, A FAMILY OF PAINTERS

BENJAMIN WEST

By Sir Thomas Lawrence, the English portrait painter.

Charles Willson Peale’s fame is almost wholly derived from his portraits of Washington, of which he painted fourteen from life, extending in time from 1772 to 1795. His earliest shows Washington in the uniform of a British Colonial colonel, and is now in the possession of Washington and Lee University.

Washington is known to have sat forty-four times to various painters. Based on these comparatively few sittings have been more portrayals on canvas than have been accorded to any man in history, with the possible exception of Napoleon. A collection of engraved portraits of him has been made which included over four thousand plates. Rembrandt Peale, a son of Charles Willson Peale, contributed a cumulative fame to the name, as he also painted Washington, as well as Jefferson, Dolly Madison, and other political and social leaders. He, as well as his father and his uncle, James Peale, all worked at times in miniature. In the work of father and son there was little merit, little invention, but a creditable craftsmanship. They recorded the appearance of the people of their day with uninspired fluency.

KING LEAR

By Benjamin West, in Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

THE ART OF TRUMBULL

John Trumbull’s standing, like Peale’s, is attained largely on his renderings of Washington. He had much opportunity for observing the general, and this contributed much to the accuracy of his compositions, but little to the fineness of his art. He is fortunate in having many of his works gathered together in the Yale School of Fine Arts; for in the aggregation they are impressive, as being a dignified and graphic presentment of the important events of the Revolutionary period. These canvases are not large. Indeed, much of his work was in the nature of miniatures in oil. He made many careful studies from life of those persons he introduced into his historical compositions. His picture of the signing of the Declaration of Independence was painted in 1791, when most of the signers were yet living, and from all of these he obtained sittings. Claim has been made that he was the greatest of the early painters in America. He was, in the sense of having made the truest record. But in the sense of being the best according to our latterday conception of art, as being something other than a labored and literal rendering of a fact, he was inferior to both Copley and Stuart.

C. W. PEALE

Portrait by the painter, in the Pennsylvania Academy.

GILBERT STUART, MASTER IN PORTRAITURE

In Gilbert