Sarah M. Peale
America's First Woman Artist
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Practically every member of the Peale family contributed to America's early art and culture and Sarah Peale was the first woman artist to have made a living from her work. Having learned to paint from her renowned father, she painted several famous people, including Lafayette, Andrew Jackson, Thomas Hart Benson, and Daniel Webster.
Sarah was a passionate woman bent on being successful as an artist. She was also a woman of strong passion with a will to love and to be in love. Though unmarried, she nevertheless loved her men—fiercely!
As a respected artist in Baltimore and in Washington, Sarah can truly be considered America's first woman professional artist, her art work continuously being in demand during her days and now hanging on the walls of prominent American museums.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Sarah Peale (180085), niece of portrait painter Charles Willson Peale, made a living as a painter in an age that frowned on women artists. Spoiled and gutsy, she rebelled against her father, artist James Peale, who insisted that her proper place was as an assistant in his own workshop. Forsaking marriage, lest it interfere with her calling, she supported herself by doing portraits and still lifes. She was sometimes desperate for money, but she became a workaholic and persevered in her independent path. General Lafayette and Daniel Webster were among her subjects. This two-dimensional, fictionalized account by the author of Impressionist: A Novel of Mary Cassatt is filled with shoptalk and the day-to-day doings of a close-knit artistic family. King neither deeply probes Sarah's inner life nor situates her art in the context of her times.