1741-1827 Painter and museum founder. After serving as a saddler's apprentice in Annapolis, MD, from 1754 to 1761, he worked at various trades, including painting signs and portraits. In 1766 some prominent Marylanders underwrote his studies in London with Benjamin West, from whom he absorbed the fundamentals of the British portrait tradition. Peale probably attended the informal life classes offered at St Martin's Lane Academy, precursor to the Royal Academy Schools, and drew from casts in the Duke of Richmond's collection in Whitehall. He visited the studios of such important British portrait painters as Joshua Reynolds, Francis Cotes and Allan Ramsay and studied the techniques of miniature painting, sculpture and engraving. In London he executed his first major commission  Related Paintings of Charles Willson Peale :. | Rachel Leeds Kerr | Portrait of Yarrow Mamout | The Staircase Group | Exhuming the First American Mastodon. | Oil on canvas painting of Richard Henry Lee |
Related Artists:
Nash, Joseph
English, 1809-1878
Ochtman, Mina Fonda
American, 1862-1924 was the wife of the American painter Leonard Ochtman and a notable American Impressionist in her own right. She was a part of the Cos Cob Art Colony and lived in Greenwich, Connecticut. Their daughter, Dorothy Ochtman Del Mar, was also a painter of note.
robert john thornton
Robert John Thornton (1768-1837) was an English physician and botanical writer, noted for "A New Illustration of the Sexual System of Carolus Von Linnæus" (1797-1807) and "The British Flora" of 1812. He was the son of Bonnell Thornton and studied at Trinity College, Cambridge. Inspired by Thomas Martyn's lectures on botany and the work of Linnaeus he switched from the church to medicine. He worked at Guy's Hospital in London, where he later lectured in medical botany. After spending some time abroad, he settled and practised in London. Robert inherited the family fortune after the death of both his brother and mother. The most ambitious part of the "New Illustration of the Sexual System of Linnæus" was Part III, the "Temple of Flora" (1799-1807). The first plates were engraved by Thomas Medland (1755-1833) in May 1798 from paintings by Philip Reinagle. Between 1798 and 1807 they produced a total of thirty-three coloured plates, engraved in aquatint, stipple and line. When he planned the project, Thornton had decided to publish seventy folio-size plates. Lack of interest from the general public spelled disaster for the scheme, and the holding of a lottery could not save it from financial ruin, neither did a page in the work dedicated to the spouse of George III, Queen Charlotte, patroness of botany and the fine arts??Thornton died in destitution.