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Charles Willson Peale’s letters contain several references to James painting landscapes. In a letter of May 19, 1788, he discusses
a raffle of James’s landscapes; 2 in the Columbian Magazine, Charles Willson mentions a “variable landscape scene” by James. 3
Charles Coleman Sellers says that James carried out these pictures for Charles Willson. 4 We do know from the contents of an
1820 letter from Charles Willson that landscape painting was a communal activity for the brothers: “My brother is with me,
and I propose to visit Skulkill [sic] the neighborhood of Canal, for the purpose of taking several interesting views.” 5
It was common for James, like other contemporary portraitists, to include either general or specific landscapes in the
background of his paintings of the 1790s, but it would be almost twenty years before his pictures would reveal an emotional
response to the landscape. James’s first “pure” landscape may be the one shown at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
in Philadelphia in 1819: Landscape—Belfield Farm, Near Germantown (no. 86). He would continue to exhibit his landscapes
at the Academy until his death in 1831.
The landscapes that James Peale painted in the 1820s, such as the View on the Wissahickon, had changed considerably from
those he executed in the 1790s, for there is now a sense of enjoyment and excitement about the landscape. The color is in
a higher key, light and shadow form interesting patterns, the figures—even in their genre activity—are integrated into the
composition rather than being merely placed in the setting, and the entire picture has a theme and unity missing from his
earlier landscapes. The final stage of James’s landscape production is marked by dramatic scenes in which he contemplates
man’s place in nature. As Edward J. Nygren comments, James’s earlier landscape work “exudes a sense of rural gentility of
man at ease in an environment of his making,” whereas the late period “speaks for the sublimity of nature where man is a
mute observer of forces beyond his control.” 6
James is known to have painted four views of the Wissahickon (as well as several of the Schuylkill and the Brandywine)
between 1821 and his death. 7 One Wissahickon picture at Swarthmore College and two at the Philadelphia Museum of Art
relate only in subject to this one. Another, however, now in a Philadelphia private collection, is quite similar and may have
been painted at the same time. An oil on canvas of corresponding proportions (15 3 /4 x 22 inches), it is painted from the
same vantage point and has a similar palette and style.
—Linda Crocker Simmons
Notes
1. Charles Willson Peale to Benjamin West, Apr. 20, 1771, in The Selected Papers of Charles Willson Peale and His Family, ed. Lillian Miller et al., vol.
1, Charles Willson Peale: The Artist in Revolutionary America, 1735–1791 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1983), p. 95. 2. Charles
Willson Peale, Diary No. 7, June 19, 1788, and June 22, 1788, in Miller, The Selected Papers of Charles Willson Peale and His Family, vol. 1, pp. 502,
504. 3. Charles Willson Peale, Columbian Magazine, vol. 3 (1789), pp. 413–16. 4. Charles Coleman Sellers, “James Peale: A Light in Shadow,
1749–1831” in Four Generations of Commissions: The Peale Collection of the Maryland Historical Society, ed. Eugenia Calvert Holland et al. (Baltimore:
The Maryland Historical Society, March 3–June 29, 1975), p. 30. 5. Charles Willson Peale to Rembrandt Peale, July 27, 1820, quoted by Linda
Crocker Simmons, “James Peale: Out of the Shadows,” in The Peale Family: Creation of a Legacy, 1770–1870, ed. Lillian B. Miller (New York: Abbeville
Press, 1996), p. 209. 6. Edward J. Nygren, Views and Visions: American Landscapes before 1830 (Washington, D.C.: The Corcoran Gallery of Art,
1987), p. 74. 7. The author estimated that the total may be about a dozen in a telephone conversation with Robert Schwarz, Sr., July 30, 2003.