Titian Ramsay Peale (1799-1885)
A MONA Moment |
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Philadelphia artist Charles Wilson Peale was a dominant influence in the visual arts in the early years of the American Republic. Trained by American artist Benjamin West in London, he pursued a highly successful career painting portraits of the urban gentry of the eastern seaboard and revolutionary war heroes.
A product of the age of enlightenment, he vigorously pursued an intellectual ideal through art and scientific pursuits-especially through his establishment of America's first museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
His devotion to the cause of art was taken to an extraordinary level of consummation as it were. Eight of his ten children became practicing artists, most of them named after famous, European Renaissance painters including Rembrandt, Rubens, Titian, and Raphael.
It was his youngest son Titian who carried on his father's devotion to art and science. Trained by his father as an artist and naturalist, he was a member of a scientific expedition in 1820 that explored the Platte River. He served as assistant to the expedition's official naturalist, Thomas Say.
His specific assignment was to collect and record specimens of birds, mammals, reptiles, fishes and insects. His sketches, numbering over one hundred, also included some landscapes and views of Indian life. Approximately fifty of these drawings are now in the collection of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia. Among the expedition's personnel, he became a skilled huntsman, in addition to his activities as an artist.
It is perhaps I his capacity as hunter that in 1847, reviewing his experiences 27 years prior, he painted the oil painting now in the collection of the museum of Nebraska Art, Buffalo Hunt in the Platte Valley.
In this work the Colorado Rockies dominate the background. In the left middle ground we see a pale ribbon of blue, the south branch of the Platte. As it winds right it is masked by trees, a convenient backdrop for the main action in the foreground: two Plains Indians on horseback at close quarters with a Buffalo, moving in for the kill.
There is a lot going on in this painting with no less than four separate scenes playing out on the canvas. In the left middleground a buffalo, bleeding, its front legs buckled, is stalked by a single Indian who has jumped off his horse. Behind him a party of four Indians is skinning a buffalo. At the edge of the river another pair on horse back close in on four buffalo, backing them into the river. In the far right background lies an Indian encampment of teepees.
Peale has composed this painting with care, and like his father, Charles Wilson Peale, with the eye of an educator. All of the action I have described takes place in the middle-ground in a horizontal band through the middle third of the painting. Each of these scenes is a vignette, detailing a specific aspect of the buffalo hunt.
In the foreground his scientific interests are evident, with a closely observed rendering of Blue Stem grass and Cacti. There lurks in the scrub grass here-a human skull and pelvic bones next to much larger skulls of buffalo, perhaps a momento mori, plains style. Is this Peale's version of the medieval tradition of an image of death in art to remind us of our mortality. Here the message "remember you will die", seems perfectly suited to "Home on the range," the dangerous, transitory life of the western prairie.
