Originally titled "Portrait of Raphaelle Peale and Titian Ramsay Peale," the so-called "Staircase Group" by Charles Willson Peale (1741-1827) is arguably the first major original painting in American art. Other significant portraits and history paintings preceded it, but they were invariably indebted to the compositions and conventions of English and European precedents. Peale belonged to a generation of intellectual revolutionaries who were declaring not just political but cultural and artistic independence from the Old World. His bold and visually arresting double portrait of his sons was startlingly new in its format, finish and presentation.
The elder Peale was born and grew up in Maryland. In the decade before the Revolution he gained some early art training, first being taught by John Singleton Copley in Boston and then undertaking a two-year apprenticeship with Benjamin West in London. But unlike his teachers, who moved to England for their mature careers, Peale returned to America to pursue a diverse career in painting and science. Multitalented like his colleagues and friends Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, he was active as an inventor, scientist, soldier, writer, naturalist and museum founder. Above all, he was progenitor and patriarch of a remarkable dynasty of offspring who painted over two generations and beyond. With a native sense of ambition and aspiration he named his children after famous painters (Raphaelle, Rembrandt, Rubens, Titian and Angelica Kaufman) and scientists (Franklin and Linnnaeus).
The oldest living son Raphaelle, age 21, and 15-year-old Titian stand life-size within this door-shaped canvas, youthful but already artistically inclined. The older boy occupies the lower center of the composition, starting to climb the turning steps in the stairway. (He would go on to produce the first important body of American still-life paintings during the opening quarter of the 19th century.) His younger brother has climbed several steps above, and now turns back in a balancing counterpose. (Poignantly, Titian would die three years later.) Both pause to look out at their father, who has presumably called them to hold their place as he works at his easel before them. Peale was an often-dominating figure in this family, and something of his controlling temperament is evident in the calculated equilibrium of this work.
We may wonder what generated such a large yet intimate portrait. Peale settled his family in Philadelphia at the outset of the Revolution. During the 1780s it became the nation's center of political and cultural activity, as the Constitutional Convention debated the structure of the new union, and eminent naturalists such as William Bartram and Alexander Wilson were at the forefront of Enlightenment discourse. By 1795, when the new government was located there for several years before its final move to Washington, Peale had reached his own peak of artistic productivity and influence. Now he conceived an enterprise that would appropriately recognize and promote the fine arts in America. This was the Columbianum, an "American Academy of Painting, Sculpture, Architecture and Engraving," organized to train artists and showcase their work. It would be the direct antecedent of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, founded by Peale 10 years later. His own submission to the Columbianum was "The Staircase Group," a trompe l'oeil deception that went beyond the realist efforts of his and others' previous portraits. He intended his tour-de-force to remain as a centerpiece in the new museum he was planning for Philosophical Hall. The Columbianum was the beginning of his efforts to reform and enlighten the tastes of his fellow citizens.
Why are the harmonies of this painting so satisfying? Its visual charms lie partly in the combination of beguiling informality and rhythmic clarity. Peale employs here a zigzag or spiral design, which perfectly suits the casual moment and delicate interruption of the boys' movements. One notes the repeated rectangular planes, from the small ticket on the bottom step to stair risers and corner walls. Crossing diagonals, of the treads, legs and maulstick (held by Raphaelle, and used to stabilize one's palette when painting), help to unify the animate and inanimate. More softening rhythms occur in the oval repetitions of the heads, eyes, the palette, its paint daubs, the buttons and wallpaper designs. (It's worth noting that these geometries of spiral, oval and ellipse were also central in Federal architecture at this time.)
The ultimate illusionism comes with the picture's framing: a simulated door molding around the canvas and installation of a real wood step at the base, painted to match those within the picture just above. With these gestures Peale blurs the boundary between pictorial and actual space, between artifice and reality, reinforcing the boys' glances outward from the painting to their father in the room and to us now looking at them. There is something disconcertingly modern in this subject and its connection with audience. (The Philadelphia Museum of Art has effectively mounted the painting at the end of a long corridor.)
For Peale, "The Staircase Group" was ultimately about art and family, with its palette at the compositional center and Raphaelle posing as an artist. The ticket painted by his foot is identifiable as one printed by Peale for admission to his museum, a clever autobiographical gesture placing his metaphorical signature, and self, within his artistic undertaking. It is no accident that he shared this expression of autobiography with a number of other great creative individuals of his time. In 1793 Benjamin Franklin's "Autobiography" appeared, a year after his death, now considered America's first original piece of literature, inventive in its down-to-earth narrative style and imaginative written life. Thomas Jefferson began rebuilding Monticello in the mid-1790s, America's first and greatest architectural expression of self. Peale joined them in fusing the private and public in a new way.
The full-length format of "The Staircase Group" speaks to its final originality. Heretofore it was reserved in the Old World for upper-class and royal portraiture. Peale inverts its use for American figures who are ordinary, relaxed and democratic.
—John Wilmerding is emeritus professor at Princeton University and the author of more than 20 books on American art.