Harriet Christina Cany Peale (1799–1869) was an American landscape, portrait, and genre painter of the mid-nineteenth century. Although sometimes described as a copyist, a greater share of her oeuvre has been made public in recent years, allowing Cany Peale to earn recognition for her genre and landscape paintings. She has been located in contemporary scholarship as an artist of the

Hudson River School The Hudson River School was a mid-19th century American art movement embodied by a group of landscape painters whose aesthetic vision was influenced by Romanticism. The paintings typically depict the Hudson River Valley and the surrounding area, ...

.Krieger, Jennifer C. "Women Artists of the Hudson River School." ''American Art Review'', vol. 22, no. 3, May/June 2010, pp. 140-45.

Family

Harriet Christina Cany was born in 1799, the daughter of Charles and Mary Cany, in Philadelphia. She was widowed sometime before 1840, and worked in her family's "fancy goods business." She studied with the artist

Rembrandt Peale Rembrandt Peale (February 22, 1778 – October 3, 1860) was an American artist and museum keeper. A prolific portrait painter, he was especially acclaimed for his likenesses of presidents George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Peale's style w ...

, whom she married in 1840, becoming his second wife. Her association with the more famous Peale usually places her within the famous Peale family of painters, overshadowing her individual achievements as an artist in her own right.

Career

Harriet Cany Peale first exhibited in 1840 at the

Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts Pennsylvania (; (Pennsylvania Dutch: )), officially the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, is a state spanning the Mid-Atlantic, Northeastern, Appalachian, and Great Lakes regions of the United States. It borders Delaware to its southeast, Maryl ...

, where she continued to exhibit for the rest of her life, as well as at the

Artists' Fund Society The Artists' Fund Society of the City of New York was a benevolent society founded on February 5, 1859, to assist members and their families in cases of illness, old age, and death, and to provide aid to non-member artists in distress. It was incor ...

. She and her husband shared a studio in Philadelphia. Her 1848 painting, ''Her Mistress's Clothes'' (private collection) has gained notoriety for its exploration of power differentiation in a scene of an African American woman dressed—presumably by her employer—in a bourgeois white woman's clothes and jewelry. Cany Peale depicts the "mistress" as an ideal, serene, light-skinned figure clasping the neck of the African American servant, whose features appear cruder in contrast. Together, they peer into a mirror to examine the effect of the clothes (relics of an earlier generation) and jewelry on the servant. Kaaterskill Clove by Harriet Cany Peale 1858

Kaaterskill Clove by Harriet Cany Peale 1858

Her landscape, ''Kaaterskill Clove'' (also in a private collection), was the key landscape image of the 2010 traveling exhibition, "Remember the Ladies: Women Artists of the Hudson River School," organized by the

Thomas Cole Thomas Cole was an English-born American artist and the founder of the Hudson River School art movement. Cole is widely regarded as the first significant American landscape painter. He was known for his romantic landscape and history paintin ...

Historic Site. Harriet Cany Peale died in 1869.

Collections

* Charles S. and Isabella V. McMullen Museum, Boston College, Boston, MA *

Chrysler Museum of Art The Chrysler Museum of Art is an art museum on the border between downtown and the Ghent district of Norfolk, Virginia. The museum was founded in 1933 as the Norfolk Museum of Arts and Sciences. In 1971, automotive heir, Walter P. Chrysler Jr. ...

, Norfolk, VA *

Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) is a museum and private art school in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.The Newark Museum The Newark Museum of Art (formerly known as the Newark Museum), in Newark, Essex County, New Jersey, United States, is the state's largest museum. It holds major collections of American art, decorative arts, contemporary art, and arts of Asia, A ...

, Newark, NJ * The Washington County Museum of Fine Arts, Hagerstown, MD

References

External links

Archives of American Art: Finding Aid to the Rembrandt and Harriet Peale Collection, circa 1820-1932
*[http://siris-artinventories.si.edu/ipac20/ipac.jsp?session=149049S5J1188.15809&profile=ariall&uri=link=3100006~!218710~!3100001~!3100002&aspect=Browse&menu=search&ri=1&source=~!siartinventories&term=Peale%2C+Harriet+Cany%2C+1800-1869%2C+painter.&index=AUTHOR Smithsonian Institution Art Inventories: Harriet Cany Peale paintings]
Smithsonian Institution Magazine Review of the 2010 "Remember the Ladies" exhibition featuring Harriet Cany Peale's painting
{{DEFAULTSORT:Peale, Harriet Cany Artists from Philadelphia Painters from Pennsylvania American women painters 1799 births 1869 deaths Hudson River School painters