Robert Feke: Isaac Royall and Family, 1741	John Smibert: Dean Berkeley and His Entourage (The Bermuda Group), 1729
Benjamin West: The Artist’s Family, 1772	Charles Willson Peale: The Peale Family, 1773

West's painting of his family demonstrates a changed approach to the family portrait.  West stands on the right side of the painting, overlooking the scene and probably gazing at his infant child in his wife's lap.  The men in hats are his brother and father, both still observing their Quaker lifestyle and beliefs.  West and his immediate family, however, appear to be moving away from that life.  The painting conveys the new wealth of West in its deep green and brown tones, a setting which might seem austere but communicates luxury through the warm, rich style of painting.  Peale's painting of the Peale family is an interesting variation of the more traditional family portrait.  The family members are still seated around a table with the maternal core at the center.  They seem to be engaged in conversation with one another, listening and responding.  Yet, there is still a sense of the formal portrait, possibly because the table is so central to the composition and possibly because the emphasis on grey and black values makes the painting feel less alive.
 

Charles Willson Peale: John and Elizabeth Lloyd Cadwalader and Their Daughter Anne, 1772	John Singleton Copley: Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Mifflin, 1773

The painting of the Cadwaladers demonstrates another change: increasingly, the painting of the husband and wife, in separate paintings or together in one, becomes more popular than the family portrait.  The Cadwaladers do include their daughter but the painting follows the form of a husband-and-wife portrait with its focus on the adults in characteristic positions--the standing man and the seated woman.  The next change that occurs in paintings of this type is one in which the husband and wife begin to be placed in almost identical positions--both standing or both sitting--perhaps a reflection of what was then a newer understanding of marriage as a contract between companions or partners (the "companionate" marriage).  The individual or paired portrait generally had a single goal: to capture a good likeness of the individual’s face and to demonstrate that the person displayed class-appropriate behavior.  The props in these paintings are in some cases more important than what we see in the person, and they are slower to change than the body position of the person.  In most cases, the husband and wife chose to have paired portraits.  They would be treated in almost identical fashion in the two paintings with the primary differences lying in the objects associated with them and the gender-specific associations of those objects.  The overall equality of the couples in these portraits and in the less frequent double portrait was new, even if the attributes of gender were not.  Earlier paintings tended to contrast a vertical male figure who communicated activity through his body position with a horizontally disposed female, who communicated passivity and ornamentation.  It is of interest, then, that Copley's painting in 1773 shows the man and woman in nearly identical poses.
 

Sarah Miriam Peale: Eleanor Smith Gittings, c. 1830	Sarah M. Peale: John S. Gittings, c. 1830

Sarah Peale generally chose to make separate portraits of the husband and wife, precisely because it did allow her to place each person in the same position, facing front and undiminished by the need to share the space of the painting.  Sarah Miriam Peale and her sister Anna Claypoole Peale were highly respected portrait painters in the 19th century, with Anna primarily making her home in Pennsylvania while Sarah worked in Baltimore and St. Louis.  Anna’s career was not as long as Sarah’s, since she stopped painting after her second marriage; Sarah had a long and successful career making portraits of politicians and wealthy people and winning prizes for her still-lifes.   In either case, having been born into this family was undoubtedly an advantage–much like Renaissance families, if the father was an artist, the children often became artists as a means of continuing the family business.  Since women could not study at art schools until the late 19th century, they were able to learn their skills at home.  They did, however, become the first female members of the Academy of Fine Arts in Pennsylvania.  Sarah was generally thought of as one of the best portrait painters of her time, receiving more commissions than many male artists who were well-known then and are still better known today.  Anna, also a popular portraitist, was better known for her miniature watercolor portraits on ivory, such as the example below.  Such portraits were often worn as jewelry, in bracelets or as pendants around the neck.
 

Anna Claypoole Peale: Nancy Aertsen (watercolor on ivory, approx. 3 x 3"), 1820

Sarah Miriam Peale: Mrs. Rubens Peale and Son, 1823	Sarah Miriam Peale: Self-Portrait, 1830

Paintings of the mother and child are obviously not a new idea in art.  Sarah Peale's painting is not unusual in terms of the composition.  But its special qualities lie in the intensity she almost always seems to give to the eyes of her subjects, the fleshy sense to the child, and her marvelous ability to render the clothing of her subjects.  All of these qualities are apparent in her self-portrait as well.

Lilly Martin Spencer: Self-portrait, 1841

We will meet Lilly Martin Spencer later in the textbook, but at this point, it is interesting to observe a bigger change in the family painting: the family engaged in activity.  Spencer unites the traditional genre painting (paintings of daily life) with the family painting.  She is not alone in doing this but her paintings also reflect some of the contradictions of social life in the mid-19th century, especially as they might have been experienced by a professional woman.

The decade beginning in 1848 in the United States was a period which starts with the woman's rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York, and ends with financial ruin in the northeast--they both posed challenges to traditional male authority--rights for women, and economic failure beyond their control.  Spencer, a woman whose life seemed to embody many of the contradictions of the period in women's roles, supported her family through her painting.  The mother of 13 children (7 of whom lived), she was the daughter of parents who believed in rights for women and who encouraged her to pursue an education.  Her husband took most of the responsibility for care of the house, freeing Spencer to paint, but it is not clear that he had the means to support the family otherwise.
 

Lily Martin Spencer: This Little Pig went to Market, 1857	Spencer: Domestic Happiness, 1849

Spencer's art tends to embrace a somewhat ambiguous position--she neither affirms the middle class patriarchal values nor rejects them.  But her position regarding family values is radical in a conservative way.  That is, she is supporting the traditional, conservative role of the woman in the family, at a time when it was coming under attack by feminists and socialists.  What is not immediately apparent to us is that in her painting, Domestic Happiness, in which the children are really the dominating force and the parents subordinate themselves to the happiness of the children, she is taking a position which is in opposition to a new, more conservative stance of saying that the children should be led, taught, governed; they should not "govern."  The painting is a harmonious scene during a time of disharmony in the nation, and this fact could also argue for seeing Spencer's painting as radical--radical in that it is actually giving a message in favor of the harmony of the family and the family as a strategy against disunity in society, but the message is given in images, not words.