Catherine and Elizabeth Hall

Artist Charles Willson Peale (American, 1741 - 1827)

Date1776

MediumOil on canvas

DimensionsUnframed: 30 1/4 x 25 1/4 inches (76.84 x 64.14 cm)
Framed: 36 x 31 3/16 x 2 3/4 inches (91.44 x 79.22 x 6.99 cm)

Credit LineGift of William B. and Harvey R. Fullerton, descendants of the sitters

Object numberF90-16

SignedSigned and dated lower right: C. W. Peale / pinx 1776

On View

On view

Gallery Location

Collections

American Art

Terms

DescriptionTwo girls, one on left standing, blue dress, 3/4 length, one on right seated in chair and in ivory dress, full- length, holding a basket of flowers together. Both look out at viewer. Dark-painted background.Exhibition History

Exhibition History

American Ancestor Portraits, William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, Kansas City, Mo., April 4–May 3, 1953, no cat. (as Elizabeth [age 4] and Catherine Hall [age 1h]).

Kansas City Collects, William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, Kansas City, Mo., January 22–February 28, 1965, no. 4 (as Portrait of Elizabeth and Catherine Hall).

Kaleidoscope of American Painting: Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, Kansas City, Mo., December 2, 1977–January 22, 1978, no. 11.

Gallery Label

Charles Willson Peale was the preeminent portrait painter in the mid-Atlantic colonies from 1770 to 1800. During the spring of 1776, he painted Catherine and Elizabeth Hall, the daughters of a Maryland plantation owner and fellow patriot. The girls' faces were painted from life, but their bodies were likely completed using studio props. The sisters are depicted with Peale's characteristic attention to resemblance and tenderness that conveys his own dedication to family. Their loose-fitting frocks reflect new ideas about children needing greater freedom. The flowers they hold indicate Peale's interests in horticulture, natural history and the language of flowers, according to which lilacs symbolized innocence. A decade after Peale painted this canvas, he opened the first natural history museum in America.

Provenance

To Elihu Hall and Catherine Orrick Hall (parents of the sitters), Cecil County, Md., 1776;

to Elizabeth Hall Ogle (sitter), Baltimore,c. 1790;

to Catherine Hall Ogle Borland (daughter of the sitter Elizabeth), Leavenworth, Kans., by descent, after 1841;

to William Patterson Borland (grandson of the sitter Elizabeth), Kansas City, Mo., by descent, after 1865;

to Katherine Hall Borland Fullerton (great-granddaughter of the sitter Elizabeth), Kansas City, Mo., by descent, after 1885;

to William Borland Fullerton (great-great-grandson of the sitter Elizabeth), Kansas City, Mo., by descent, after 1943;

to William Borland Fullerton Jr. (great-great-great-grandson of the sitter Elizabeth) and Harvey R. Fullerton (great-great-great-grandson of the sitter Elizabeth), Kansas City, Mo., by descent, after 1961;

to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, 1990.

Published References

Theodore Bolton, “Charles Willson Peale: The First Catalogue of His Portraits in Oils and in Miniature,” Art Quarterly supplement, 2 (1940), 425.

Charles Coleman Sellers, Portraits and Miniatures by Charles Willson Peale (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1952), 2:94 (as Hall Children).

Jane Fletcher Saunders, “Early Day Portraits in April Exhibition,” Independence (Mo.) Examiner, March 27, 1953, 12.

Winifred Shields, “Ancestor Portrait Show Leads to Bizarre Family Reunion,” Kansas City Star, April 3, 1953, 20.

Kansas City Collects, exh. cat. (Kansas City, Mo.: William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, 1965), unpaginated (as Portrait of Elizabeth and Catherine Hall).

Charles Coleman Sellers, “Charles Willson Peale with Patron and Populace,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 59 (May 1969), 65, 118.

Kaleidoscope of American Painting: Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, exh. cat. (Kansas City, Mo.: William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, 1977), 18.

Henry Adams, “Family Heirloom Enters the Museum,” Calendar (Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art), May 1991, 2–3 (as Portrait of Catherine and Elizabeth Hall).

Henry Adams, Handbook of American Paintings in the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art (Kansas City, Mo.: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 1991), 6, 18.

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