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TITIAN PEALE

1799 - 1855

BiographyEven earlier than the arrival of the Mormon pioneers, "Euro-American" painting and drawing made its appearance here as a part of the Spanish appearance in the area in the 1770s and then as part of the "artist-naturalist/explorer" traditions carried forward by early American expedition artists. The best early American "artist-naturalists" were those who, like the ornithologist Alexander Wilson, excelled in "cool, crisp" objectivity. It was with this spirit that the draftsman-painters Samuel Seymour (q.v.) and Titan Ramsay Peal II (son of the great Philadelphia painter-scientist Charles Willson Peale) had first come west. C.W. Peale founded America's first natural history and art museum, and it was his contemporary J.D. Godman who created the period axiom that "to study natural history, it is only necessary for us to use our eyesight." The younger Peale, whose deceased older brother of the same name had also been an "artist-naturalist," and Seymour were assigned as artists to a specialized scientific party under the leadership of Stephen Harriman Long as a part of the Atkinson Yellowstone expedition (1819-20). Titian Peale's instructions were "to collect and delineate specimens and to make sketches indicating the geological stratifications of rocks, earth, and mountainsides."

Olpin, Robert S., William C. Seifrit, and Vern G. Swanson. ARTISTS OF UTAH. Salt Lake City: Gibbs Smith Publisher, 1999: 209.

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