An unusual double portrait: a botanist and his geranium.
Rembrandt Peale, Rubens Peale with a Geranium, 1801, oil on canvas, 71.4 x 61 cm (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.). Speakers: Dr. Bryan Zygmont and Dr. Steven Zucker
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0:00:05.0 Dr. Steven Zucker: We’re in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., looking at an amazing double portrait. This was produced by Rembrandt Peale, but the subject is unusual. It is his younger brother, Rubens Peale and Rubens’ geranium. Now, despite the fact that Charles Willson Peale, the patriarch of the family, named his children after important European artists and scientists, Rubens did not take after his namesake and become a painter like his brother Rembrandt. Instead, he became a botanist. But here we’re seeing him at 17 years old, already lovingly attending to what was then a very rare plant in the United States, a geranium.
0:00:51.7 Dr. Bryan Zygmont: And his path in botany was sort of preordained by the ways in which Rubens had very poor eyesight. And this is very clear by the inclusion of not one, but two pairs of eyeglasses, one of which he wears and the other of which he holds.
0:01:08.2 Dr. Steven Zucker: The fact that the children were named after important European painters speaks to this moment at the end of the 18th century, the tail end of what we know as the Enlightenment, a moment when philosophy, science, the arts are understood as a pathway to improve society, to improve mankind, that no longer are we ruled by religion. That power can rest in intellectual inquiry, and it is not necessarily found in the traditional centers of monarchs or religious rulers.
0:01:42.2 Dr. Bryan Zygmont: And in many ways, Charles Willson Peale, Rubens’ and Rembrandt’s father, lived this out in his life. He began a natural history museum that chronicled the plant life and animal life of North America. He exhumed a mastodon skeleton, reassembled it, and took it on tour. And so the whole Peale family was engaged in this idea of the Enlightenment, using science as a way of speaking to what America is and could be.
0:02:10.7 Dr. Steven Zucker: And we see that in this painting. The glasses do reference Rubens’ poor eyesight, but they also call attention to the idea of careful visual attention, the attention that a botanist brings to the study of a plant, but also the attention that an artist brings to their subject. And in that way, creates a bridge between the arts and sciences.
0:02:30.7 Dr. Bryan Zygmont: And to return to the idea of the Enlightenment, there’s a lot going on in this composition that speaks to that. Think about John Locke, who was an English philosopher, who spoke about the blank slate, the tabula rasa. And Locke believed that everything that humans know, we know from experience, and the places we get those experiences are through the human senses. And so we can think about the ways in which Rubens is very much engaging those senses within this painting. You can appreciate the tactile nature of the leaves of the geranium, of the smoothness of this plant. And note the ways in which he has taken the fingers of his right hand and placed them into the soil. You can almost smell the soil. The flowers are blooming. And, of course, the ways in which Rembrandt Peale has brought attention to the visual nature of this, given the ways in which eyeglasses and his eyes are a particular area of emphasis of this composition.
0:03:26.1 Dr. Steven Zucker: And that’s such an interesting issue, the idea of emphasis, because traditionally, we would expect the plant to be secondary. But when we began, I called this a double portrait. And that’s because there is every bit as much loving attention paid to the leaves of this geranium as to the planes of the face of the artist’s younger brother. This is a double portrait. It is a portrait of a plant, and it is a portrait of a person.
0:03:50.1 Dr. Bryan Zygmont: Absolutely. This is a portrait of an individual person. And I think the same could be said about the plant. It does serve exactly like a portrait.
0:04:00.1 Dr. Steven Zucker: And if Rubens Peale’s two fingers are touching the moist soil within the pot, look at the way that the plant returns that touch. There are these two buds at the very top that seem to reach down to that wonderful mop of brown hair.
0:04:15.7 Dr. Bryan Zygmont: And in some interesting ways, the fingers are going into the soil, which is the source of the life of the plant. And the plant is reaching out to his head, which is the source of his intellect as well.
0:04:27.3 Dr. Steven Zucker: And so we really have a sense of what was important to this young painter, Rembrandt Peale, what was important to his brother, and what the culture of this extraordinary family was in 1801, soon after the birth of the United States.
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