“C. Peale Painted This in London in 1768”: Sources, Beauty, and Likeness in Boy with a Toy Horse

Abstract

In his only trip abroad, young Charles Willson Peale lived in London for a little over two years, from 1767 to 1769. While there, he eagerly studied contemporary British painting, Italian Renaissance art, and art theory. Apart from paintings of William Pitt that were shipped back to America, Peale’s only surviving canvas from this period is his Boy with a Toy Horse (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Bayou Bend Collection). The picture is the fruit of Peale’s study while in London, and we see borrowings and adaptations from the art of Benjamin West, Titian, Leonardo da Vinci, and John Zoffany. Above all, Boy with a Toy Horse embodies ideas found in William Hogarth’s influential Analysis of Beauty (1753). The article closes with a proposed identification of two of the figures in Boy with a Toy Horse: they are probably likenesses of Raphael Lamar West, child of Peale’s teacher Benjamin West, and Thomas West, Benjamin’s half-brother.

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