Anna Claypoole Peale

Anna Claypoole Peale was the artist James Peale's daughter and a frequent exhibitor at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts between 1811 and 1842. She and her sister, Sarah Miriam Peale, were the first women elected academicians of the academy. Anna's work was in high demand during her lifetime, and she traveled along the East Coast from Boston to Washington, where she painted President Andrew Jackson in 1819. Anna also assisted her father with his paintings when his eyesight grew poor. She painted more than two hundred miniatures before switching to easel painting as her own eyesight declined in the 1840s. Most of her miniatures were painted while she was single, during the interval between her two marriages and after she was widowed.