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Collectors’ Day – How Appealing: Charles Willson Peale & Collecting
Collectors’ Day 2022 features two perspectives on the artist Charles Willson Peale and collecting. Dr. Wendy Bellion will focus on Peale himself as a curator. Art collector Stiles Tuttle Colwill will discuss how he created a collection of works by Peale and his family over the last 30 years. Collectors’ Day complements the exhibition Ambition: Charles Willson Peale in Annapolis.
Program
Saturday, November 12
12:30 p.m. Doors open
1 p.m. Dr. Wendy Bellion Lecture
2 p.m. Stiles Tuttle Colwill Lecture
3 p.m to 4:30 p.m. Reception and Galleries Open
$70 per person. Members $60. Ticket includes lectures and reception. The event capacity will be limited.
SPEAKERS
“Charles Willson Peale as Art Curator”
Dr. Wendy Bellion
In 1807, Charles Willson Peale installed the inaugural exhibition of paintings at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. The display featured works of art collected by American inventor Robert Fulton in London, together with paintings added by Peale to highlight the accomplishments of his own family and members of the Academy. How did Peale present these pictures on the walls? How did visitors respond? And how did Peale reckon with the surprising challenges of the exhibition space—a circular rotunda? An inside look at this historic exhibition illuminates the art and ideas that animated Peale’s era. Wendy Bellion is the Associate Dean for the Humanities, College of Arts and Sciences and professor of art history and Sewell C. Biggs Chair in American Art at the University of Delaware, where she also serves as director of the Center for Material Culture Studies. Her research focuses on 18- and 19th-century art in North America and the Atlantic World. She is the author of Iconoclasm in New York: Revolution to Reenactment (Penn State University Press, 2019) and Citizen Spectator: Art, Illusion, and Visual Perception in Early National America (OIEAHC/UNC Press, 2011), which was awarded the Charles Eldredge Prize by the Smithsonian American Art Museum. She also served as co-editor of Objects in Motion: Art and Material Culture across Colonial North America (Winterthur Portfolio 2011). She is currently co-editing Material Cultures of the Global Eighteenth Century: Art, Mobility, Change (Bloomsbury Academic, 2023), and writing a new book: Pictures Onstage: Art and Theater in the Early United States.
Stiles Tuttle Colwill
50 Years of Chasing and Collecting the Peales
Stiles Tuttle Colwill is one of the leading collectors of works by members of the Peale family. He will trace his collecting of the Peales from his early years as curator of the Maryland Historical Society (now Maryland Center for History and Culture) through today. The lecture will cover works by four generations of the Peales, including portraits, landscapes, still-life, miniatures, watercolors, drawings, and family possessions. Stiles T. Colwill is the proprietor of Stiles T. Colwill Interiors in Lutherville, Maryland. Mr. Colwill received his BA in art history from the University of Louisville in Kentucky and did his graduate work in museum studies at George Washington University. During his graduate and undergraduate work, he completed internships with the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Hirshhorn Museum, and he was a Helena Rubenstein Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art. From 1974 to 1988 he served in a variety of positions at the Maryland Historical Society (now Maryland Center for History and Culture), culminating as museum director.
He is the author of Four Generations of Commissions: The Peale Collection of the Maryland Historical Society (1975), Francis Guy 1760-1820: American Landscape Painter (1981), and co-authored Joshua Johnson: Freeman and Early American Portrait Painter (1987). His present interior design business has him traveling the country for private clients. Design projects have included work locally as well as in New York, Pittsburgh, Palm Beach, Nantucket, Pebble Beach, Telluride, Deer Valley, and Bermuda. In addition to his business ventures, Mr. Colwill has served on the following Boards: Maryland State Arts Council, Historic Hampton, Maryland Historical Society, Valleys Planning Council, Homewood House of the Johns Hopkins University, Ladew Topiary Gardens, and many more. He is also past chair of the Baltimore Museum of Art.
Sponsors:
The Glen Harwood Scholarship in memory of Terry Harwood