Window on a Lost But Radiant Time
6 February 2012 | Share:
Charles Willson Peale, who added a second “l” to his middle name to remind himself and others that a man is self-created
Raphaelle, his son, named as all the Peale children for a European master…the most perceptive painter of the early 19th century, who nonetheless would only paint in still life, and who refused his willful father’s admonitions to “act the man”
John Lewis Krimmel, AKA Johann Ludwig Krimmel, German immigrant, whose paintings—the only urban street scenes of early America, used on the covers of countless books of history—poked holes in the American narrative Peale was so careful to create
Joseph Bonaparte, brother of Napoleon, exiled in Philadelphia, who dreamed of building a palace of art
Edward Hicks, unbalanced painter of “The Peaceable Kingdom”
Pavel Svinin, Russian attaché, art thief, liar, who pilfered Krimmel’s watercolors and published them as his own, and who was the basis for Gogol’s Government Inspector
Harriet and Henrietta Miller, sisters, characters invented from one of Krimmel’s paintings
Eliza Hamm, fruit peddler to the stars
Ylaire Charlotte de Chevalier, a streetwalker of Haitian ancestry rescued from slavery by Harriet Miller
Caleb Cloud and Victor Blanc and William Dixcy, young men from the tiny village of Easton, who come to Philadelphia in search of a distant star
The year 1818, economy crashing, American art up for grabs…Peale’s museum is failing…to make up for the lost income he attempts to turn his farm Belfield into a cotton mill…an act with tragic consequences…
This is my recently completed novel I WILL FLOOD YOU, a flood of voices, a father-son tug of war, America in search of itself…
At present I am in search of an agent and a publisher for the book, which might be called literary-historic fiction. I’m going to use this space to document my search (indeed as any writer the breakout novel is a distant star)…
Next up: I join the Author Salon.