ABSTRACT
In spite of these difficulties, women throughout the 19th century pieced together sufficient training and financial support to be able to practise as artists on a number of levels. In some regions, such as the state of Maine, they accounted for 50 per cent of the professional artists recorded during that period. The cultural patterns and institutions changed, but the desire of American women to find employment in art was constant. In the early part of the 19th century an upper class of British descent still held power in the USA, despite the War of Independence (1776-81) from Britain. Artists who had trained in Britain, such as Gilbert Stuart, Charles Willson Peale and Thomas Sully, set the standards for portraiture, both private and official. They in turn paved the way for some of the first prominent women artists of the century, Jane Stuart (Gilbert Stuart's daughter), Sarah Miriam and Anna Claypoole Peale (q.v., daughters of the miniaturist James Peale and nieces of Charles Willson Peale) and Jane Sully (daughter of Thomas Sully). These women trained with their fathers and found many doors open to them. Jane Stuart practised mainly as a copyist filling the seemingly endless demand for her father's famous portraits of George Washington, but Sarah Peale shaped an impressive career for herself as a portraitist and still-life painter in Baltimore and later St Louis. Peale and her sister Anna Claypoole were the first women to be elected academicians of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1824, and their friend, Jane Sully, was elected in 1831.
