Lot 203: Paul Peel (Canadian, 1860-1892) Getting ready for the hunt

Getting ready for the hunt
signed 'PAUL PEEL 1886' (lower left)
oil on canvas
77.5 x 60.3cm (30 1/2 x 23 3/4in).

Born into an artistic family in London, Ontario, Peel's skill and talent were apparent from a very young age and by seventeen he was receiving training under renowned American artist Thomas Eakins at the Pennsylvania Academy in Philadelphia. Three years later, Peel moved to Europe eventually studying under Jean-Léon Gérôme in Paris at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. At 23, his first painting was accepted into the Paris Salon. Many more were to follow.

The year 1886 was an important one for Peel. In January he wed Danish artist Isaure Verdier and welcomed the arrival of their first child, a boy, in October. His mother-in-law, who owned a fashionable Copenhagen antique shop and represented her son-in-law's work, sold a related painting also executed in 1886 to Alexandra, Princess of Wales while the princess was visiting her native city. This work, entitled Two Friends, remains in the Collection of her Majesty the Queen at Sandringham.

Preparing for the Hunt is consistent with what collectors have relished about Peel's oeuvre. The young boys in the foreground could be Peel's "Bubble Boy" or "Young Botanist" grown taller and bigger. Such typical Peel subjects, young children and their pets, while unabashedly sentimental nonetheless continue to resonate with us.

Peel was quite possibly the most famous Canadian painter in Europe in his day. Sadly, his career abruptly ended with his premature death from Tuberculosis a month short of his thirty-second birthday. To some extent fashion, and its myriad vagaries, have been unkind to the artist. David Burnett observes that while the popular appeal of Peel's work has endured, he has not always been as fortunate with critics who favoured a less academic approach to painting or spurned Peel's international style in favour of a more nationalist approach to art as espoused by the Group of Seven. However, Burnett also remarks on the "scholarly attention now being paid to nineteenth century academic art in an effort to redress the imbalance of an art history which so long favoured an 'evolutionary' sense of development."

Despite his extraordinarily short life, Paul Peel became and remains, one of Canada's pre-eminent nineteenth century painters.

Literature:
Victoria Baker, Paul Peel: A retrospective 1860-1892, London Regional Art Gallery, London, Ontario 1986, pp. 39-43.
David Burnett, Masterpieces of Canadian Art from the National Gallery of Canada, Hurtig Publishers, Edmonton, 1990, page 52.