Sarah Miriam Peale. Sarah Miriam Peale was an American portrait painter, considered the first American woman to succeed as a professional artist.
One of a family of artists of whom her uncle Charles Willson Peale was the most illustrious, Sarah Peale painted portraits mainly of Maryland, Pennsylvania and Washington, D.C. notables, politicians, and military figures.
Lafayette sat for her four times. Sarah was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the youngest daughter of the miniaturist and still-life painter James Peale, younger brother of Charles Willson Peale.
Her mother was Miriam Claypoole. Her father and her uncle trained her as an artist, and she served as her father's studio assistant.
During her time as a studio assistant, she gained experience in mixing paints, preparing canvases, and delineating backgrounds. Sarah and her sisters, Anna Claypoole and Margaretta, were different from the middle-class women of the time, as they experienced schooling, how to be a wife and mother, as well as developed entrepreneurial skills from their family such as art. As a young girl, she gained experience doing the finishing touches on her father's paintings. Her first public works date from 1816 with subjects such as flowers and still-life, but soon turned to portraiture. In 1818, she spent three months with Rembrandt Peale, her cousin, in Baltimore, and again in 1820 and 1822. He influenced her early paint