"At whose suit is this?" Steele asked. On learning that it was at the suit of his washerwoman, he bowed, put on his coat, and apolo­gized graciously "for being obliged to go out." Thus ended Peale's first association with a professional artist. Many years later, he wrote his son concerning Steele: "He was of a respectable and wealthy family on the eastern shore of Maryland; had a fondness for paint­ing; I believe went to Italy and spent his fortune; and it was said was somewhat deranged in his mind. Some pieces I have seen of his pencil seemed to confirm my opinion that such was his mis­fortune." Nothing more is known of this colourful early American painter, who may have preceded West to Italy, than the few men­tions of him in Peale's papers. Perhaps some day a scholar will iden­tify one of his purple-faced portraits.

Having discovered that painting was so complicated a craft he might have difficulty working out all its refinements for himself, Peale offered John Hesselius, a successful artist who lived near Annapolis, "one of my best saddles with its complete furniture" to let him watch while he painted a portrait. Hesselius accepted the saddle; allowed Peale to see him paint two portraits; and then, hav­ing completed one side of a face, let Peale paint in the other side. Following exactly the line of the nose, the curve of the cheek his mas­ter had drawn, the saddler felt he was learning the secrets of great art. How was he to know that John Hesselius was¹ a very inferior workman?

The son of Gustave Hesselius, an adequately trained Swedish painter who had settled in America in 1712, John had inexplicably failed to follow in his father's footsteps but had imitated the poorer work of John Wollaston, the former drapery painter who had been West's first master in Philadelphia. Hesselius caught Wollaston's difficulty in painting eyes which gave all his faces an oriental look, repeated the wooden poses of Wollaston's figures, and added to these blemishes one of his own: he endowed almost all his sitters with such puffy cheeks that a study of his pictures makes one won­der if mumps were not endemic in the Colonies. Some of his pic­tures, however, are agreeably coloured. For the time being, Peale religiously copied John Hesselius's mannerisms.

Peale was still practising painting only as a sideline with his many other crafts when in 1764 he became involved in the radical political movement that was to culminate in the revolution; he took a prominent part in the campaign of a commoner against that fine gentleman, Judge Stuart. When the Court Party was defeated for the first time in the history of Annapolis, its rich supporters were so outraged that they used their financial position to ruin their opponents. Four writs were served on Peale for sums he owed. "Al­though I had never spent any of my time in taverns or any other kind of extravagances, and had always been closely engaged in some sorts of labour, yet I found myself nearly nine hundred pounds in debt, which was entirely caused by . . , engaging in too many pur­suits at one time, and making one false step at first setting out in business: going into debt to Mr. Walters [the master saddler]."

Since he had no possibility of paying and debtors' prison yawned, Peale fled with his wife to his sister's house at Tuckahoe Bridge, where he engaged happily in painting portraits. One afternoon, however, a neighbour rushed in to say that the sheriff was already