Anna Claypoole Peale was among the earliest, fully professional, self-supporting woman artists in the United States. Specialising in the delicate and demanding art of miniatures painted in watercolour on ivory, she was among the six surviving children of the American artist James Peale (1749–1831) and his wife Mary Claypoole Peale (1753–1829) and one of three daughters active as artists. During her long, productive career, she painted high profile politicians, military men, intellectuals, entrepreneurs and members of the new nation’s emerging, affluent middle class.

A. Peale was trained by her father, who also excelled as a miniaturist and had been instructed by his elder brother, Charles Willson Peale (1741–1827), the portraitist and museum entrepreneur, who had acquired his artistic skills in London between 1767 and 1769. A. Peale assisted James until his diminishing eyesight led him to transition to larger oil portraits and still life pictures. After completing his outstanding miniature commissions, she developed her own clients in Philadelphia and Baltimore, where her cousin Rembrandt Peale (1778–1860) established his own museum and studio in 1814. When she accompanied her uncle Charles on a visit to Washington, D.C. in 1818, where he was painting noted individuals for his museum’s portrait collection, he was impressed with her success and wrote home that her work was highly regarded and her clients so numerous she continually raised her prices to slow demand. Her sitters included President James Monroe (1758–1831) and a striking likeness of the then newsworthy General Andrew Jackson (1767–1845), painted in 1819.

A. Peale’s miniatures highlight contemporary fashion and, like her father James’s works, exhibit strong decorative qualities. But unlike James’s delicate linearity and pastel palette, her miniatures are bolder in colour and her likenesses more anatomically modelled. These stylistic differences are akin to those seen in the oil portraiture of her cousin, Rembrandt, and also more typical of the period in which she was painting. A. Peale exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts from 1814 to 1834, as well as the Boston Athenaeum, Philadelphia’s Artists’ Fund Society and the Peale museums in Baltimore and New York City. In 1824, she and her younger sister, Sarah Miriam Peale (1800-1885), who specialised in oil portraits and still life pictures, were the first women elected Academicians of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

In August 1829, aged thirty-eight, A. Peale married fifty-nine-year-old Rev. Dr William Staughton (1770–1829), a British born Baptist pastor and educator, who served as the first President of George Washington University and Chaplain of the U.S. Congress. His unexpected death three months later was traumatic, but she resumed her career until 1841, when she married General William Duncan (1772–1864). Her miniatures are signed with her family name, or as Mrs Staughton. A few are signed Mrs Duncan. A small number of oil portraits and still life pictures are attributed to her.