His father was also a notable artist, and named him after the noted 17th-century Dutch painter and engraver Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn.

A year after his mother's death and the remarriage of his father, Peale left the school of the arts, and completed his first self-portrait at the age of 13.

He studied portraits by other artists including John Trumbull, Gilbert Stuart and his own father, as well as his own 1795 picture which had never truly satisfied him.

His resulting work Patriae Pater, completed in 1824, depicts Washington through an oval window, and is considered by many to be second only to Gilbert Stuart's iconic Athenaeum painting of the first president.

Peale went on to create over 70 detailed replicas, including one of Washington in full military uniform that currently hangs in the Oval Office.

He painted the famous explorer Alexander von Humboldt and several other noted patrons such as Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac and François André Michaux.

The painting depicts a young girl shielding her father, a prisoner in chains, and feeding him from her breast, the emblem of "Roman Charity" reported in the pages of Pliny.

It was deemed too "sensational" by the people of Philadelphia,[3] who were unsympathetic to his endeavors toward "improving the state of fine arts in America" in the 19th century.

[4] Amid the economic hardship of the War of 1812, President Jefferson—who promised to buy the 1795 portrait of Washington, but could not keep his promise—instead encouraged Peale to go to Europe, as "we have genius among us but no unemployed wealth to reward it".

Renovated and restored again in 1981, it reopened with a groundbreaking interpretive history exhibition, "Rowhouse: A Baltimore Style of Living."

[6][7] In 1828, an ambitious Peale raised funds and tried earning money for his previous paintings, in order to travel to Rome.

Exhibited and discussed in "In Pursuit of Fame: Rembrandt Peale 1778–1860," Washington D.C., National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian institution, 1992–93, The portrait of Margaret Irvine Miller exemplifies Peale's ability to convey a story and capture character through taking liberty with the way in which he portrayed his sitters.

[11] In 1824, Peale painted the Patriæ Pater, in which a rectangle supporting an oval wreath surrounds the eye-catching image of George Washington.

[13] During their marriage, Peale and Short had nine children: Rosalba, Eleanor, Michael Angelo, Angelica, and Emma Clara among them.