Benjamin Franklin Peale

This posthumous portrait of Benjamin Franklin Peale (1795-1870) was probably commissioned by his widow. Starkey would have used a photograph or a painted portrait as his model. The carving, which was almost certainly done by Starkey himself, is very skillful. The sculptor was most likely at mid-career when he executed this work. Its naturalistic style, execution in marble, and the use of the dead eye, and the toga suggest that he had been steeped in the late neoclassical tradition, which continued well into the second half of the nineteenth century in provincial areas.