Treasures in the eighteenth-century gallery include some fine landscapes by Jacob de Heusch and Hubert Robert as well as a number of elegant British portraits. The rhetoric of these large-scale paintings stands in counterpoint to the unidealized portrait of David Gelston by an American peer, Charles Wilson Peale.

Peale was one of America’s foremost painters in Colonial times. When he was sixty-nine, Peale acquired a farm in Germantown, called Belfield, where he would live for the next 16 years. Peale’s farmhouse is a National Landmark house and has been adapted for La Salle University’s presidential offices.

View highlights from the 18th Century Gallery by clicking here.