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Artist: William Arthur Smith (1918-1989)
Title: Charles Willson Peale
Date: 1968
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 66" H x 78" W
Accession number: MSA SC 1545-3500
This mural of renowned artist Charles Willson Peale was one of nine murals originally commissioned in 1966 for the Maryland House Travel Plaza near Aberdeen, Maryland. This series of murals depicted individuals and events significant in Maryland’s history. In 2002, because of damage to the murals and in anticipation of the future redevelopment of the travel plaza, the murals were carefully removed and were rolled and stored in a climate-controlled storage facility.
As the owner, the Maryland Transportation Authority sought appropriate repositories for each of the vignettes, and in 2018, three were added to the Maryland State Archives’ Artistic Property Collection. These views of Lord Baltimore and the Maryland Charter, Charles Willson Peale and George Washington and the Continental Congress have strong connections to displays in the Maryland State House and to other objects in the State’s collections.
William Arthur Smith's works are included in the collections of the National Portrait Gallery, the Library of Congress, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the James A. Michener Museum. He was a portraitist and illustrator whose work regularly appeared in the Saturday Evening Post, Cosmopolitan, True, and other publications. Besides being compelling paintings, and long beloved by travelers along Interstate-95, the group of murals was also important in the development of the Visual Artists’ Rights Act of 1990. In 1988, the artist and his family stopped while passing through the area only to discover that one of the vignettes had a doorway cut through during remodeling, with the subjects repainted and signed by a different artist. He had no legal recourse at the time because he did not own the painting, but his case is widely cited as having helped pave the way for this legislation, referred to as VARA.