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Edward Peticolas’ most famous work, an oil painting of the Marquis de Lafayette, circa 1824 (Image courtesy The Valentine)
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A 1797 miniature portrait of Mrs. Cornelius Baldwin (Mary Briscoe), grandmother of Mary Baldwin College’s namesake, by Phillippe Abraham Peticolas (Image courtesy Smithsonian American Art Museum)
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Phillippe Abraham Peticolas painted this miniature portrait of George Washington in 1796. (Image courtesy Harvard Art Museum)
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A miniature portrait of Thomas Heyward Jr., a founding father from South Carolina who served in the Continental Congress, by Phillippe Abraham Peticolas, circa 1790 (Image courtesy Philadelphia Museum of Art)
The Peticolas brothers of early 19th-century Richmond exhibited gifts for drawing, painting, music, teaching and small business. Augustus (born 1790), Edward F. (born 1793), Julius Adolphus (born 1795) and Theodore (born 1800) constituted Richmond’s first family of creatives, yet little remains that is attributable to them. This includes a “castle.”
Their French parents, Phillippe Abraham, from Meziers, and Amelie Jute Moncé of Cambrai, came to the United States via Santo Domingo (Haiti). Phillippe came from a military background, but he’d also developed a talent for the difficult art of painting in miniature. These tiny pieces, in lockets or on other accessories, require acute precision.
He inherited his brother’s Haitian estate amid the upheaval of the antislavery independence movement led by Toussaint Louverture. After some skirmishes, Phillippe, Amelie and the infant Augustus boarded a U.S.-bound vessel.
Moving first to Philadelphia and then to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Phillippe billed himself as a “drawing-master from Paris” whose clientele extended to New York and Baltimore, as described by historian L. Moody Simms Jr. in his 1977 article “Talented Virginians: The Peticolas Family,” written for the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography.
By 1802, Phillippe expanded his artistic repertoire to lessons on the harpsichord and pianoforte alongside young Augustus.
The Peticolases caught the attention of Joseph Gallego, another enterprising immigrant. Gallego, from Malaga, Spain, had settled in Richmond with his wife, Mary Magee of Philadelphia. His burgeoning Gallego Flour Mills ultimately became one of the world’s largest makers and exporters of flour.
Gallego, perhaps recognizing similarities between his experiences and those of the Peticolases, and also seeking to enhance his adopted city’s cultural life, invited Phillippe and family here.
In 1804, Phillippe advertised his services for painting miniatures and music teaching. The next year, he brought his family to Richmond. They took up residence in a corner house at Eighth and Clay streets.
The Jan. 17, 1807, issue of the Richmond Enquirer carried an advertisement for P.A. Peticolas, “Professor of Music and Miniature Painting,” and it detailed how “Master Edward Peticolas” also rendered “likenesses in Miniature on moderate terms.”
Amelie died at age 66 in December 1825 and received internment at Shockoe Hill Cemetery. Not much is known about Phillippe’s later life; he died in August 1841 at the Petersburg home of his son Julius Adolphus.
The brothers Peticolas all engaged in variations of art and trade. Augustus taught drawing at Anna Maria Byrd’s school for young women. He seems to have died young, around 1810.
Julius Adolphus, after some missing years in Europe, proved prolific in the family manner; he and his wife, Mildred Warner Brown of Amherst, produced seven children. His livelihood blended music teaching and merchanting in Richmond and Petersburg, where he died in 1862.
Theodore dabbled in miniature painting and also took up shopkeeping. Moving west, he continued his pursuits in arts and commerce, eventually settling in Clermont, Ohio. There, at various times, he worked as a surgeon, horticulturist and musician, developing a side interest in fireworks. He died in 1865.
Edward studied art in Richmond under the soon-renowned Thomas Sully (that’s his Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill), while Phillippe gave music lessons to Sully’s wife, Sarah (widow of Sully’s older brother and art colleague, Lawrence).
Edward went to England in 1815. He studied and traveled in Europe for about five years, returning to Eighth and Clay by 1820, where he promoted his own “exhibition room.”
Writer William Dunlap included Edward’s work in a survey of the young republic’s artistic development. Dunlap expressed Edward’s style as “chaste, his coloring clear” and noted that “he deserved all the employment of that city.”
On Oct. 17, 1822, Edward married painter and copyist Jane Pitfield Braddick. Their son, Arthur Edward Peticolas, also exhibited art but went into medicine.
Edward’s best-known work is a full-length portrait of America’s Revolutionary War ally the Marquis de Lafayette, which was first displayed in the domed Robert Mills-designed City Hall during Lafayette’s 1824 visit. This painting and another of George Washington by artist and would-be museum creator James Warrell went above either side of the bench where sat Lafayette and mayor/physician John Adams (for whom the downtown street is named). Edward’s Lafayette survives at the Valentine.
Edward lived for a while in London but by 1833 returned to Richmond. After 1840, Edward began suffering, writes Simms, from “attacks of acute rheumatism.” He ceased painting around 1845; his wife died at age 61 on Nov. 10, 1852, and she was buried at Shockoe Hill Cemetery.
Edward turned recluse and dressed in suits of colorful patches. He moved into the largely uninhabited western end of Richmond called Sydney, where, like his little brother Theodore, Edward’s artistic passion grew toward horticulture. He cultivated roses, fruits and grapes on a plot near today’s Grove Avenue and Harvie Street. His peace, however, was interrupted on occasion by the taunts of children.
One youngster who witnessed these “deprecating urchins,” Robert Alonzo Brock, grew up to be secretary of the Southern Historical Society and recalled Edward’s “rage at some of the spoilations, as he pursued the freebooters in their hasty flight.”
Despite these depredations, overlooking his gardens Edward created one of Richmond’s first idiosyncratic houses, though it was mocked by some citizens as “Peticolas’ Castle.”
Brock remembered the place as a “heterogenous mass in form and material defying literal description.” Many additions clustered around in various stages of completion, with “turrets varied in dimensions and attitude” and some parts deteriorating while others were undergoing repair.
In July 1853, Arthur, the doctor son, sold off his father’s remaining art and property, which led to the dismantling of “Peticolas’ Castle.” Edward received formal adjudgment as a lunatic and apparently died not long after.
Arthur, too, suffered from afflictions of body and mind.
While superintendent of the Eastern Lunatic Asylum in Williamsburg, on the morning of Nov. 28, 1868, he jumped from a window to his death.
