Untitled (Portrait of a Young Man with Red Curtain)

This striking portrait of a fashionably dressed blue-eyed man by Sheldon Peck was rediscovered during the filming of the PBS program Antiques Roadshow. The artist's decision not to align the focus of the sitter's eyes - as if they were looking in two directions at once - heightens the picture's dramatic intensity. Peck was born in Vermont but later moved west; he pursued numerous careers, painting portraits while homesteading in Illinois and perhaps dabbling in real estate speculation in Chicago. A radical abolitionist and active in the Liberty Party, Peck used his home in rural DuPage County outside of Chicago as a stop on the Underground Railroad.