Painting Sold for $4 Million

NEW YORK — The National Gallery of Art bought Rembrandt Peale’s “Rubens Peale with a Geranium” today for $4,070,000, a record auction price for a painting by an American artist. It was sold by Mrs. Norman B. Woolworth of New York.

Peale, a 19th-Century painter who lived in Philadelphia, portrayed his bespectacled younger brother with his right hand on a large potted geranium. The previous auction record for an American painting was Frederic Edwin Church’s “Icebergs,” sold for $2,750,000 in 1979.