PEALE, CHARLES WILLSON

(b. Queen Anne’s country, Maryland, 15 April 1741; d. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 22 February 1827)

museum direction.

Eldest of the five children of Charles Peale, sometime clerk in the General Post Office, London, and Margaret Triggs of Annapolis, Maryland, Peale grew up in Chestertown, Maryland, where his father was master of the Kent Country school. Deciding at the age of twenty-one that painting might be more profitable than saddlemaking, for which he had been trained, he sought instruction from John Hesselius in Maryland and from John Singleton Copley in Boston. Thereafter he displayed such skill in his portraits of the Maryland gentry that in 1767 several joined to send him abroad for two years to study under Benjamin West, who was later historical painter to George III. In 1776 Peale settled in Philadelphia, the largest and wealthiest city in the British colonies. During the American Revolution, Peale, a zealous patriot, served as a militia officer in the campaign of Trenton and Princeton (1776–1777) and the defense of Philadelphia (1777–1778); and as a “furious Whig” he took a prominent role in political controversies of the period. All the while he continued to paint — Washington, his officers, and the men of the Revolution are known today largely through Peale’s eyes. With the return of peace Peale’s artistic genius, mechanical skill, and patriotic vision of America’s future found expression in designs for grand public displays, such as Philadelphia’s Procession of 4 July 1788.

A commission to make drawings of bones of a prehistoric creature from the banks of the Ohio River gave Peale the idea of establishing a natural history museum. It was first in the United States, for the American Museum of Pierre Eugène du Simitière, although containing natural history specimens, was primarily historical. The museum was opened in Peale’s house at Third and Lombard Streets in 1786; thereafter, without entirely giving up painting, he devoted his principal energies to it. It was moved in 1794 to the hall of the American Philosophical Society, the members of which took a warm interest in it and seemed thereby to endorse Peale’s plans; and in 1802 it was established in the State House (now Independence Hall). Most of the exhibits were gifts or deposits (for instance, specimens collected by Lewis and Clark presented by President Jefferson); others were secured by Peale himself, most notably the nearly complete skeletons of two mastodons from Orange County, New York, in 1801. When the museum collections were sold in 1848 and 1854 the catalog listed 1,824 birds, 250 quadrupeds, 650 fish, 135 reptiles, lizards, and tortoises, 269 portraits, and thirty-three cases of shells.

Peale’s museum demonstrated sound principles of scientific exposition. The exhibits were arranged according to the modified Linnaean system, from fossils and insects to “animal man” (although Peale never obtained a preserved specimen of Homo sapiens); and as far as possible they were shown in their natural forms, attitudes, and backgrounds, which Peale as painter readily provided, Special attention was directed to likenesses between species and to distinctive features: a rattlesnake, for example, was mounted with its jaws open and a glass was placed so that all might see the fangs and venom sacs.

Peale viewed the museum as an element in a reformed system of education suitable for virtuous republicans and hoped it would become a national institution, comparable with the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris, with salaried staff lecturers laboratories, and publications. This would have required greater support than the federal government was prepared to give, Peale had, therefore to depend on admission charges, which, although they produced a satisfactory income, constantly exposed the museum — especially when Peale was not personally in charge —to pressures to compromise with scientific integrity. The museum was a school for such young naturalists as Alexander Wilson, John D. Godman and Richard Harlan, who drew upon its collections for their earliest researches. Similar institutions were established in Baltimore and New York by Peale’s sons Rubens and Rembrandt; and catchpenny imitations which did not scorn, as Peale’s museum did, to “catch the eye of the gaping multitude,” sprang up throughout the country after 1820. These cabinets of jumbled curiosities gave a few young men an introduction to science, but they misled many as to science’s nature and scope and fell far short of Peale’s goal.

Peale was married three times; to Rachel Brewer of Annapolis in 1762; to Elizabeth DePeyster of New York, in 1791; and to Hannah Moore of Philadelphia, in 1805. From the two first marriages he had seventeen children, of whom eleven reached maturity. Most of them displayed artistic talents of high order; two — Titian Ramsay and Franklin — achieved distinction in natural history and mechanics, respectively.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Peale’s paintings have been listed and illustrated in Charles Coleman Sellers, “Portraits and Miniatures by Charles Willson Peale” and “Charles Willson Peale With Patron and Populace,” in Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, n.s.42 pt. 1 (1952), and 59 , pt. 3 (1969), respectively. The contents of the museum are described in Peale and A. F. M. J. Palisot de Beauvois, A Scientific and Descriptive Catalogue of the Peale’s Museum (Philadelphia, 1796); and Peale’s Guide to the Philadelphia Museum (Philadelphia, 1804). Peale explained his purpose and philosophy in Introduction to a Course of Lectures on Natural History (Philadelphia, 1800). His letter books, diary, autobiography, and other MSS are in the American Philosophical Society library.

Charles Coleman Sellers, Charles Willson Peale (New York, 1969), based upon a lifetime of study, is a sufficient introduction to, as well as the last authority on, the subject and its sources.

Whitfield J. Bell, JR.

Charles Willson Peale

Charles Willson Peale (1741-1827), American painter and scientist, was a solid and sometimes strikingly original painter, as well as an inventor and a museum founder.

Charles Willson Peale was born in Queen Annes Country, MD, on April 15, 1741. His father was an adventurer from Rutlandshire, England, who emigrated to Maryland after he had been caught embezzling. In Maryland he took a position as a schoolmaster and married. He died, leaving no inheritance, when Charles was 9, and the boy and his mother were forced to fend for themselves. At the age of 13 Charles was apprenticed to a saddler; shortly afterward he learned watchmaking. By the time he was 21 and married, he had added clock-making and upholstering to his repertoire and had taught himself painting after having been inspired by an amateur artist.

Successful Portraitist

Peale received some instruction from the Maryland artist John Hessalius. In 1766 wealthy citizens of Maryland raised £83 to send him to London to further his training in art, studying with Benjamin West. He remained until 1769. While there he painted an elaborately symbolical portrait, Pitt as a Roman Senator. On his return Peale settled in Annapolis. In 1772 he painted the first portrait ever done of George Washington. The exuberance of the Peale family and their warmth toward one another is recorded in the Peale Family (1773), which includes the artist, his wife, mother, brothers, sister, his old nurse, and an unidentified baby. Peale had such great success as a Portraitist just prior to the Revolution that he was able to move his business to Philadelphia. His portraiture combines a freshness and affability with a certain naive stiffness.

Peale served with distinction in the Revolution. As a first lieutenant in the militia, he crossed the Delaware with Washington and spent the dreadful winter at Valley Forge, where he did miniatures of some 40 officers. He gained the intimate friendship of Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson.

In 1781 Peale added an exhibition gallery to his Philadelphia studio, where he housed 44 of his portraits of outstanding American leaders. His wife died in the 1790s as a result of her eleventh pregnancy, and Peale soon remarried. In all, he fathered 17 sons and daughters, who were named after famous painters chosen from the pages of a dictionary of painters.

Peale liked to present a tour de force in some paintings. The Staircase Group (1795) shows his sons Titian Ramsay and Raphaelle, life-size, climbing a narrow stairway. The painting was exhibited in a doorframe as a trompe l'oeil, and the shadows the figures cast and an accurately painted card on a step added to the effect. On one occasion, Peale's desire for novelty took a macabre turn. In Rachel Weeping (1772) he shows his first wife weeping over her dead child prominently laid out in the foreground. In the portrait of his brother James (1822) the sitter is shown in a novel way: he is seated at his desk at night, his face illuminated by a lamp.

Scientific Interests

Throughout his lifetime Peale maintained an enduring and active interest in many branches of science. He did silhouettes with the physiognotrace, a machine used to record profiles. He patented a fireplace, porcelain false teeth, and a new kind of wooden bridge; perfected the polygraph, a kind of portable writing desk which could make several copies of a manuscript at once; invented a rude motion picture technique; and wrote papers on engineering, hygiene, and other subjects.

In 1786 Peale established the first scientific museum in America. It contained living species of snakes, turtles, toads, and fish as well as stuffed birds and animals. The crowning touch was an entire mastodon skeleton, which he helped excavate on a farm in upstate New York in 1801. He depicted this event in an extraordinary painting, The Exhuming of the Mastodon (1806-1808). It contains 75 figures and shows the great wheel used to lift the water from the marl pit where the bones were embedded, the plank room, and the army tent where the excavators slept. It is loosely classified as one of the first American genre pieces. In the painting The Artist in His Museum (1822) Peale shows himself lifting a curtain to reveal the contents of his museum.

Peale fought to have his museum established as a state institution, and in 1802 it was transferred to the upper floor of the State House (the present Independence Hall). He established the Columbianum in 1795, America's first public exhibition of both modern paintings and the Old Masters. Out of this he organized the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, which received its charter in 1806 and which stands today as the oldest art school in America. He died in Philadelphia on Feb. 22, 1827.

Further Reading

Charles Coleman Sellers, Charles Willson Peale (2 vols., 1947; 1 vol., rev. ed. 1969), is an extremely lively and well-documented account, with ample quotations from Peale's elaborate "Letterbooks." Peale is discussed in Charles H. Elam, comp., The Peale Family: Three Generations of American Artists (1967). For general background see Oliver W. Larkin, Art and Life in America (1949; rev. ed. 1960).

Additional Sources

Peale, Charles Willson, Charles Willson Peale and his world, New York: H.N. Abrams, 1983.

Sellers, Charles Coleman, Mr. Peale's Museum: Charles Willson Peale and the first popular museum of natural science and art, New York: Norton, 1980. □

Peale, Charles Willson (1741–1827) US painter, inventor, naturalist, and father of a family of artists. In 1782, Peale opened the USA's first art gallery, in Philadelphia, where he exhibited his own portraits. He later expanded the gallery into the country's first natural history museum. In 1795, he painted his most celebrated picture, The Staircase Group, a portrait of two of his sons.