ExclusiveRosalba Peale: The Forgotten Artist of America's First Art Family

Welcome to American Legends. My name is Tiffany Brannon. Each culture has its legends, and that could be myths or different stories, but here in America, our greatest legends are the wonderful heroes who are right from our history pages. Now, some of these heroes are very famous and some are obscure, but each person deserves to be discovered because each man or woman stands as a great example of how we can be better Americans It can be hard to live up to a famous name. For Rubens Peel, this challenge was doubly hard. Firstly, he had to live up to the legacy of his father, Charles Wilson Peel, the most renowned portraitist in colonial America and several of his brothers who became very successful painters. Secondly, he had to live up to his namesake, Paul Peter Rubens, a Flemish artist of great renown. When Charles Wilson Peel named most of his children after great men and women of art and science, he didn't mean this as an intimidation but as an encouragement, and he encouraged all his children to have some kind of artistic creativity. Although Rubens' physical disposition kept him from pursuing art as a young man, he nonetheless became a very important part of this artistic family's legacy. His path would eventually lead him to being a creative artist himself. Rubens Peel was born on May 4th, 1784. He was the fourth surviving child out of six children who survived to adulthood, born to Charles Wilson Peel and his first wife, Rachel. As one of the younger sons in this first group of children, Rubens quickly proved that he was the frailest of the family. He had a fragile disposition as a young child and very poor eyesight. Throughout his life, he had to wear strong spectacles, which he eventually invented himself. If you look up his name, you'll find many beautiful portraits, not by him but of him. He was a favorite subject of his family members, both by his father as a child and his brother, Rembrandt, and he always is pictured with his very distinct, memorable profile, strong features, and characteristic spectacles. Because of his weak eyesight, he didn't receive the artistic training of his older brothers Rembrandt and Raphael. Instead, his father trained him in some of his other interests, namely the sciences and most notably museum curation. Rubens was born the same year that his father established what's considered the first museum in the United States, Peel's Philadelphia Museum. For the first two years, this museum was just a collection of art, mostly paintings by Peel himself. Two years later, however, Peel added a natural history section where he displayed different specimens and artifacts of taxidermy, since he was a taxidermist, bug collections, stuffed birds, and other scientific curiosities. He even displayed collections of bones in early archaeological findings, such as mastodon skeletons. Rubens Peel grew up right in this environment, practically living in the museum as the family lived in the same building in which the museum was housed. That building is now the Philosophical Hall, run by the American Philosophical Society. Charles trained Rubens to take over for him as director and curator of the museum. Working alongside his sister, Sophonisba, Rubens learned Latin and French so that he could develop the linean system of taxonomy to properly label everything in the museum. He learned about display and all the different tricks which would be used to make a museum not only an intelligent intellectual and scientific place of renown, but a place where people would really want to come. Like all the Peel children, Rubens was instilled with a strong sense of personal discipline and hard work, as well as a happy, fun-loving home environment. Ironically, despite the fact that his powers of sight weren't very strong, Rubens had an exceptional power of observation. He noticed things, and this would prove an invaluable skill throughout his career as a museum curator. At the age of 26, he officially took over as director of the Philadelphia Museum. Under his guidance, he shifted the focus of the museum a bit, keeping the same intelligent, scientific focus as his father had had, but also trying to make it even more of a draw. You see, this was a difficult time for museums. For one thing, they were just getting started. This was one of the first museums in the United States, so they were trying to figure out how it would work. Meanwhile, competition was already arising. There were a few other rival museums in Philadelphia, where other artists and curators were trying to have more impressive collections of art oddities and other interesting draws. Also, this is before the days of non-profit organizations, government grants, and independent donors who would benevolently support culture. Rather, museums were more like a form of entertainment. Granted, there weren't as many options for entertainment in Philadelphia in these days, but still, you had to have a reason to draw people in and to make it worth their while to come and view the museum. Rubens had a great sense of showmanship, and the Philadelphia Museum, under his leadership, had an impressive art display, a large collection of natural artifacts, bug collections, and even live events. Rather than just static exhibits, he also incorporated lectures, special events, and even theatrical exhibitions. One interesting development which Rubens added to the Peale Museum was the use of gas lighting, a new technology to properly illuminate all the artifacts held therein. In 1822, he left Philadelphia and went to Baltimore, where he helped his brother Rembrandt with his museum. He was there with him for about three years before relocating to New York City. On October 22nd, 1825, he opened his own museum. This was the first time that he actually had a museum that he started himself, and there he took his showmanship to the next level. He brought many of the exhibits he'd had in Philadelphia to New York, as well as bringing in new ones. He had some of the finest works of art, some really impressive natural history displays, excellent specimens, large collections. He traded with museums in Europe for foreign displays of birds and other specimens, trading, of course, the unique American findings. He had large bone collections and even some rather rare oddities like Egyptian mummies. He made the museum exciting by having extravagant theatrical displays, exciting lectures, intelligent debates on scientific topics, special exhibits that would only be there for a short time, demonstrations of new scientific fads like mesmerism and curiosities like the unwrapping of the Egyptian mummies. At this time, he faced stiff competition from two other museums in New York, one of which was the American Museum run by none other than P.T. Barnum. Yes, the man who ended up starting the circus, and his museum was really more of a freak show than a scientific place. Museums often were a bit of a freak show at the time, with oddities like shrunken heads and animal fetuses preserved in alcohol. Now, Peale had some of those things too. He tried to not focus on things like human freaks, people who were suffering from deformities or other such exploitation. Instead, he preferred to highlight human prodigies, such as having a series on a six-year-old prodigious mathematician. He wanted to focus more on positive, really inspiring aspects rather than the more lurid, sensationalist things. Nevertheless, he was brilliant and he was an excellent showman. Sadly, the financial collapse resulting from the panic of 1837 eventually led the museum to be in debt, so he ended up having to sell out to none other than P.T. Barnum in 1843. Shortly after, he retired from the museum business and went to the family farm in Philadelphia. There, he returned to some of his earlier loves of scientific studies. He began dabbling in taxidermy again as a hobby, but he put to use his understanding of botany and agriculture to make the farm flourish. He didn't do as much of the heavy labor himself, instead overseeing the work done by his sons, but he worked out complex ideas for how to manage the agriculture and livestock on the farm, making it produce very successfully. He personally tended to the flower and vegetable gardens on the farm. With these proceeds, he was able to send his daughter, Mary Jane, to Philadelphia to study art painting, in particular, with her uncle, Rembrandt. By the age of 71, you'd think that this man, who had spent a very busy act of life, would be ready to start settling down and retiring. Nevertheless, at that age, he took up two new hobbies, daily journaling and painting. When his daughter returned from Philadelphia to help her parents with the managing of the farm, she encouraged her father to pick up the brushes himself. This might seem counterintuitive, since no doubt his eyes were much worse at 71 than they had been in childhood, but he doubtless had always had the desire to be an artist himself, having been surrounded by art his whole life, both in his family and then in his museums. He was timid and self-conscious about starting, since he had so many relatives who were such successful artists, but his daughter encouraged him. So, at the age of 71, in 1855, he began painting. During the last 10 years of his life, he produced over 130 different paintings, 95 of which are still lifes. These paintings include pictures of nature, fruit, and animals, such as animals that were around the farm. He didn't have a formal studio set up. Instead, he would just set up his paint box and his little impromptu easel whenever he had a chance in the house, and do a bit of painting. Thus, it would often take him a couple of weeks to do a painting, as he just did it when he could. Farming was still his priority. He was able to do this very successfully, though, even when painting perishable fruit, because he didn't paint from sight or by looking at a model. He painted from memory. He was able to use his seven decades of lived experience and studying nature to bring nature to life vividly on the canvas in a way that just looking at something could never do. Thus, he communicated beautifully through his paintings, and the many existing paintings he created do not look like the work of an amateur. Although he never sold his paintings, he did it for the sheer joy of it. And as he gained confidence, he began sharing these paintings with his family members, often as gifts. He was delighted by their surprised enthusiasm. He labeled these paintings by numbers rather than by names, drawing on his experience in the museum curation business. One of his paintings, produced in the year 1865, is Still Life with Watermelon, and it was purchased by the Princeton Art Museum in 2007. This painting is very vivid and beautiful, and it could easily be mistaken for one of the still life fruit paintings rendered by his brother Raphael, who was considered the first great landscape painter of the United States. Rubens Peale died at the age of 81 in the year 1865, having lived a long full happy life. He did more in his 81 years than many people would have done in many lifetimes, being an excellent scientist, ornithologist, taxidermist, museum curator, and eventually painter in his last decade of life. Although not as famous as his father or his brothers Raphael and Rembrandt, Rubens was a very important part of American art, as he helped develop the museum system, which continues to flourish to this day. He also was a champion of other great artists, including his own family members and other painters of America. His legacy proves not only that art deserves to be preserved, as does natural science, but that it's never too late to start pursuing a secret passion for art. Thank you for spending this time with me, and I hope you'll join me next time for more American Legends.