ExclusiveTitian Ramsay Peale II: America’s Pioneer of Scientific Illustration

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 in our daily lives. It can be hard to carry on the legacy started by someone else. However, if you look back at the early American pioneers and founding fathers, you'll see many times where the son of a very famous and influential man would successfully carry on his father's legacy, even down to the generation of the grandson, the brothers, the nephews. The American spirit is to not be intimidated by one's ancestors, but to pick up the torch where someone else left off. Today, we're going to talk about the son of a great artist who was given the difficult task of carrying on where his half-brother left off due to an early death in the field of natural science. We'll see how he very successfully picked up that mantle and became one of the innovators of illustrating flora and fauna in America. Charles Wilson Peale may not be a name you immediately recognize as a great American artist. However, if you have studied early American history, such as around the time of the revolution or the early American presidents, you'll definitely recognize his work as he painted some of the most famous portraits of George Washington and other founding fathers. He himself was a founding father, both figuratively and literally, as he had 17 children, many of whom survived to adulthood and became important artists and scientists. Wilson Peale had three wives, the first two of whom gave him many children, but who tragically died before he did, leading him to marry again twice to find mothers for his surviving children. The third surviving son from his first marriage was Titian Ramsey Peale, who was a budding young natural scientist, ornithologist, taxidermist, and illustrator of entomology. But sadly, he died at the age of 18 in 1798. By this point, Charles Wilson Peale had been widowed, as Titian's mother, Rachel, had died, and he had remarried Elizabeth de Paester. So the next year, in 1799, on November 2nd, when they had a son, who was one of several children they had together, they named that son Titian Ramsey Peale II. It might look a little strange when you look at the names of all Wilson Peale's children, and you see that he had two sons named Titian. But this actually was not an uncommon practice. If a child would die, oftentimes the parents would name another child that same name, especially if it was junior. Some families would have multiple juniors, as they tried to have an heir who would last. But Peale clearly was very grief-stricken that this son, who had survived to adulthood only to die at 18, had such a short life. So he wanted another son to carry on that legacy. Like many of his children, both Titians were named after the great Renaissance painter Titian. He named most of his sons and daughters after painters, scientists, or other important men and women of arts and science. And he trained his children to follow in his own footsteps, as well as the footsteps of those great painters, artists, and scientists. Now Titian II had quite an act to follow. He had to live up to the legacy of his father, the great Titian the painter, and his deceased half-brother, whom he would never meet, but clearly whose presence he must have felt in his life as he was named after him. And interestingly, rather than shrinking from that duty, he managed to pick up exactly where Titian I had left off, following directly in his footsteps as combining the use of both art and science to become one of the most important scientific illustrators of the 19th century. Now, although basically all Peale's children were named after some important artist or other, Titian II is one of the only children from the second marriage who really became an important artist himself. He didn't paint landscapes or portraits just for the sake of art, although you can see he was a very skilled artist from self-portraits he rendered and some beautiful landscapes or depictions of different flora, fauna, insects. He didn't make these just to be displayed in a museum. He made them to illustrate the natural world. And you can tell that he was heavily influenced by his father and his brothers and his sisters from an early age by how early he was already doing illustrations himself. When he was in his teenage years, the family moved from Philadelphia to Germantown, Pennsylvania, and there he began collecting and illustrating insects, particularly butterflies. Throughout his life, he loved studying butterflies and moths, and he would later develop a unique way of preserving and mounting butterflies in boxes. He preserved hundreds of them during his lifetime, many of which still exist and are on display in various natural history museums. His drawings of insects were first published as early as 1816 in Thomas Say's American Entomology, which was a multi-volume publication, at which point Titian was only 15 years old. The next year, he was a member of the first museum-sponsored expedition for scientific purposes, which went to Florida and the Carolina Islands, as well as the state of Georgia. He went along with William McClure, Thomas Say, and George Ord. This expedition was sponsored by the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. In 1819 through 1820, he went on a government-led expedition to the Rocky Mountains, which took several months. It was led by Major Stephen Harriman Long, and it's often called the Long Expedition, and he was the assistant naturalist on this expedition. Again, he was around the age of 18 when this began, and his father made a portrait of him at this time when he's in his uniform. As they explored the Great Plains region of the United States, they documented the plant life, the animal life, the insects of this whole region, and they found it to be so dry and devoid of water that they named the area the Great American Plains. And again, consider how early this is, 1819, and how little of the United States really had been vastly explored and detailed in exactly what existed out there. From this expedition, Titian made 122 drawings, illustrations, and paintings of the plant life and the insects he found there, many of which were published in various publications. This really cemented his growing reputation as one of the foremost illustrators of American flora and fauna. For the next several decades, he was the top scientific illustrator of flora and fauna of the Central Plains. He made colorful plates which were drawn for Alexander Wilson's American Ornithology, which they were in that publication between 1824 and 1833. And he also made many colorful plates of insects for Thomas Say's American Entomology, published between 1824 and 1828. If you look online, you can see in dozens of different online holdings, as well as physical museums, these illustrations he made, which far more than just drawings or crude sketches, they really show a great artistic flair, such as his illustrations of different deer, wasps, bugs of various kinds. They have a personality to them, a lifelikeness, which he got from his father, who was renowned for his realism in his portraits. But you can also see that he studied art, not just copying things. They really have vivid color and a lot of perspective to them. While many members of the family studied taxidermy, Titian Peale II was more interested in the preservation of insects, because that was really his field, although he did do ornithology and other animals as well. During the 1820s and 30s, he went on several other scientific expeditions, traveling to distant islands, across the seas, even going as far as Antarctica, always being taken along to document what they found. Because if this is before the 1830s, this is really before there was photography. So if you wanted to know what something looked like, you had to have some kind of an artist to draw it, to illustrate it, so that you could show people back home what you'd seen, because not everything could be collected in specimens. And while they did collect specimens, his artistic renderings were so beneficial and helpful to these scientists who were studying things. In the 1830s, Titian Peale spent many years as the director of the Philadelphia Museum, which his father had started decades ago, actually before his own birth. He also was a member of the Philosophical Hall, which again was started by his father, for several years. In the 1850s, Titian Peale developed an interest in photography, which was an emerging field at the time, starting in about the year 1855. Now he described himself as an amateur photographer, largely because he really he didn't make money at it, but he used that same artistic eye which he used in his illustrations. Rather than photographing nature, he was more interested in photographing buildings. And for those 10 years, from 1855 through the Civil War, he took particular interest in photographing the buildings of Washington, D.C., and his photographs are preserved in that regard as very useful records of what the capital looked like at the time. He was a member of several amateur photography clubs, and he would go on field trips and other expeditions to practice his photography. But basically, by the end of the Civil War, he kind of gotten tired of photography, so he didn't do much more in that regard. He worked for the U.S. Patent Office for many years, until his retirement in 1873. He also worked with the U.S. Mint, which might seem strange, but consider that there's artwork on a lot of coins and dollar bills. So he designed the artwork on several different coins during his time working for the Mint. Titian Ramsey Peale died on March 13, 1885, at the age of 85. A long, impressive life, which he had filled with, like all the Peales, many different artistic and scientific interests. He studied the work of the greats of the past, such as great painting, but he also was a pioneer for the future, dabbling in photography as soon as it was developed, designing new coins, working with patents, helping other inventors, so that they could have the proper documentation of their work. He went on expeditions, discovering new animals. He was only the second person to have a specimen of a female bird of a particular kind, the first of which was Thomas Jefferson. He helped his father with the curation of several museums, and then he was a curator himself, helping to find, preserve, document, and illustrate all these different birds, insects, and plant life, as well as then displaying it on museums, so that other people could see it live or read about it in various publications. Magazines like National Geographic or countless online sources now allow us to see photographs of various birds, animals, insects, things that we probably wouldn't see in person. But it all began with the work of people like Titian Ramsey Peale II, who went on these daring and dangerous expeditions to discover what was out there in the world, and to document it, create artwork of it, and to use those skills he developed in both art and science to create lifelike and very easy to understand descriptions and depictions of these animals and birds. The further development and expansion of the United States with the pioneers would have been impossible if not for the work of such men as went on these daring expeditions to discover what was out there, so people would know what they were going to experience as they delved into the vast wilderness. As a very important figure in the science world of most of the 19th century, Titian Ramsey Peale II deserves a place of honor among other scientists and artists as an American legend. Thank you for spending this time with me, and I hope you'll join me next time for more American Legends.