Charles Wilson Peale's American Museum

Hi Founder Fans, Jason here, and today, seeing as how the world has become a fairly stressful place all of a sudden, I thought it would be nice to talk about something fun. And what could be more fun than revolutionary painter and museum owner, Charles Wilson Peale. Now, you might not recognize the name Charles Wilson Peale, but you most certainly know his work. Charles Wilson Peale is one of a handful of people who painted portraits of the Founders. Men like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson sat still for a very long time so that Charles Wilson Peale could paint their image. To be fair, there are other artists, Gilbert Stuart and John Trumbull come to mind, who also helped paint the revolutionaries. But Charles Wilson Peale's story has a little more pizzazz to it. So Charles Wilson Peale was born in Maryland and didn't come from much. In fact, as a young man, he was apprenticed to a saddle maker. And while he was still in his late teens, he opened his own saddle shop. And this business failed. And he tried several other different artisan professions, and they all failed. He was extraordinarily lucky that in his early 20s, he decided to paint a picture. And it turns out, he was really good at it. Very natural, really, really good at it. So good, in fact, that some of his local community took up a collection to pay for him to travel to Europe to study painting. Which was not... people didn't go to art school back then like we do now. It was very rare, but obviously, he had talent. So when he arrived in London, he started studying under a man named Benjamin West, who many of the other painters of the revolution also studied under. West was actually an American who had traveled to Europe. And he became very famous, and is still today considered one of the world's greatest history painters. And history painting is when you paint something that happened a long time ago. It's pretty self-explanatory. But many paintings we see of historical events are done later. It's not like most of history, you couldn't just take a picture. Someone had to paint it, and the painting was done later. For example, this was still going on in the mid-1800s. And many of the most common images in our head of the American Revolution were painted decades, even up to a century later, when it was fashionable in the 1800s. However, the portraits themselves were done by people like Charles Wilson Peale. So Peale went and studied under West, and then when he came back to the United States, it was still British colonies. And he moved to Philadelphia. But shortly thereafter, there was a Revolutionary War, and he signed up for it. And while he's in between battles, he would paint people. And he ended up getting the opportunity to paint some officers, and they would pay him. And he started making a name for himself as a portrait artist, and he moved up the ranks. He would eventually paint George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Baron von Steuben, John Lawrence, Henry Knox, William Moultrie, Benjamin Lincoln, Nathaniel Greene, James Wilkinson. And that's just a brief list of founders who we know what their faces looked like, because Charles Wilson Peale. During this time, in 1779, Peale was actually elected to the Pennsylvania State Assembly. He's there for two years, but then he doesn't want to run for re-election. He just wants to focus on his painting, which he does, and he does a great job on it. And he becomes really successful. Now, a few decades go by, and eventually he becomes wealthy enough to start a museum. It's about the time his friend Thomas Jefferson became President of the United States. Now, it was Peale's American Museum, it was called. And it was essentially the first natural history museum, where he had examples of plants and animal species from all over the country, and even from different parts of the world. And what's extraordinarily interesting in this is they had just recently started finding these bones in the ground around the world. And some of these bones were found in America, and they were reassembled. And these were woolly mammoth bones. And Charles Wilson Peale acquired one of the first collections, a complete woolly mammoth. And what he did was, he assembled the bones together as if they were still inside the beast. And he put them up for all to see. Now, today for us, it's, okay, I've been to museums, we've all seen dinosaur skeletons in the museums, at least on TV. Well, we see those because Charles Wilson Peale came up with this strange idea to put the bones together and put them out for display. It was a novel idea at the time. No one was doing it. And it's all over the world. It's common museum practice now. And that is, in large part, due to Charles Wilson Peale, who seems to have been, based on my research, seems to have been the first person to ever actually do that. Definitely the first in the United States. And it looks like one of the first in the world. And he not only contributed to the American founding in that fact, but he essentially contributed to the founding of the entire modern world in a very small little way. And to end his story, eventually, like everyone who lived 200 years ago, Charles Wilson Peale did pass away. Unfortunately. However, his museum lived on for 15 years. And then it went out of business, partially due to his oversight, him not being there to oversee it, I should say. And for fiscal reasons, people had seen what was there. But, Peale's American Museum, when it went bankrupt, sold off its assets. And the majority of its assets were bought by a man named P.T. Barnum. And P.T. Barnum would go on to have a very famous curiosity show. In fact, much of Charles Wilson Peale's museum would become part of the early Greatest Show on Earth. So that's the life of Charles Wilson Peale, in brief. Thank you so much for watching. I really hope you enjoyed it. I love talking about Charles Wilson Peale. He is fascinating. Before you go, I am going to put a link in the description below. There's a book called Of Arms and Artists, which looks at the American Revolutionary War through the eyes of five painters. Charles Wilson Peale and four of his contemporaries. And it's an extraordinary look at the American Revolution through the eyes of artists. Nowadays, there are artists around. Back there, there weren't so many. And it's a really interesting dichotomy on how the different people from different places in the colonies, and then different states, how they saw things go down. And I highly recommend it. So I'm going to put a link to that down there. Because I think you might appreciate it if you like this video. Furthermore, I am going to have a live video tomorrow, Saturday at 3 o'clock. That's the March 14th, 2020. And I'll talk about the articles I wrote for Founder of the Day this week. So if you have nothing to do tomorrow, and it seems like a lot of people are staying home, please come join us. It's a lot of fun. We chat. If you talk to me, I will respond pretty quickly. And we have a good time. Please hit like if you like this video. Please subscribe if you want to be reminded about the video tomorrow. Hit the notification bell. Thank you so much for watching, and I look forward to seeing you live tomorrow.