PEALE, CHARLES WILLSON

born April 15, 1741, Queen Anne's county, Md., U.S. died Feb. 22, 1827, Philadelphia Portrait of Zebulon Pike by Charles Willson Peale, oil on canvas, 1808; in Independence National American painter best remembered for his portraits of the leading figures of the American Revolution and as the founder of the first major museum in the United States. Pealewho was a saddler, watchmaker, and silversmithbegan his art career by exchanging a saddle for a few painting lessons from John Hesselius. He was also advised and influenced by John Singleton Copley. In 1766 a group of Maryland patrons sent him to London, where he studied for three years with Benjamin West. Peale's ideas were firmly democratic, and it is recorded that he even refused to take off his hat when the coach of King George III passed by. On his return to America, Peale immediately became the fashionable portrait painter of the middle Colonies. He moved to Philadelphia in 1775, entered wholeheartedly into the Revolutionary movement, and served with the city militia in the Trenton-Princeton campaign. From 1779 to 1780 he represented the Furious Whig party in the Pennsylvania assembly, an activity that damaged his professional career. He opened a portrait gallery of Revolutionary heroes in 1782 and in 1786 founded an institution intended for the study of natural law and display of natural history and technological objects. Known as the Peale Museum, it grew to vast proportions and was widely imitated by other museums of the period and later by P.T. Barnum. Located in Independence Hall, the museum was a mlange of Peale's paintings, curious gadgets, and stuffed animals. Its most celebrated exhibit was the first complete skeleton of an American mastodon, unearthed in 1801 on a New York farm. Peale, who had accompanied the expedition, chronicled the excavation in his painting Exhuming the Mastodon (1806; Peale Museum, Baltimore). In his long life, Peale painted about 1,100 portraits, including those of Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, and John Adams. Crisply outlined and firmly modeled, they paralleled the Neoclassical style developed in France by Jacques-Louis David. His seven life portraits of Washington were repeated many times by himself and other painters of his family. Peale was also a master of trompe l'oeil painting; his The Staircase Group (1795; Philadelphia Museum of Art), a life-sized double portrait of his sons Raphaelle and Titian, intentionally framed in a real door jamb and with a projecting bottom step, is said to have deceived George Washington into doffing his hat to the boys' images. Peale's brother James (17491831) and his sons Raphaelle (17741825), Rembrandt (17781860), Rubens (17841865), and Titian (17991881) were also painters.