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Charles Willson Peale's Expressive Design: The Artist in His Museum

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Roger B. Stein
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The relationship of any single work of art to its culture is always problematic. As the act of an individual artist faced with the task of creating something on the two-dimensional surface of a canvas with line, shape, and space, with form and color, a painting belongs to the biography of the artist and to the history and criticism of art, a possible subdivision of which is the history and criticism of the art of a particular culture. Cultural critics and historians of a more comprehensive sort will examine a work for the ways in which it “reflects,” “illustrates,” or “expresses” shared experiences, thoughts, and feelings of the culture, directly or in some mediated fashion. If art historians tend at times to underestimate the interrelation between a painting and other forms of cultural expression in their preoccupation with the specialness of the medium, its tradition and methodology, the cultural critics often run the risk of ignoring or flattening out the special language of pictorial expression in their avid search for interconnections. At one extreme, they seem to posit some hypostatized notion of a “culture” in which individual acts seem almost to be assumed as automatic illustrations rather than formative shapes. To fashion a more adequate critical approach requires thus that we draw upon the strengths of both approaches while avoiding their pitfalls.

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Research Article
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Prospects , Volume 6 , October 1981 , pp. 139 - 185
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1981

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References

NOTES

1. Quoted in Dunlap, William, History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States, ed. Bayley, Frank W. and Goodspeed, Charles (Boston: n.p., 1918), I, 92–93.Google Scholar

2. The theoretical literature on this subject is surprisingly limited. My own preliminary statement can be found in “Structure as Meaning: Towards a Cultural Interpretation of American Painting,” American Art Review, 3 (03–04 1976), 66–78Google Scholar, and the subsequent discussion in that periodical (3 [September-October 1976], 49–55). Americanists are familiar with Norman Grabo's frequently reprinted essay “The Veiled Vision: The Role of Aesthetics in Early American History,” which first appeared in William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Series, 19 (10 1962), 493–510Google Scholar, with its central argument to colonial historians that literary evidence is crucial but must be understood as it is mediated by the formal structures. The issue of New Literary History, 3 (Spring 1972)Google Scholar, devoted to literary and art history touches this question tangentially at several points. Some of the most perceptive critiques of our failure to address this question have come from Marxist scholars, most notably Raymond Williams in his recent Marxism and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977)Google Scholar, Clark, T. J., “On the Social History of Art,” Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the Second French Republic, 1848–1851 (Greenwich, Conn.: New York Graphic Society, 1973), pp. 9–20Google Scholar, and from a more doctrinaire Althusserian point of view, Hadjinicolaou, Nicos, Art History and Class Struggle (London: Pluto Press, 1978).Google Scholar

3. This may only be a way of saying that they seem more culturally accessible, for no work of art is “outside” its culture any more than it can be “ahead of its time.” However f amiliar these cliches are, they must be, to the student of culture, contradictions in terms, logical impossibilities, evasions of the responsibility for defining why a work seems alien to our notion of its cultural context.

4. The crucial scholarship on Charles Willson Peale, to which this study and all work on Peale is immensely indebted, is by Peale's descendant the late Charles Coleman Sellers: his two-volume biography, Charles Willson Peale, Memoirs of the American Philosophical Society, 23Google Scholar, Parts 1 and 2 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1947), hereinafter cited as “Sellers (1947)”; the revised version of that biography, Charles Willson Peale (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1969)Google Scholar, hereinafter cited simply as “Sellers”; his Portraits and Miniatures by Charles Willson Peale, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, n.s. 42, Part 1 (Philadelphia: 1952)Google Scholar, hereinafter cited as “P & M”; the supplement to that volume, Sellers's Charles Willson Peale with Patron and Populace: A Supplement to Portraits and Miniatures… with a Survey of His Work in Other Genres, in ibid., n.s. 59, Part 3 (Philadelphia: 1969), hereinafter cited as “Supp.”; and Mr. Peale's Museum: Charles Willson Peale and the First Popular Museum of Natural Science and Art (New York: W. W. Norton, 1980)Google Scholar, published just as this essay was going to press.

All of these works draw heavily on the ms. Peale Papers, the originals of which are now at the American Philosophical Society (hereinafter cited as “APS”). I was privileged to consult them in reproduction at the offices of the Peale Papers, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., which was preparing the microfiche and letterpress edition of the Papers for publication under the editorship of Lillian B. Miller. I wish to acknowledge my gratitude to the staff of the Peale Papers for their generous assistance to me in locating material, and to the Smithsonian Institution and the National Collection of Fine Arts for a fellowship year during which the initial research and conceptualizing of this project was carried out. Where possible, in what follows, I have checked printed versions of Peale materials against the manuscript versions (with Peale's rather erratic spelling and punctuation). All citations from Peale's manuscript are given with the permission of the American Philosophical Society and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania (hereinafter cited as “HSP”).

5. See the full descriptive account in P & M, pp. 157–63.

6. Quoted, in ibid., p. 160.

7. This letter, like some of those in the following paragraph, is quoted in part in ibid., p. 161; see ms. Peale Letterbook No. 17, APS, for full versions.

8. Peale Letterbook No. 17, APS; the Jefferson, letter is dated 10 29, 1822.Google Scholar

9. This portrait of Benjamin West in his robes as President of the Royal Academy (107 by 69½ inches), standing full length with drapery behind and to the right of him and gesturing to the viewer's left at a small version of Raphael's Death of Ananias on an easel while lecturing on “The Immutability of Colors,” was commissioned by the American Academy of Fine Arts. Completed by Lawrence after West's death in 1820, it reached the AAFA in New York in 1822, where Rembrandt Peale saw it. It is now owned by the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Conn. A copy by Rembrandt Peale was recently on the art market.

10. Peale Letterbook No. 17, APS.

11. This particular bird is in all probability the one that went to the Peabody Museum at Harvard. See Poesch, Jessie J., Titian Ramsay Peale, 1799–1885 and His Journals of the Wilkes Expedition, APS, Memoirs, 52 (Philadelphia: 1961), 47Google Scholar, and Sellers, , Mr. Peale's Museum (Note 4 above), p. 242.Google Scholar

12. Autobiography, p. 446, in the transcript by Horace Wells Sellers, APS.

13. For the Renaissance tradition of emblems see Praz, Mario, Studies in Seventeenth Century Imagery, 2d ed. (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1964)Google Scholar, and Freeman, Rosemary, English Emblem Books (London: Chatto & Windus, 1948).Google Scholar The most recent study of the subject, with an excellent critique from the point of view of German scholarship — which modifies Freeman's emphasis on the “arbitrariness” of the emblem —is Daly, Peter M., Literature in the Light of Emblem (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), esp. pp. 1–102Google Scholar, and with excellent bibliography. My own previous emphasis on the emblematic in American art appears in Seascape and the American Imagination (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art and Clarkson Potter, 1975), p. 9Google Scholar and passim. In some sense both essays are part of an argument about the continuities of the emblematic mode of thinking in American literature and art.

14. As this essay goes to press, word arrives that the work has just emerged from conservation. New insights may emerge as a result.

15. One year after he painted The Artist in His Museum, Peale saw the already deteriorated Lord Baltimore again on a trip to Annapolis, and by offering to do six portraits of Maryland governors for the State House he gained ownership of the painting. He took it to Philadelphia to clean it and died in 1827 with it still in his studio. After many years at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, it was finally returned in 1957 to Peale's Museum in Baltimore, the institution founded by his son Rembrandt, for which he had originally destined it and where it soon may be seen-restored at last. Sellers, , pp. 33–34, 410, 480.Google Scholar

16. Did Peale hear Reynolds's first Discourse before the new Royal Academy on January 2, 1769, two months before he returned to America? Reynolds recommended to young students “an implicit obedience to the Rules of Art, as established by the practice of the great Masters.… That those models, which have passed through the approbation of ages, should be considered by them as perfect and infallible Guides, as subjects for their imitation, not their criticism.” Seven Discourses Delivered in the Royal Academy by the President (London, 1778; Scolar Press reprint, 1971), p. 13.Google Scholar That Peale had listened to this or similar advice is clear from the “imitation” in the Pitt portrait discussed below. For Reynolds's use of the emblematic, see Gombrich, E. H., “Reynolds' Theory and Practice of Imitation,” in Norm and Form: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance (London: Phaidon, 1966), pp. 129–34.Google Scholar Ronald Paulson, in his brilliant discussion of continuities and change in the emblematic tradition, locates Reynolds as a transitional figure, moving away from the manipulation of shared emblematic understanding and usage to a more generally associative expressive usage; see Paulson, Ronald, Emblem and Expression: Meaning in English Art of the Eighteenth Century (London: Thames & Hudson, 1975), esp. pp. 80–94.Google Scholar In what follows, I would want to locate Peale also within that transition, while insisting on his intermittent use of the specifically emblematic.

17. P & M, pp. 172–73, and Sellers, , pp. 67–70Google Scholar (the mezzotint broadside is reprinted in full on p. 69).

18. Peale has already noted that Pitt “makes a figure of Rhetoric” —that is, that even his posture stands emblematically for a specific traditional quality. In addition, Frank H. Sommers III has suggested that the figure is an allusion to Brutus, the Roman martyr, thus enriching its emblematic significance. “Thomas Hollis and the Arts of Dissent,” in Prints in and of America to 1850, ed. Morse, John D. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia for Winterthur Museum, 1970), pp. 151–55.Google Scholar For the classical pictorial context, see the Brown University exhibition catalogue, The Classical Spirit in American Portraiture (Providence: 1976).Google Scholar

19. P & M, p. 273. John Singleton Copley wrote (December 17, 1770) to thank Peale for the copy of the mezzotint sent to him in Boston, indicating his pleasure both in the subject, “that great man, in the most exalted carractor human Nature can be dignified with that of a true Patriot vindicatting the rights of mankind, and secondly for the merit of the work itself and the fair prospect it affoards of America rivaling the continant of Europe in those refined Arts that have been justly esteemed the Greatest Glory of ancient Greece and Rome” —Copley's generous acknowledgment of how much Peale had learned about European style and method since his weeks in Boston in 1765 painting merchants' portraits in and around Copley's studio. Letters and Papers of John Singleton Copley and Henry Pelham, 1739–1776 (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1914), pp. 100–101.Google Scholar

20. Supp., pp. 55–56, and Sellers, , pp. 83–86.Google Scholar

21. Supp., p. 55.

22. Sellers, , p. 86.Google Scholar

23. Supp., pp. 11, 14, and Sellers, , p. 111.Google Scholar

24. Quoted in Sellers, , p. 190.Google Scholar

25. See esp. Supp., pp. 9, 16–33, 40–41, 47–48.

26. The recent traveling exhibition of The Splendors of Dresden: Five Centuries of Art Collecting (National Gallery, Washington, D.C.-Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York-Museums of San Francisco, 1978–1979)Google Scholar made the point by devoting one section to court festivities; and the Electoral Kunstkammer, dating to 1560, with its combination of pictures, statues, tools for gardening and the chase, mineral specimens, and scientific instruments, is another distant source of the arrangement organized in the background of The Artist in His Museum. Recent awareness of public festivals as art activities prompted a session on the subject at the 1979 College Art Association Meetings.

27. Hogarth is a notable case in point; see the literature on him by Ronald Paulson, Frederick Antal, and others.

28. The newspaper accounts of Peale's transparent paintings, triumphal arches, and the like –in some cases the only sources for this occasional work, since it has disappeared, as it was intended to-are clear in their “emblematical” labeling of these activities. See the quotations cited by Sellers in Supp. (note 25 above).

29. For the Peale Franklin portraits, see P & M, pp. 80–83; for the larger context, see Sellers, Charles Coleman, Benjamin Franklin in Portraiture (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1962).Google Scholar

30. P & M, p. 225. Here and elsewhere in his studies of Peale, Sellers is content with a very general usage of the term “symbolism” to characterize those aspects of Peale's work which extend meaning beyond denotation of the observable world. This tends to obscure the specific kinds of symbolic and conventional usage Peale inherited and adapted from the European past. It seems to me especially important to insist on the distinction between emblem and symbol during Peale's lifetime, for it was precisely then that the codifications of emblematic meaning and the world view they shaped were challenged by Schiller, Coleridge, Emerson, and other romantic theorists. Of course, my sense of the epistemological importance of this distinction in no way lessens my indebtedness to Sellers's extensive work in describing with such care Peale's artistic activities.

31. Peale had close intellectual and political connections at the time with President John Witherspoon and the astronomer David Rittenhouse of Princeton, whose portraits he took (P & M, pp. 181–82, 252–53). Peale's 1783 revision of the Princeton Washington, which includes the death of General Mercer (P & M, pp. 234–35), echoes in some ways his former teacher West, Benjamin's Death of Wolfe (1771).Google ScholarCopley, 's Death of Chatham (the William Pitt whom Peale had earlier painted)(1779–1781)Google Scholar and Death of Major Peirson (1782–1784)Google Scholar, completed just as Peale was finishing his new Washington, also focus on the death of a hero, as do Trumbull, John's Death of General Warren and Montgomery of 1786.Google Scholar

32. P & M, p. 86, and Sellers, pp. 175–77. The view of Independence Hall in the background of the Gérard portrait made it inevitably part of an inside-outside game for visitors to the Long Room.

33. Poesch, Jessie J., “A Precise View of Peale's Museum,” Antiques, 78 (10 1960), 344Google Scholar, and P & M, pp. 114–15.

34. Historical Catalogue of the Paintings in the Philadelphia Museum, Consisting Chiefly of Portraits of Revolutionary Patriots and Other Distinguished Characters (1813), 56 pp.Google Scholar

35. For Peale's own response to the Lafayette visit, see Sellers, , pp. 414–18Google Scholar, and Supp., pp. 47–48.

36. To the narrator of the “Custom House” sketch, the discovered scarlet letter is a “mystic symbol,” which evades the analysis of his mind. But within The Scarlet Letter proper there is a struggle between the more rigid status of emblem and the more fluid working of symbol. In the chapter on “Pearl,” the child is defined thus: “An imp of evil, emblem and product of sin, she had no right among christened infants.” Her mother, who is as seamstress responsive to the community's need for “manifold emblematic devices” (“Hester at Her Needle”), dresses her daughter in this same manner, “lavishing many hours of morbid ingenuity, to create an analogy between the object of her affection, and the emblem of her guilt and torture. But in truth Pearl was the one, as well as the other” (“The Governor's Hall”). The tendency of emblem to fix relationships in an intellectually rigid system of social and religious meaning —stylized, hieratic, ritualistic–prevents Pearl, and surely her mother, from becoming full-scale romantic heroines.

37. P & M, pp. 160, 162, 163.

38. Supp., pp. 33–34; eight of them are reproduced in color in Sellers, plates VIII–IX.

39. The description of Peale's Germantown farm can be found in Poesch, Jessie J., “Mr. Peale's ‘Farm Persevere’: Some Documentary Views,” APS, Proceedings, 100 (12 1956), 545–56Google Scholar; the landscape paintings he produced there are in Poesch, , “Germantown Landscapes: A Peale Family Amusement,” Antiques, 72 (11 1957), 434–39.Google Scholar His manuscript Letterbooks, Belfield Daybook, and Autobiography (APS) contain the records of the estate. As one example of his garden decoration, “he painted two pedestals ornamented with ball to crown each, and the die of the Pedestals, on one the explanation of the figures, viz. America with an even ballance– as justifying her acts. The Fassie [fasces] emblematical of the several states, are bound together, incircled by a Rattle-snake, as innocent if not meddled with, but terrible if molested. This emblem of Congress is placed upright, as that body ought to be, with wisdom its base, designated by the owl; the beehive and children; industry an increase the effects of good government, supported on one side Truth and Temperance, on the other Industry; with her distaff, resting on the cornucopia-consequence, a wise Policy will do with wars. Hence Mars is fallen. The figure of Mars was made on the end of shed roof to hide it.” Autobiography, Sellers transcript, p. 392.

For Jeffersonian parallels, see Nichols, Frederick D. and Griswold, Ralph E., Thomas Jefferson, Landscape Architect (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1978)Google Scholar and Betts, E. M., ed., Thomas Jefferson's Garden BookGoogle Scholar, APS, Memoirs, 22 (1944).Google Scholar For English eighteenth-century sources, from an emblematic point of view, see Paulson, , Emblem and Expression (note 16 above), esp. pp. 19–34Google Scholar, and Hunt, John Dixon and Willis, Peter, The Genius of the Place: The English Landscape Garden, 1620–1820 (New York: Harper & Row, 1975)Google Scholar, for the texts, illustrations, and introductions.

40. Sellers, plate XIV; a better color version is that accompanying Louise Lippincott's useful “Charles Willson Peale and His Family of Painters” for the bicentennial exhibition catalogue, In This Academy: The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1805–1976 (Philadelphia: 1976), at p. 78.Google Scholar

41. MS “Walk With a Friend in the Philadelphia Museum,” HSP.

42. MS lecture, “The Theory of the Earth. Linnaean System of Animals and Moral Reflections on Man,” APS.

43. Sellers, , p. 331Google Scholar, and the very useful chapter of which it is a part.

44. See Sellers, , p. 467, for an example.Google Scholar

45. This is one version; variants exist. See the reproductions in Sellers, (1947), II, facing p. 270.Google ScholarSellers, , in Mr. Peale's Museum (note 4 above), discusses the organ (p. 196)Google Scholar, the tickets, and the source of the Book of Nature emblem (pp. 15, 154, 218); the biblical mottoes (pp. 216–20) were apparently at least in part the Deist's strategy to draw into the Museum a sectarian Christian audience-an issue that needs further investigation.

46. Quoted in Sellers, , p. 284.Google Scholar Charles Brockden Brown made Philadelphia during yellow fever epidemic the setting for his Arthur Mervyn; or Memoirs of the Year 1793 (Philadelphia: 1798).Google Scholar

47. Discourse Introductory to a Course of Lectures on the Science of Nature … Delivered… 11 8, 1800 (Philadelphia: 1800), p. 48.Google Scholar

48. Ibid., p. 32.

49. MS “Walk with a Friend,” HSP. The passage is cited in Bush, Clive, The Dream of Reason: American Consciousness and Cultural Achievement from Independence to the Civil War (London: Edward Arnold, 1977), p. 79.Google Scholar

50. Discourse, 1800 (note 47 above), p. 48.Google Scholar

51. Quoted in Bush, , Dream of Reason (note 49 above), p. 196.Google Scholar

52. Ibid., p. 197.

53. Thoreau, Henry David, Walden, Chap. 2.Google Scholar

54. Cf. Emerson, in “Nature”Google Scholar: “A fact is the end or last issue of spirit. The visible creation is the terminus or circumference of the invisible world” (section iv, “Language”). One should not overemphasize the differences between Locke and the transcendentalist strain. It is Edgar Allan Poe who is the real enemy of Lockean empiricism.

55. Introduction to a Course of Lectures on Natural History Delivered…November 16. 1799 (Philadelphia: 1800), p. 14.Google Scholar

56. The closest analogue within the romantic sensibility is probably Whitman in his assertion that “all truths wait in all things” (“Song of Myself,” section 30), until they are galvanized and ordered by the receptive consciousness that gives them shape in the poem. At that point they become part of his religious credo:

I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journeywork of

the stars,

And the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and the

egg of the wren.

And the tree-toad is a chef-d'oeuvre for the highest…

All things, large and small, stand for and exemplify the design of the whole for Whitman, though what is crucial, as the succeeding stanza in section 31 makes clear, is the irresistible attractiveness of all things to the omnivorous self—including the prehistoric past:

In vain the speeding or shyness,

In vain the plutonic rocks send their old heat against my approach,

In vain the mastodon retreats beneath its own powder'd bones…

Design is achieved, finally, in Whitman, through the dynamic process of the active self, who makes the elements of the natural world a part of the poem, which shapes what it receives.

57. See Jaffe, Irma B., Trumbull: The Declaration of Independence (New York: Viking Press, 1976), pp. 67–73Google Scholar and plates. Note also that the specifically classical forms of the busts in the Long Room by Rush and others, visible in the Titian Peale sketch, have been eliminated from the final painting. They are identified in Poesch, , “Precise View” (note 33 above), pp. 344–45.Google Scholar

58. On Linnaeus, see especially Larson, James L., Reason and Experience: The Representation of Natural Order in the Work of Carl von Linné (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971)Google Scholar, and Stafleu, Frans A., Linnaeus and the Linnaeans: The Spreading of Their Ideas in Systematic Botany, 1735–1789 (Utrecht: International Association for Plant Taxonomy, 1971).Google Scholar On the American scene, Boorstin, Daniel's The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson (New York: Holt, 1948)Google Scholar, is still useful. See esp. Chap. 1, “Nature as the Work of Art.”

59. Ms. “Walk with a Friend,” HSP.

60. Cooper, James Fenimore, The PioneersGoogle Scholar, Chap. 17. The illustration reproducedv here is a later visual rendering of the popular Cooper scene by Tompkins H. Matteson (1857, New York State Historical Association, Cooperstown); see also the version by William Walcutt (ca 1850, National Collection of Fine Arts, Washington, D.C.).

61. Poesch, , Titian Ramsey Peale (note 11 above), pp. 46–47Google Scholar, and Sellers, , Mr. Peak's Museum (note 4 above), p. 242.Google Scholar The Titian plate of the turkey is reproduced in color in the modern reprint of Wilson, entitled American Bird Engravings (New York: Dover, 1975)Google Scholar; the Audubon wild turkey is the first plate in The Original Water-color Paintings by John James Audubon for The Birds of America, Introduction by Davidson, Marshall B. (New York: American Heritage, 1966).Google Scholar For further details on the engraving of Audubon's work, see Fries, Waldemar H., The Double Elephant Folio: The Story of Audubon's Birds of America (Chicago: American Library Association, 1973), pp. 11, 14, and passim.Google Scholar

62. Compare the eagle in this painting with the slightly different stance of the pair in the Titian drawing and Peale's drawings of eagles in his 1812–24 sketchbook, (No. 15 in Supp., p. 111)Google Scholar, and both with Alexander Wilson's version in the 1808–14 American Ornithology (American Bird Engravings, plate 76), which was itself the model for Audubon's plate in the later Birds of America (plate 1 in Davidson edition). Cf. the comment and illustration in Sellers, , Mr. Peale's Museum (note 4 above), p. 89.Google Scholar Audubon mentions seeing Wilson drawing this eagle in Philadelphia on a visit there–Audubon, Maria R., Audubon and His Journals (New York: Dover, 1960), II, 203Google Scholar – when he also visited Rembrandt Peale. The engraving of his own eagle was completed in 1828 (ibid., II, 295). The eagle in The Artist in His Museum, like that in Wilson, is “white-headed,” while the pair in Titian's sketch appear not to be. Peale noted in his 1813 “Walk with a Friend” (ms., HSP) that the Falco leucocephalus, the white-headed eagle, is improperly called bald eagle and that it “does not get the dress of a white head and tail until the fifth year of its age.” The version in our painting is a somewhat flattened, stylized bird, with its white plumage—the plumage chosen by Wilson and Audubon (in one plate; there are plates of other versions) and familiar to us in the national emblem. The salmoncolored blur under the eagle in the picture echoes the color of the fish in the Wilson plate, which may have served in part as a model, though the disposition of the body and wings is somewhat different.

Two further biographical notes: Peale was especially fond of an eagle kept in a wire cage on top of Philosophical Hall, when the museum was there, which was tame enough for him to handle (Sellers, [1947], II, 62–63)Google Scholar; secondly, one may notice the whimsical visual similarity between the white-headed or bald eagle in its dark feathers and its bald-headed master in his dark coat with long tail. This visual wit seems reinforced by the darkly but specially lit head of the turkey and by a contrasting pun on the right side of the picture: the immense femur of the mastodon contrasted to the elegantly silhouetted calf of the old man. For further evidence of visual puns, especially by Raphaelle Peale, see Parts III–IV below.

63. For a useful summary of the early national argument, see Miller, Ralph N., “American Nationalism as a Theory of Nature,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Series, 12 (1955), 74–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar; for Jefferson's Notes, see the well-indexed edition of William Peden (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1955). Irving speaks, in “The Author's Account of Himself,” of his delight in going to Europe to see “the gigantic race from which I am degenerated.”

64. In the ms. “Walk with a Friend,” HSP, Peale drew special attention to the American elk, “not known by Buffon,” and to be differentiated from the moose, and also to the cervus virginiansus: “Its well turned and delicate limbs, stately carriage and smooth skin, render it the Admiration of most foreigners that visit the Museum.”

65. See, for example, Letterbook No. 17, p. 156, dated Belfield, , 08 26, 1822.Google Scholar

66. Bell, Whitfield J. Jr., “A Box of Old Bones: A Note on the Identification of the Mastodon, 1766–1806,” APS, Proceedings, 93 (05 1949), 177.Google Scholar

67. Ibid., pp. 169–77.

68. Peale, Rembrandt, An Historical Disquisition on the Mammoth, or Great American Incognitum, an Extinct, Immense, Carnivorous Animal, Whose Fossil Remains Have Been Foundin America… (London: 1803), pp. iv–v, 4, 9, 10, 15–16.Google Scholar

69. Ibid., p. 91.

70. Davidson, Abraham, “Charles Willson Peale's Exhuming the First American Mastodon: An Interpretation,” in Art Studies for an Editor: 25 Essays in Memory of Milton S. Fox (New York: Abrams, 1976), pp. 61–70.Google Scholar

71. Cited in Supp., p. 37. Davidson recognizes a link between the Mastodon painting and the Pitt portrait but obscures the connection by mislabeling and misunderstanding the process as “symbolism” (Davidson, , “Peale's Exhumings,” p. 63).Google Scholar

72. Jefferson, , Notes (note 63 above), pp. 19, 24–25.Google Scholar These passages were well known to Americans and to foreign visitors like Brissot de Warville, the Comte de Volney, Richard Cobden, and Augustus John Foster. Rembrandt Peale did a sketch of “Jefferson's Rock” at Harper's Ferry on a southern trip in 1819, turned into a lithograph for public consumption about 1826. Even Melville picked it up, likening the leap of the great white whale to the Natural Bridge. Moby-Dick, Chap. 133.

73. Another, larger landscape — now unlocated — from a different point of view also hung in the same room (Supp., pp. 34, 36). For Peale's vivid diary account of the exhumation and the difficulties encountered, with a sketch of the works, see Sellers, , Mr. Peale's Museum (note 4 above), pp. 131–37.Google Scholar

74. The wild-steed motif as index of the sublime was to become a familiar one. George Stubbs had already used it frequently in England in his horse-lion confrontations. (See Basil Taylor, “‘The Lion and Horse’ Theme,” Burlington Magazine, 107 [1965], 81–86.) Thomas Cole used it in his otherwise bucolic 1837 View on the Catskills: Early Autumn (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). It became a popular folkloric image as well. See Kendall, George, “A Superb Wild Horse,” in Cohen, Hennig and Dillingham, William B., eds., Humor of the Old Southwest. 2d ed. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1975), pp. 92–93.Google Scholar Melville captures it in his image of the white steed of the prairies, land alternative to Moby-Dick in the famous “Whiteness of the Whale,” Chap. 42. It has, of course, biblical origins in Revelations 6, which Benjamin West explored in a variety of pictorial ways.

75. Autobiography, quoted in Davidson, , “Peale's Exhumings,” p. 62Google Scholar; the Autobiography also has an extended account of the exhumation process, APS.

76. It is worth noting in this respect that both the technology of the wheel pump and the artistry of the picture have precursors, extending back at least to the woodcuts of the sixteenth-century metallurgist Agricola. See Hoover, Herbert C. and Hoover, Lou H., trans., De Re Metallica, from First Latin Edition of 1556, reprint (New York: Dover, 1950)Google Scholar, esp. Book VI with its plates. I am grateful to my former colleague Bert Hansen for calling this to my attention.

77. Jefferson, , Notes on Virginia, p. 19.Google Scholar

78. It needs to be compared with the pyramidal order in the middle ground that John Singleton Copley establishes in Watson and the Shark (1778)Google Scholar, equally an imposition of human geometric control over the experience of the sublime confrontation between shark and helpless Watson in the foreground — though there are differences, especially in the background. See my “Copley's Watson and the Shark and Aesthetics in the 1770s,” in Israel, Calvin, ed., Discoveries and Considerations: Essays in Early American Literature and Aesthetics Presented to Harold Jantz (Albany: SUNY Press, 1976), pp. 85–130.Google Scholar These three Enlightenment strategies for bringing the sublime under control in the middle distance are not, we must insist, instances of American “pastoral” in the loose way that Leo Marx's less perceptive followers have used his insights in The Machine in the Garden. For the generation of Copley, Jefferson, and Peale the issues and their aesthetic expression are rather different.

79. See Sellers, (1947), II, 355–56Google Scholar; for Godman's discussion of the mastodon, see Godman, John, American Natural History (Philadelphia: Carey & Lea, 1826), II, 204–52.Google Scholar

80. Godman, John, Addresses Delivered on Various Public Occasions (Philadelphia: Carey, Lea & Carey, 1829), pp. 110, 128–29.Google Scholar I quote it from the suggestive chapter on “Philadelphia Science and the Artist-Naturalist” in Truettner, William H., The Natural Man Observed: A Study of Catlin's Indian Gallery (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1979), p. 68.Google Scholar Truettner's study is helpful for locating Peale in relation to the next-and finally very different-generation.

81. Jefferson, , Notes on Virginia, p. 19.Google Scholar

82. Kahr, Madlyn Millner, “Velásquez and Las Meninas,” Art Bulletin, 57 (06 1975), 225–46Google Scholar, here at p. 239. I am grateful to my colleague Kenneth C. Lindsay for calling the potential relevance of this essay to my attention. Readers are referred to it for its perceptive insights and for the wealth of illustrations of Northern European gallery pictures with which Velásquez's work is linked (Spain's political and cultural connections with the Netherlands are well established). My attention was initially called to this kind of “source” for The Artist in His Museum by Patrick Stewart, Jr., in his critical review of my first brief comments on the painting in “Structure as Meaning” (see note 2 above).

83. Both works are discussed and illustrated, with special relation to emblematic strategies, in Paulson, , Emblem and Expression (note 16 above), pp. 138–48, 152–58.Google Scholar

84. The Bonaparte collection is frequently noted in American art historical literature; Peak's sketch of the walls of the Academy with Fulton's collection hanging, in a letter of November 15, 1807, is reproduced in Supp., p. 107. Miller, Lillian, Patrons and Patriotism: The Encouragement of the Fine Arts in the United States, 1790–1860 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966)Google Scholar, mentions numerous Northern works in collections, and the published catalogues of the American Academy of Fine Arts, the National Academy of Design, and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts contain considerable raw data (though of course attributions to particular artists are open to question). For the Peale family and still life, see esp. Elam, Charles H., ed., The Peale Family, exhibition catalogue (Detroit: Institute of Art, 1967)Google Scholar, and Gerdts, William H. and Burke, Russell, American Still-Life Painting (New York: Praeger, 1971)Google Scholar, Chap. 2; for Peale's comment on King, see Cosentino, Andrew J., The Paintings of Charles Bird King, 1785–1862, catalogue (National Collection of Fine Arts, Washington, D.C., 1977), p. 80.Google Scholar A precise study of Northern seventeenth-century work in American collections has been undertaken by H. B. Nichols Clark of the University of Delaware.

85. Alpers, Svetlana, “Is Art History?” Daedalus, 106 (Summer 1977), 5.Google Scholar

86. The visual pun is not an unusual pictorial event. Within the Peale family, Raphaelle was the most frequent practitioner (for instance, placing in his still lifes a partially peeled orange as a kind of signature).

87. This balancing is mirrored in the movement of the museum itself from the Lombard Street residence to Philosophical Hall, with a great parade (Sellers, , pp. 264–65).Google Scholar from thence to the State House; eventually, part of it went to P. T. Barnum's American Museum. On the continual tension between science and showmanship, see Sellers, , Mr. Peale's MuseumGoogle Scholar (note 4 above), passim.

88. The work of Jean-Baptiste Greuze was fashioned after the conventions of the new drama and aesthetically justified by Diderot. Along with works by the Wilkie, Scot David (Blind Fiddler [1806])Google Scholar, Greuze's work served as model and inspiration for John Krimmel's shallow-staged genre pieces in Philadelphia in the second decade of the nineteenth century. See Hills, Patricia, The Painter's America: Rural and Urban Life, 1810–1910 (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art and Praeger, 1974), pp. 2–9.Google Scholar

89. Two examples available in the recent Splendors of Dresden exhibition are the Vermeer, Girl at a Window Reading a Letter (ca. 1658), and the Dou, Gerard, Still-Life with Candlesticks and Pocket WatchGoogle Scholar, Nos. 553 and 559 in the catalogue, cited above, note 26.

90. Quoted in Sellers, , p. 474, note 10.Google Scholar

91. P & M, pp. 161–62.

92. Sellers, , p. 410.Google Scholar

93. Ibid.

94. P & M, p. 162, which contains the gathered evidence on this lost work. Trompe l'oeil devices to emphasize Peale's role as artist (also involving Raphaelle) can be traced back to as early as 1787, when Peale sculptured a life-size selfportrait in wax for his Lombard Street Museum. See Sellers, , Mr. Peale's Museum (note 4 above), pp. 30–31Google Scholar, for an account of this “deception.”

95. See Gerdts, and Burke, , American Still-Life Painting (note 84 above), pp. 30, 31Google Scholar, and Gerdts, William H., The Great American Nude: A History in Art (New York: Praeger, 1974), p. 45Google Scholar; for the related King, Charles Bird, Environs of ItalyGoogle Scholar, see Cosentino, , King, p. 99Google Scholar, and the colored plate, p. 100, and Gerdts, and Burke, , American Still-Life Painting, pp. 51–53.Google Scholar

96. Sellers, , p. 420.Google Scholar Sellers points out in Mr. Peale's Museum (note 4 above), p. 246Google Scholar, that in 1822–23 the popular Philadelphia competitor of the Peale Museum with its scientific fare, the Washington Museum at Second and Market streets, was exhibiting paintings including Wertmüller, Adolph's Danaë and the Shower of Gold.Google Scholar This notorious nude, a succes de scandale (see Gerdts, , Great American Nude [note 95 above], pp. 39–41, 44–45)Google Scholar that the elder Peale deplored, may also have been in Raphaelle's consciousness when he created his inverted image of the Danaë for After the Bath — a Raphaellesque pun on “shower.”

97. An Essay to Promote Domestic Happiness (Philadelphia: 1812)Google Scholar; Peale could not resist using teleology at Raphaelle's expense: “How wonderful, beautiful, and wise is the divine work of creation! Each individual creature, made with forms and capacities, best calculated to fill its station and relation with other beings” (p. 19). He ended with Luke 15: “For thy brother was dead, and is alive again; and was lost, and is found” (p. 24).Google Scholar

98. The best account of his artistic life is in Gerdts, and Burke, , American Still-Life Painting, pp. 24–31.Google Scholar We still lack a full-scale study of Raphaelle, though there is rich evidence throughout the Peale Papers.

99. Supp., pp. 75–76.

100. Cooper, James Fenimore, The Prairie: A Tale (New York: Rinehart Editions, 1950), pp. 77, 78.Google Scholar As Henry Nash Smith points out in his introduction (p. vii), Edwin James's account of the Long expedition (the expedition of 1819–20 on which Titian Ramsay Peale served as assistant naturalist) was one of Cooper's sources for both the descriptions of the territory and his parody of scientific rationalism.