Museums: An American Wonder Room (part 3 of 6)

“Whoso would learn wisdom, let him enter here!”

— Charles Wilson Peale
Sign above the door of the Peale Museum in Philadelphia

On July 18, 1786 Charles Willson Peale opened his museum in Philadelphia to the public. Like most museums of the day, it was a private collection. Peale was best known for his portraits of important figures of the Revolutionary War and early Republic. However he was interested in diverse fields of natural history, as expected of educated men of his time.

Peale's motivation in establishing a museum was the belief that an educated populace was necessary to consolidate and advance the democracy won as a result of the American Revolution. His inspiration had occurred three years earlier when creating illustrations of Mastodon fossils for his friend Dr. John Morgan, a co-founder of the first medical school in America and a founding member of the American Philosophical Society.

Charles Willson Peale, self-portrait (1822)
Peale inviting guests into his museum
Philadelphia Museum of Art, The George W. Elkins Collection

The original Museum housed Peale’s portraits of Revolutionary War luminaries mounted high above display cases holding 90 species of stuffed and mounted mammals, 700 species of birds and 4,000 insects, along with minerals and various strange and wondrous artifacts. Peale’s Philadelphia museum eventually occupied parts of two buildings including three rooms at Independence Hall one of which was the first-floor Assembly Room where the Declaration of Independence had been signed.


Front room of Peale's Museum, ink and watercolor study (1822)


In time Peale's Museum housed the specimens collected by the Lewis and Clark Expedition as well as Native American cultural artifacts. The highlight was a mounted 11-foot high Mammoth skeleton, which had been excavated in 1801 by Peale from a farm in the Hudson River Valley of New York.

In 1810, Charles Willson Peale retired from his work at the museum, leaving its management and responsibility to his sons. In 1814 a second museum "Peale's Baltimore Museum and Gallery of Fine Arts" was established by his son Rembrandt Peale. Eventually there would be a third museum in New York City as well.

The museum in Baltimore was designed by noted architect Robert Cary Long, Sr. and was the first building in America built as a public museum. Housed in this stately three-story red brick Georgian style building, the museum was described in an early newspaper announcement as an “elegant Rendezvous for taste, curiosity and leisure.”

Announcement of mammoth skeleton

on display at Peale's Museum

Despite high hopes and ideals creditors foreclosed on the building in 1829 at which time the exhibits were moved to another location and the structure became Baltimore’s City Hall.




George Washington
As he would have looked in 1772
Painted by Charles Willson Peale in 1784
Washington-Custis-Lee Collection,
Washington and Lee University, Lexington, Virginia


The downfall of the Peale Museum empire was brought about by competition from P. T. Barnum who had opened his own dime museum in New York in 1834. Less than 10 years later a successful Barnum purchased the contents of Peale’s New York City museum. In 1849 he opened a museum in Philadelphia where Peale, mounted a strong competition. This proved disastrous to Peale. The museum closed and its contents were sold by the sheriff. Barnum and his friend Moses Kimball purchased most of Peale's collection and divided it between Barnum's American Museum in New York and Kimball's Museum in Boston.

P. T. Barnum’s American Museum in New York City

Most of the Peale Museum artifacts displayed at Barnum’s American Museum in New York City were destroyed when the building burned down in 1865. However some of the collection survived and is held at the Museum of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia.

One hundred years after the Peale's Baltimore Museum closed the grand old building that had housed it was rescued from proposed demolition. In 1931 it became the Municipal Museum of Baltimore. The Museum underwent a major renovation in 1979 and re-opened two years later with a focus on the history of Baltimore rather than art. In 1985 the facility became part of the City Life Museums system. However, the revamped museum had no more success than Peale’s original museum and closed due to financial difficulties in June of 1997.

(Read about The Beginnings of the Modern Museum in the next post on Museums)