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The Artist and His Museum: Charles Willson Peale and the First Public Museum in the United States

By (author) Diane Webber

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normal price: R 511.95

Price: R 460.95

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Artist Charles Willson Peale was making detailed drawings of fossilized bones when a relativeâ€™s off-hand comment sparked an idea in his mindâ€”why not turn his art gallery into a museum of the natural world? People would come. People might even pay! His reputation as a portrait painter was growing, but so was the number of people living under his roof. Charles Willson Peale turned from his career as a successful portrait artist to become the proprietor of Americaâ€™s first public museum. Then (nearly) all of it disappeared, and (nearly) everyone forgot about it. What was Pealeâ€™s Museum? And where did it go? Unlike the wealthy personâ€™s â€œcabinet of curiosityâ€ that came before, Charles wanted the museum to be organized by the latest ideas in scientific thinking. He believed useful knowledge should be available to the public, and hoped that his museum might offer Americans a sense of their emerging identity as citizens of a new nation. He dreamed that his museum would become a national, public institution, countering European views of American inferiority. Home to groundbreaking innovations in paleontology, taxidermy, and the role of scientific order, the museum survived yellow fever, multiple moves, and ongoing financial challenges before eventually closing. Today itâ€™s largely forgotten. Yet Pealeâ€™s legacy lives on in the very idea of a museum as a space combining education and entertainment