Charles Willson Peale’s Philadelphia Museum Portraits, 1782 to 1827

This essay discusses the eighteenth-century Philadelphia Museum of artist Charles Willson Peale, and particularly the numerous portraits, including those of French military commanders, painted for it. Inspired by eighteenth-century Enlightenment ideals celebrating humankind’s capacity to learn and use new information, Peale conceived his Philadelphia Museum. In it Peale intended the works of man and nature to co-exist for the edification of all. The Philadelphia Museum, Peale said, served “to instruct the mind and sow the seeds of Virtue” in the new, American republic. During the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, Peale and his family filled the museum with hundreds of painted portraits, thousands of natural history specimens, minerals, models, Asian and American Indian artefacts, archaeological objects, life-sized wax figures, fossils and curiosities, all exhibited to an international public