“I have to confess,” said Dr. Dunlap. “I’m a physical anthropologist. I’m a little out of my element. I hope you’ll bear with me.” He scratched his head and chuckled to himself.
A staff member of the museum played with the light switches until only one overhead beam shone down on Dr. Dunlap. He was tall and broad and wore a khaki shirt tucked into khaki trousers. His glasses had wire rims and his hair was the color of a faded and downy hen’s nest. He was old with a deep solid voice and he carried himself like a spacious and well-staked canvas tent.
He shared the stage with a cage from the Wonder Wheel, two funhouse mirrors, and a preserved scene from a shooting gallery in which dark-skinned hobos were villains. Above his head was a sign for an old roller coaster that said in large red letters The Twister.
He squinted up at the light above him and took a step forward on the stage. The light hit him from behind and revealed him in silhouette. He put his hands in his pockets and planted his feet.
“Thank you for inviting me to talk about Charles Willson Peale. Not many people get to talk about their relatives like this. I’m fortunate in that way. Now, he was my great, great, great––how many was that?” He peered out at the audience and kept his stance. “Three greats I believe it is. Great, great, great grandfather. And if we brought him right up to today, he would fit right in. He was interested in politics and gardening and biology and art. He always seemed to me like he would be a pretty nice guy to have around.”
Dr. Dunlap moved to tap the computer beside him to view to his next slide. He looked over his right shoulder towards the projector screen and the light that filtered through his beard cast an orange glow below his jaw.
“Peale had a beautiful hand. Which is why his first job was copying letters. Though he is better known as a painter. He studied with Benjamin West. West painted this portrait.”
He paused thoughtfully. “Peale must have been about eighteen here. Not yet married.” He stood admiring the portrait of Peale as a young man with a tawny wave of hair framing his delicate face, his left hand gracefully holding a quill.
“You’ve all seen some of Peale’s most famous paintings. He painted Washington and he painted Jefferson. Let’s see if I have those here somewhere.” He tapped his computer again, passing through a number of portraits of Peale as an older man with bright eyes and wispy grayed hair.
“Darling,” he said casually, looking out towards the crowd, “did I put those other portraits in here?” A woman in the front of the audience smiled helplessly, her blond hair reflecting some of the light from the stage. “My wife is an artist,” he said, looking into the rows of chairs where people stirred in the darkened room.
“Ah, here we are. I always thought this was a beautiful portrait of Thomas Jefferson. And of course, here are his portraits of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. They brought back quite a few pieces for Peale’s Museum.”
He cleared his throat. “One of Jefferson’s longest correspondences with Peale concerned a botanical issue—Jefferson was having trouble cultivating his geraniums. He asked Peale for help. They were both very dedicated gardeners. In fact,” he took a step back and the rims of his glasses flashed in the light, “Peale always used the Linnaean taxonomy in his museum. Part of what made it the first natural history museum. Up until that point, collections of natural objects for the public’s consumption were billed as, well, oddities or unnatural mysteries.” He paused, glancing around the room at the fading signs that said Coney Island Freak Show and Live Freaks. “But I’m getting ahead of myself with the museum.” He turned to his computer to move back to the early slides of Peale.
A photographer entered the room and made his way to the front row and sat down noisily.
Dr. Dunlap did not look up from his computer and spoke softly to himself. “Let’s see. Here we are! Peale married a wonderful woman, Rachel Brewer. That was in…that was in 1762. And, get a load of this.” He stretched out his fingers in emphasis. “She bore him ten children. I can just imagine what a wild household that was. Especially later when they had the incident with the bear.”
He cleared his throat and looked back towards the screen. “Here is the Peale house. For those of you who know Philadelphia, that’s Third and Lombard.” A few people nodded.
“He began by collecting specimens of plants and animals. And he was fond of painting and preserving the things he collected—or was given. And this,” he said, getting louder, “this was another way the household was unique. Peale trained his children in these practices too. The girls as well, which was rare at the time, for them to receive such a scientific education.”
His voice softened. “I like to imagine a little workshop with all the kids around. Some of them painting, others sketching or searching for the right phylum and class from the books in Peale’s library. Some cleaning the hide of a specimen. Peale, he actually made a lot of developments in the field of taxidermy. Most of his specimens were later destroyed in a fire, but a few of them remain. Just imagine that. A 200 year old stuffed squirrel!” he boomed. “He also made improvements to the physiognotrace and the polygraph. He exchanged some letters with Jefferson about those too.
“But,” he continued, “Peale’s son Raphaelle did most of the taxidermy for the museum. He was very good. But all those years working with arsenic and mercury eventually poisoned him. He spent the last twenty years of his life suffering from delirium. Very sickly. He produced some gorgeous still-life paintings during that time, though.” He gestured toward an image of a painting with a boy sitting next to a tall potted plant. “Here’s his brother Rubens with a fine looking geranium. You know, geraniums were new to North America then. They came to Peale and Jefferson from Europe. Via South America. So growing one this healthy was tremendous news to the scientific community.”
He moved to the next slide. “Raphaelle really perfected his technique. His paintings almost look like photographs. Darling, are these watercolors?’
His wife smiled and shook her head. “They’re oil.”
“Oil. Of course. Here’s Cutlets and Vegetables. And another one of his paintings, Cheese and Crackers.” He looked at the painting for a few moments. “He really wants you to just be part of the cheese, you see. It’s a phenomenological type of thing.”
The photographer began to photograph Dr. Dunlap and the shutter of his camera sounded loudly.
“This is Still Life with Orange and Book. He was fond of using oranges in his still-lifes. He was rather entertained by his own mastery of the peel.”
A chuckle spread through the room and there was one delayed guffaw.
“He was also a first-class ventriloquist.” He nodded silently, out of stories about Raphaelle.
“Rembrandt was the real painter, though, after his father. One of his first official tasks in service to his father’s museum was to help excavate the mastodon. They got word in 1801 that some bones had come to light. And he traveled with his father upstate to sketch their findings. The skeleton was complete all but for a missing left tibia, which they were able to construct out of plaster. Using the right tibia as a model, of course.”
The audience waited silently for him to continue. Some sipped bottles of beer from the bar downstairs and had started to leave the room occasionally to find a bathroom, creaking on the old floorboards as they walked down the hall.
“Peale had the idea to exhibit the assembled skeleton in his museum. And this caused quite an uproar in Europe. It was fashionable in Europe at the time to assume that North America was an inferior place. This big set of bones gave a lot of Americans the feeling that they had a real fighting chance out there. Big animals to match the big ideas. Something like that. But regardless, the mastodon was good for the museum business.
“Now, here’s about the only image we have of what Peale’s Museum looked like. Peale himself painted this.”
Dr. Dunlap indicated a painting where an old man held back a curtain to reveal a long hall lined with books, assembled bones, stuffed creatures, and drawers and drawers of ordered specimens.
“He looks a little creepy here, doesn’t he? Kind of peeking at the people in the museum hall and peering back at us at the same time. But it gives you a sense of what the space looked like. And if you’ll note,” he moved closer to the image, getting in the way of the projector and then readjusting his position, “it’s got gas lighting. It was the first building in Philadelphia to have it.
“Oh, and off the right side of the painting, you can see the mastodon skeleton as it would have been displayed. Peale had the idea to set up the family dinner table under the skeleton, so they often had their dinners beneath the mastodon.”
The photographer rose to leave and his chair scraped against the wooden floor.
“The family also kept a collection of live animals as part of the museum. So you can just imagine what it would have been like for all those kids to grow up with peacocks perched around the yard and maybe a snake or two in the sitting room. They kept a black bear for a time. They raised it from a cub, of course. But one day it batted Rubens around and Peale had to shoot it.” He shrugged his shoulders slightly. “But Peale got Raphaelle to stuff it after that.
“Another one of Peale’s sons, Titian, was a great naturalist. He was Peale’s youngest son. He traveled with the Wilkes Expedition in 1738 and—what’s that, darling?”
His wife gestured at him.
“What did I say? Oh, 1838. I’m terrible with dates. So, the Wilkes Expedition explored the Pacific. That was quite a big deal back then, to explore the Southern Seas. People thought that the North and South Poles were entrances into the core of the earth. You could walk right into the poles and there would be another civilization living there. But they didn’t make it that far north or south.
“By that time the museum had been moved to Baltimore and Peale’s sons had taken over its care. It had a pretty good run. It eventually suffered from competition with Barnum, who…Barnum was totally into freaks. And Peale was against that kind of thing. It had to be honest. It couldn’t be a fraud like…a mermaid. It had to be real.” He bent one of his knees and put his weight on his left foot. A few people shifted in their chairs.
“But Peale died in 1827. He lived to be 85 and was active up until the end. He outlived three wives and was on his way home from wooing a fourth when he came down with pneumonia—the old man’s friend, they call it.”
He scanned the audience. “Now, I’ve probably kept you all here much longer than you thought. Maybe we can end with that.”
The audience clapped, and Dr. Dunlap stood, feet planted. “I think I need to have a beer or something,” he said.
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