Take an audio tour of The Peale, Baltimore's Community Museum and the oldest museum building in the United States! Listen to WYPR's Aaron Henkin recount the fascinating stories that surround this historic building. Includes 16 stops.
You might recognize the room depicted here: it’s the “Long Room” in Philadelphia’s Independence Hall, where Charles Willson Peale rented rooms to exhibit his museum collection. This mural shows a detail from a watercolor by Titian Ramsey Peale of his father’s museum. The same room can be seen in Charles Willson Peale’s 1822 self-portrait replicated in the Peale Gallery downstairs, where the artist is lifting a red curtain to invite us to see the portraits, taxidermied birds, mastodon skeleton, and other exhibits on display there.
The Peales were notable for their innovative exhibit displays. Charles Willson Peale was among the first to show preserved animals in dioramas that recreated their natural habitats. Following Carl Linneus, the Swedish botanist and “father of modern taxonomy,” Peale also displayed natural history specimens in his museum according to Linnean classifications. The exhibits seen in cubbies in this mural, for example, were grouped by their physical similarities, and Peale’s sons painted backgrounds in the cubbies to provide context for the animal’s natural environments. Peale even named one of his children after Linneus!
