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.
The Peales’ collections reflected the great variety in their own interests, including everything from European masterpieces to portraits of Revolutionary war heroes, military artifacts and taxidermied animals. Two mastodon skeletons, excavated from a farm in upstate New York in 1801 by Charles Willson Peale, could be viewed in the Peales’ Baltimore and Philadelphia museums. A few years later, Charles Willson Peale documented the “Exhumation of the Mastodon” (pictured) in this idealized painting. We see his sons Raphaelle, Rembrandt, and Rubens, and other family members – including two of his wives, one of whom had already passed away at the time. The original painting, and one of the Peales' mastodons, are now in the collection of the Maryland Center for History and Culture.
The mastodon represented the largest terrestrial animal then known, and the Peales' skeletons were the first prehistoric animals to be exhibited in museums. They were a huge draw, and visitors paid extra to see the mastodons – incorrectly called mammoths. Hoping to refute charges that American animals were weak and degenerate, Thomas Jefferson, then president, charged Lewis and Clark with keeping an eye out for living mastodons during their expedition across the west of the North American continent. Their failure to find any helped Jefferson and others come to understand that species could become extinct.
You can learn more about the Peale family in the Peale Gallery.
