The Politics of Vision: Charles Willson Peale in Print

On January 24, 1784, the Philadelphia-based artist, museum curator, and inventor Charles Willson Peale completed work on one of his largest public undertakings. Comprising paintings done on oiled canvas and suspended over a large wooden frame, Peale's "Triumphal Arch" was a temporary construction meant to mark the recently established peace between Britain and the new United States and the hope of political order that such an event seemed to promise. Fully assembled, the forty-six-foot edifice straddled Philadelphia's Market Street just in front of the newly constructed President's House, allowing spectators to pass between its illuminated columns. Unfortunately for Peale, his construction, made "very combustible by the varnish and oil," the "700 rockets," and over 1,100 candles that it featured, caught fire, injuring observers and attendants, causing mass public chaos, and burning Peale so severely that he was forced to remain in bed for over three weeks. As he recalled years later, Peale only escaped the inferno by jumping from his perch at the top of the construction: "In his descent he fell across the edge of a board of the building, which broke two or three of his ribs, and from thence to the ground with several blazing rockets carried with him that went off in different directions, his cloaths being on fire" (Peale, Autobiography 92). Creating a public spectacle of peace, order, and national unity, as Peale found out, was easier said than done.

The remainder of Peale's career would seem to have been a concerted effort to rectify his Triumphal Arch disaster by bringing visual embodiments of social and political order to Philadelphia's inhabitants. Like a federal phoenix, Peale rose to become the founder and curator of the nation's foremost museum of portraiture and natural history. Meant to have a didactic effect on visitors, the Philadelphia Museum was designed to present viewers with rational amusement. No early modern wonder cabinet, Peale's museum featured intricately organized sets of objects and artworks. The museum held taxidermied animal specimens, carefully arranged according to Linnaean models of classification; parallel rows of portraits; curiosities like the skeleton of a mastodon that he unearthed in 1803; and a variety of inventions and mechanical devices.

While it eventually came to occupy a large portion of the Pennsylvania State House (now Independence Hall) in 1802, the first incarnation of the museum was just a small portrait gallery that Peale built in 1782 onto the rear of his home. As an advertisement in the Pennsylvania Packet described the space, Peale's "New Exhibition Room" was worth a visit because of the character of its contents. The rather humble gallery was "ornamented with portraits of a great number of worthy personages" notable more for their uniformity than their evidence of stylistic or artistic mastery ("Announcement"). Displayed in relatively small gilt, oval frames, Peale's regularized portraits depicted leading political and military figures, helping to create an ordered and classified visual vocabulary during a highly tumultuous cultural moment. As Christopher Lukasik has argued, "Postrevolutionary culture . . . was . . . characterized by the desire for a permanent, involuntary, and visible relationship between the face and moral character," a yearning "which arose in part, as a response to social and political anxieties generated by the fluid culture of performance" that dominated the era. Early Americans' interest in "public portrait galleries, waxwork figures, prints, sculpture, profile portraits, silhouettes, and printed biographical portrait galleries" existed because they worked to "represent the abstract ideals of civic virtue and communicate exemplary character" in intelligible, visually stable ways (414).

As a leading American artist for close to forty years, Peale documented and helped shape the changes that occurred from the Revolution through to the early antebellum period. Accordingly, he has been at the center of a number of accounts documenting the shifts in early national culture. Most scholars have tended to regard Peale as a stalwart of Enlightenment values, a figure who consistently championed scientific rationalism, ordered nature, and a theoretically attainable social equality, even as the rapidly changing cultural practices of the nineteenth century inevitably encroached on his ideals.¹ Even scholars...