From the Physiognotrace to the Kinematoscope: Visual Technology and the Preservation of the Peale Family

I

While working on his third-person autobiography in 1826, Charles Willson Peale recollected the story of what was perhaps his earliest commission. He writes that “[a] rather singular circumstance happened in an early period of his life. . .”:

An Uncle was dead, and Charles’s Grand Mother, a very aged woman, begged him to draw her a picture from the corpse, the boy told his Grand Mother that he did not know how to do it, she persisted that he could, if he would try. All her entreaties were in vain, the task appeared too difficult. ¹

Peale goes on to explain that immediately after this incident, the “idea of Making Pictures” took possession of his mind. In retrospect, such a response is hardly surprising. The incredible range of Peale’s achievements—as American painter, inventor, ethnographer, writer, collector, curator, taxidermist—centered around methods of preservation. It seems almost predictable that, as a child, he would have been indelibly impressed and stymied by the task of representing a dead forefather for posterity.

Figure 1.

Charles Willson Peale, The Artist in His Museum (1822). Oil on canvas, 103 3/4” x 79 7/8”. Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. Gift of Mrs. Sarah Harrison (The Joseph Harrison, Jr. Collection).

Indeed, the struggle to preserve and exhibit the dead animated much of Peale’s life, filling many of his days with activity and art. He had, of course, his museum and its thousands of carefully taxidermed specimens—as his famous 1822 self-portrait The Artist in His Museum makes abundantly clear (figure 1). He was always seeking to expand his collections, and he even expressed the desire to stuff and display the men he respected, such as Benjamin Franklin. In the midst of a 1792 speech to his Museum’s trustees, Peale confessed he was “sorry” that he did not

propose the means of . . . preservation to that distinguished patriot and worthy philosopher, Doctor Franklin . . . it is not improbable that . . . he could have been prevailed on, to suffer the remains of his body to be . . . in our view. ²

Peale also wanted to keep the body of his first wife, Rachel Brewer Peale, in view for a prolonged period after her death in 1790. He worried over “the custom of burying the dead too soon” and, in his autobiography, he used tales of individuals buried alive to justify his refusal to “let his wife be laid out in less than 2 or 3 days after her decease, although in her situation it was evident that the powers of nature were exhausted.” ³

In a different context, Peale placed Rachel in a more public, delicately staged confrontation with death. Between 1772 and 1776, Peale worked and re-worked a portrait that took as its subject the death of his fourth child, Margaret Bordley Peale. This well-known painting, entitled Rachel Weeping, shows his first wife with tears in her eyes, crying before the body of their young daughter, who died during a smallpox epidemic. When exhibiting this image, Peale hung it behind a curtain, using lines of poetry to warn potential viewers of his painting’s subject and power:

Draw not the curtain, if a tear Just trembling in a parent’s eye Can fill your gentle soul with fear Or arouse your tender heart to sigh.

A child lies dead before your eyes And seems no more than molded clay, While the affected mother cries And constant mourns from day to day. ⁴

The curtain and the poem suggest that, several years before his pioneering efforts in taxidermy, forty years before the painting of The Artist and His Museum and its own billowing curtain, Peale was concerned with preserving death in such a way that he could make of it a controlled spectacle. ⁵

Walter Benjamin has observed that “one of the foremost tasks of art has always been the creation of a demand which could be fully satisfied only later”—art, to put it too simply...