"Gratified in the Sight": Charles Willson Peale, the Philadelphia Museum, and the Object of Early American Happiness

This article draws upon ecocritical, visual, and affect theories to analyze how public education projects like the colonial natural history museum promoted what I call "visual gratification" and "visual unity" among citizens of the early Republic. Focused around the ways that vision is evoked in the textual and physical spaces of the Philadelphia Museum (established in July 1786), this analysis interprets how naturalist and museum curator Charles Willson Peale carefully framed scientific experiences in terms of aesthetic and social harmony. As Peale rhetorically turns natural objects toward forms of feeling, early American happiness emerges as not only an objective, or "pursuit," but also a thing to be collected, displayed, and beheld. Peale's enthusiasm for scientific study generally, and his specimen collection specifically, thus reflects an early American view of natural history as producing the kinds of social bonds and public affects generated by experience with close visual observation.