Think back over of the founding leaders of our nation, the ones who shaped us early on. There's George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson. And Charles Willson Peale.

Peale?

Artist, inventor, soldier and politician, Peale was an irrepressible renaissance man. He was also quite a naturalist. In 1786, he opened the first public natural history museum on this continent. In it were the first known exhibits of animals in their habitat, the first known dioramas. Come August 18, Peale's legacy will be celebrated in Maine with an exhibit at College of the Atlantic's George B. Dorr Museum of Natural History, The Ingenious Mr. Peale. In COA's Gates Center at 5:30 p.m. on August 17, a lecture about Peale will be given by historian and naturalist Robert McCracken Peck, a fellow of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, as well as their curator of art and artifacts and editor of their scientific publications. Peck will discuss the very delightful details of the extremely engaging Peale in a talk called, Ordering the Cosmos: Charles Willson Peale and the Philadelphia Museum.

Peale lived for 86 years, from 1741 through 1827. The stories about him are legion. When mastodon bones were discovered in upstate New York, Peale left Philadelphia to see whether he could find an entire,  skeleton. He found most of three, but stuck in deep mud, impossible to extract given the technology of the day. Undaunted, Peale invented his own device for excavating the bones, then displayed them in the museum. Of course, his children were something, too. When the mastodon was assembled, his son Rembrandt Peale held a dinner party, for 13, within the bones of the beast.

Peale had 17 children and named most of them after artists; many of them went on to be come artists. When they were born, as when they married, Peale inscribed their names not in a bible but in Mr. Pilkington's Gentleman's and Connoisseurs Dictionary, a volume on art and artists, such was his love of art. One of Peale's daughters, named after renaissance painter Sophonisba Anguissola, married Charles Coleman Sellers, making Mount Desert Island summer resident Peter Sellers the great, great, great grandson of Peale.

"Peale is just one-thirty-second of my DNA, that's fairly remote," says Sellers, a former COA trustee and husband of COA drama teacher, Lucy Bell Sellers. "But Peale was a painter and his children were painters and the grandchildren also painted and then got into photography. I'm trained as engineer and mathematician, but having grown up in family, I couldn't be all that ignorant of all that." Perhaps the Friendship sloop that Sellers built by hand, from his own timber attests to his ancestry.

Sellers was helpful in arranging for COA to create this exhibit, designed by COA alumna Rebecca Melius, who graduated in 2001, with help from COA faculty member and museum designer, Dru Colbert.

A founder of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Peale was an early advocate of drawing from the nude, much to the dismay of proper society. Indeed, if a person could be said to be too far ahead of his time, it was Peale. He wanted his museum to establish a national museum of natural history, something on the order of what the Smithsonian is now. But though he and his friend Jefferson corresponded about the possibilities for quite some time, Jefferson never could find the funding for such an institution. His concept of display dioramas was lost for at least a generation, for after Peale's museum closed, and the artifacts were sold off to Barnum for the circus, only to be incinerated in a fire at the circus. Other of his visionary ideas were more successful, though not necessarily realized by others. When his wife came down with yellow fever during an epidemic that panicked Philadelphia, Peale refused to have her bled, and instead treated her instead with rest, good diet and careful hygiene. She survived when thousands died. Later, he advocated for preventative medicine, including the establishment of free health centers, but to no avail. Peale improved on a contraption known as a velocipede, an early bicycle, and traveled around Philadelphia on it. Late in life, when he began losing his teeth, he experimented on false teeth, trying out the dentures of various animals before perfecting a porcelain glaze. He even created a form of moving entertainment, using large-scale dioramas and a judicious application of light and sound.

But what pleases Sellers most is Peale's generosity. As a captain in the Revolutionary Army, he went out of his way to find food for his men. Of southern origins, he taught a slave that the family owned a trade, so he could buy his freedom. Moses Williams learned to create silhouettes, and stayed at the museum to cut these popular art pieces for many a visitor.

For reservations for the August 17 lecture, Ordering the Cosmos: Charles Willson Peale and the Philadelphia Museum by Robert McCracken Peck, of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, please call 288-5015, ext. 254. The exhibit, The Ingenious Mr. Peale will open August 18 and run through spring, 2006 at College of the Atlantic's George B. Dorr Museum of Natural History. Hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Saturday, except in December when it's open by appointment. Admission is $3.50 for adults; $2.50 for seniors; $1.50 for teen and $1 ages 3 through 12. For more information, call the museum at 288-5015, ext. 240.

Images: 
The Peale Family a portrait painted by Charles Willson Peale. Oil on canvas. Image courtesy New York Historical Society, NYC
Sophinisba, a silhouette from the Peale Museum, courtesy of Peter Sellers.
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