Science, popular culture and profit: Peale's Philadelphia Museum

Abstract

The Philadelphia Museum, begun in 1786, was the first scientifically organized museum of natural history in the United States. For most of its sixty years of existence, it housed the largest collection of natural history specimens in the country. This impressive public museum was founded not by a college or a university, not by a scientific society, or by a national or local government, but by a relatively poor individual, the American portrait painter, Charles Willson Peale,1 who operated the Museum for private gain. Peale has often been labelled a showman by historians.2 In itself the word is not entirely unjustified, for Peale did in fact employ some of the techniques of an entrepreneur in order to lure the public into paying his 25<f admission fee. However, the word showman has to Americans become almost synonymous with the 19th century circus impressario, P. T. Barnum. Peale has been regarded as a precursor of Barnum, who, to reinforce the connection, eventually obtained half of Peale's natural history collections, and whose American Museum in New York City marked the culmination in America of the tradition of private museums begun by Charles Willson Peale. Yet in their aims and their relation to the scientific communities of their day, Peale and Barnum were worlds apart. Calling Peale a showman obscures the fact that when Peale began his museum of natural history, a