Peale's Museum

Charles Willson Peale was one of the most influential Philadelphians when it came to the arts. He is probably most famous for his painting endeavors and his many famous portraits depicting influential people. His perhaps most famous painting, The Artist in His Museum is a self portrait that also shows his museum. Behind him there is  a museum full of Peale collected taxidermy specimens and portraits of the intellectual greats of Peale's era. Peale's museum represents a time when there was a shift in collecting and the introduction of the idea that what you collect represents who you are. In Sharon MacDonald's "Collecting Practices", MacDonald analyzes that collecting became a way to make statements about one's identity. "Collecting was a means of fashioning and performing the self via material things; and the new social figure of the collector became the epitome of the then relatively novel idea that personal identities can be made rather than being definitively ascribed at birth." (pg.85) Essentially people were realizing that they could mold who they wanted to be in society by what they owned. Peale's Museum was very representative of the idea of "molded identity".

The building itself was one of the most famous in Philadelphia, a place where tourists went to experience the place where democracy was signed into law and where great minds thought of ways to govern a new nation. Peale's Museum on the second floor of that building placed him, the owner and idealist behind the whole museum placed him among the great men of the era. His collections not only showed off his extensive travels and research endeavors but the museum also showed off his artistic prowess. His taxidermy specimens were set against intricately painted backdrops of their natural habitats. Also, Peale's museum housed some of the most famous men of that time who sat for Peale's museum paintings. Which also shows to the visitor that Peale himself must be influential because all of these influential people agreed to be apart of his museum.

The site of Peale's museum are important to the study of museums work because his museum helped set guidelines for the meaning of museums and shed light on the meanings people attach to objects and museum spaces.