Peale studied under West in London, having previously been taught by Copley. Humboldt went with Peale to meet Jefferson in the White House. Jefferson helped Peale organise the exhumation of a mastodon skeleton (which went into the museum Peale had opened), as well as commissioning from him a ‘polygraph’ for copying documents, and donating a collection of minerals to his museum (as also did Franklin, Haüy and Maclure). Banks was a correspondent. Several of Peale’s many children, most notably Titian Peale, had multifaceted careers as artists among other things.