Charles Willson Peale

Charles Wilson Peel;Charles Wilson Peale

1741 (Chestertown, Md.) – 1827 (Philadelphia)

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.