The Hammock Papers: Happy birthday, Peale.

15 April 2016

Happy birthday, Peale.

Peale, C.W., Joseph Brant, 1979

Charles Willson Peale was born on this day in 1741.

Charles Willson Peale and the Lewis and Clark Corps of Discovery Expedition ...

The world was certainly changing in 1806, even as the Museum itself was yet going strong. In 1804 Peale had received a first specimen from the Lewis and Clark expedition: a horned lizard. Many more specimens arrived in October 1805, including three live ones (two magpies and a prairie dog). Other specimens arrived later, the items listed in the accession books in 1809 and reported in Poulson's Daily Advertiser on March 1, 1810. Some items came to the Museum as late as 1828, the year following Peale's death and when Jefferson's Poplar Forest Plantation was sold.

As a man who shared Jefferson's politics, a museum director who benefited from the expedition's discoveries, and someone with a keen interest in natural history, Charles Willson was as enthusiastic about the expedition as anyone. The future of America had ever-widening possibilities, and Meriwether Lewis and William Clark were two of the new nation's heroes. The stuffed birds and mammals, the skins and skeletons, and especially the Indian artifacts, that Peale received—mainly from Lewis, through Jefferson—greatly benefited the museum and consequently the public's appreciation of the expedition. Any number of connections between Peale, the expedition, and its specimens could be enumerated, but it is perhaps most illuminating to concentrate on two: mounting the pronghorn antelope and the relationship between Peale and Lewis.

CONNECT

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WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

"When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone and of good cheer – say travelling in a carriage or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep – it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence, and how, they come I know not ; nor can I force them. Those ideas that please me I retain in memory and am accustomed, as I have been told, to hum them to myself. If I continue in this way, it soon occurs to me how I may turn this dainty morsel to account, so as to make a good dish of it. That is to say, agreeable to the rules of counterpoint, to the peculiarities of various instruments etc. All this fires my soul, and, provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodised, and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it like a fine picture or a beautiful statue at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once. What a delight this is, I cannot tell."

MARCUS AURELIUS

"Is your cucumber bitter? Throw it away. Are there briars in your path? Turn aside. That is enough. Do not go on and say, 'Why were things of this sort ever brought into this world?' neither intolerable nor everlasting - if thou bearest in mind that it has its limits, and if thou addest nothing to it in imagination. Pain is either an evil to the body (then let the body say what it thinks of it!)-or to the soul. But it is in the power of the soul to maintain its own serenity and tranquility."

VINCENT van GOGH

"What am I in the eyes of most people? A nonentity or an oddity or a disagreeable person — someone who has and will have no position in society, in short a little lower than the lowest. Very well — assuming that everything is indeed like that, then through my work I’d like to show what there is in the heart of such an oddity, such a nobody. This is my ambition, which is based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Even though I’m often in a mess, inside me there’s still a calm, pure harmony and music. In the poorest little house, in the filthiest corner, I see paintings or drawings. And my mind turns in that direction as if with an irresistible urge. As time passes, other things are increasingly excluded, and the more they are the faster my eyes see the picturesque. Art demands persistent work, work in spite of everything, and unceasing observation."

DAN CAMPBELL