Charles Willson Peale

Charles Willson Peale is remembered as a portraitist of the American Revolution, and he painted George Washington from life several times, starting when Washington was still a Virginia colonel. Yet the work he cared most about was a building.

In 1786 he opened a museum in Philadelphia, one of the first in the country, meant to show ordinary Americans the natural world set out in order. Its prize came in 1801, when he led a dig in a marl pit near Newburgh, New York, and pulled out the bones of a mastodon, an extinct relative of the elephant. He mounted the skeleton, made it the centre of the museum, and then painted the excavation itself, filling the crowd with members of his own family.

Peale named his sons after painters — Rembrandt, Raphaelle, Titian — and several became artists in turn. At 81 he painted himself lifting a curtain on his museum galleries, the mastodon looming behind him, a self-portrait now at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia.