L’Artiste dans son musée

At 81, Charles Willson Peale painted himself lifting a curtain, the way a showman would, on the museum he had built inside Independence Hall in Philadelphia. He raises the drape to reveal long cases of birds and specimens receding into the light. At the right stand the bones of a mastodon, which he had dug from a New York farm in 1800 and reassembled himself. That skeleton mattered beyond its size. A famous French naturalist had claimed American animals were feeble, shrunken versions of Europe's, and here was a giant beast out of American ground to answer him. Peale meant his museum to teach ordinary people. On the floor lies a dead wild turkey, brought in that morning to be preserved.