The Peales were a distinguished fam

The Peales were a distinguished family of American artists. Charles Wilson Peale is best remembered for his portraits of leading figures of the American Revolution. He painted portraits of Franklin and Jefferson, and over a dozen of George Washington. His life-size portrait of his sons Raphaelle and Titian was so realistic that George Washington reportedly once tipped his hat to the figures in the picture.
Charles Wilson Peale gave up painting in his middle age and devoted his life to the Peale Museum, which he founded in Philadelphia. The world’s first popular museum of art and natural science, it featured paintings by Peale and his family as well as displays of animals in their natural settings. Peale found the animals himself and devised a method of taxidermy to make the exhibits more lifelike. The museum’s most popular display was the skeleton of a mastodon – a huge, extinct elephant – which Peale unearthed on a New York farm in 1801.
Three of Peale’s seventeen children were also famous artists. Raphaelle often painted still lifes of flowers, fruits, and cheese. His works show the same luminosity and attention to detail that the works of the Dutch masters show. In the late eighteenth century, however, portraiture was the rage, and so Raphaelle Peale found few buyers for his still lifes at the time. His brother Rembrandt studied under his father and painted portraits of many noted people, including one of George Washington. Another brother, Rubens Peale, painted mostly landscapes and portraits.
Jams Peale, the brother of Charles Wilson Peale, specialized in miniature. His daughter Sarah Miriam Peale was probably the first professional female portrait painter in America.