Narratives of Collections

Three portraits by Charles Willson Peale hang above visitors' heads, mimicking their placement in Peale's museum

The Second Bank of the United States, killed by Andrew Jackson and given new life by the National Park Service, currently houses a portrait gallery of important men and women of early America and Philadelphia. The base of the collection are the portraits of Charles Willson Peale, the American portraitist who opened the United States' first Natural History Museum in Independence Hall, where above his taxidermied birds, reptiles, and insects hung his portraits of notable men, American and European, in politics, science, art, and other fields.

While the gallery space itself uses Peale's portraits to tell the history of the men and women depicted, as Independence National Historical Park curator Karie Diethorn intended, it is a history limited by the collection itself. After Peale's death and unable to continue operating the museum, his family sold off his collection, leaving the portraits for last. At the time, the City of Philadelphia sought to turn Independence Hall into a Revolutionary War museum, and bought the Peale portraits of Revolutionary heroes, notable men in Philadelphia history, and the statesmen who shaped the early republic. When the National Park Service took over the site in the 1950s, it inherited the collection and built on it, acquiring non-Peale portraits of the men and women who walked the streets of Revolutionary Philadelphia.

Charles Willson Peale established his museum to educate the paying public on natural history as well as the history of great men. But does today's general public lose out by not having access to all his portraits from his museum in one place? How does the great man narrative surrounding portraiture impact how the public views the exhibit?