During the early national period Philadelphia was the epicenter of American culture. The city was not only the political capital of the new United States (during most years until 1800) and its foremost commercial city (until superseded by New York about 1820), but also its scientific and artistic capital. Greatly contributing to this stimulating environment were the city’s – indeed America’s – earliest museums that were accessible to the general public, the first opened in 1782 by the eccentric Swiss collector Pierre Eugène Du Simitière, and a second four years later by artist Charles Willson Peale. The two collections themselves, for the most part, are no more – long ago sold, dispersed, or destroyed by fire.

But we know from many surviving contemporaneous sources just what was once in those collections – a very wide range of many thousands of objects including artworks such as paintings, prints, drawings, and sculpture; natural history specimens, both fauna and flora (and in the case of the fauna, both alive and preserved); Native American artifacts and ethnographic materials from many parts of the world; antiquities; fossils; minerals and ores; coins and medals; models of inventions and other manufactured items; books, pamphlets, broadsides, and maps; and a large catch-all category of unclassifiable things that might best be called curiosities (both natural, such as two-headed snakes and five-legged calfs, and artificial, such as fragments of a robe allegedly worn by Queen Elizabeth I).

Much has been written about these two museums (especially the much better-known Peale Museum), but nowhere is there a comprehensive accounting of just what these two museums held and exhibited to the public – that is, just what could have been seen by the American and foreign visitors who experienced these collections – in modern parlance just what contributed to, or indeed constituted, much of the visual and material culture of the city.

When complete, this website -- drawing on the contemporaneous sources, both manuscript and printed, that detail the contents of the two collections – will virtually reconstruct these two museums and present the most complete possible inventory of all the identifiable holdings of these remarkable collections from 1774, when Du Simitière first began to share his collection with visitors, until Charles Willson Peale's death in 1827.

The contemporaneous sources that are being mined to create the website are, for Du Simitière’s collection:

• His Memorandum Books at the Library of Congress in which he recorded the receipt of materials for his collection
• His papers at the Library Company of Philadelphia, which include manuscripts, prints, and other works of art once in his collection and documents that list the prints, coins, medals, and natural history specimens he once owned
• The auction sale broadside published in 1785 when his collection was sold following his death that lists by title more than 250 books that comprised his lending library
• The Library Company's Accession Files, which identify the hundreds of pamphlets and broadsides acquired at the auction sale

There are many more sources available to document the larger and longer-lived Peale Museum, including:

• The Museum’s Accessions Book at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, begun in 1804, which gives the date of donations, a brief description, and the name of donor
• Newspaper notices of recent acquisitions that Peale occasionally published as early as 1787
• Publications of the Museum itself, such as guides and catalogs that list the portraits and other works of art on display
• “A Walk through the Philadelphia Museum,” a ca. 1805 manuscript at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania in which Peale lists and describes scores of the natural history specimens on display
• Peale's several dozen natural history lectures, at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University, in which he describes hundreds of species of birds, mammals, and other natural history specimens in the Museum
• The huge collection of Peale papers at the American Philosophical Society, many of which have been published in the five-volume edition of The Selected Papers of Charles Willson Peale and His Family

• The published writings and illustrations of such scientists as Thomas Say, John D. Godman, Richard Harlan, and Alexander Wilson, whose works drew on the Museum’s specimens

   

  See Du Simitière Sources and Peale Sources in the About drop-down menu.

Neither of these two collections exists today; both collections were disposed of through sale, auction, or other means and their contents scattered, and in some cases destroyed. There have been some survivals, but they represent only a small proportion of the thousands of artifacts the two collections once contained.

The largest cache of survivals are the hundreds of Du Simitière’s books, pamphlets, broadsides, manuscripts, and ephemera acquired by the Library Company; his coins, medals, Native American artifacts, natural history specimens and other curiosities have disappeared.

The second largest cache of survivals are the Peale Museum paintings. Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia now holds 94 of the Museum portraits by Charles Willson, Rembrandt, and James Peale, and many others are in other institutional or private collections.

After the portraits the next largest cache of survivals are ethnographic artifacts, many from the Lewis and Clark Expedition that were contributed by Lewis and Clark either directly to the Peale Museum or via Thomas Jefferson and now at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University.

There are several surviving ornithological specimens from Peale’s Museum at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University and at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University in Philadelphia. And there are a very few other individual survivals, such as the Peale mastodon skeleton now in Germany, a model of Charles Redheffer’s perpetual motion machine at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, and a blue silk sash worn by George Washington at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University.

This is a long-term project that is still under construction. It now has most of the data that can be gleaned from the Du Simitière sources and much of the data for the Peale Museum. The two categories that have not yet been included in this website are: 1) more than 600 species of birds in the Peale Museum's ornithological collection; and 2) about 450 works of art in both museums, including  portraits by members of the Peale family.