ExclusiveSophonisba Peale: America’s First Female Ornithologist

Welcome to American Legends. My name is Tiffany Brannan. Each culture has its legends, and that could be myths or different stories, but here in America, our greatest legends are the wonderful heroes who are right from our history pages. Now, some of these heroes are very famous and some are obscure, but each person deserves to be discovered because each man or woman stands as a great example of how we can be better Americans Art and science are often considered mutually exclusive, two very different fields of study. However, each is a different way of helping us understand the world in which we live. In the early day of the United States of America, there were many brilliant men and women who studied not just one discipline, but many. These people were called polymaths. Many great examples of polymaths were people from the renowned Peale family. This dynasty is called the first family of art in America, and it all began with the father, Charles Wilson Peale, who was one of the most renowned portraitists in the colonial days of America around the time of the revolution. He inspired all his children to follow in his footsteps of studying art and science. It wasn't just his sons whom he encouraged, however. One of his most trusted and gifted children was a daughter, Sophonisba Angushola Peale. During his long life, Charles Wilson Peale had three wives, the first two of whom, sadly, died before he did, necessitating his remarrying to have mothers for his numerous children. He had 17 children, thankfully many of which lived to adulthood, and from his first wife, Rachel, he had six surviving children. The second daughter out of these first six children was Sophonisba. She was born on April 24th, 1786 in Philadelphia, the town which the Peales called home for most of their lives. She was named after an Italian Renaissance painter, Sophonisba Angushola. Peale named almost all his children after the men and women of art, science, and deep thinking who inspired him. Thus, Sophonisba grew up alongside brothers with names like Rembrandt, Rubens, Raphael, Michelangelo, and Benjamin, as in Benjamin Franklin. Sophonisba is a beautiful but rather long name, so she was nicknamed Soapy. Sophonisba was one of the most trusted of Peale's children, largely because, as one of the youngest in that first marriage, she ended up acting as almost a mother to her younger half-siblings. In fact, she played an important role in the Peale household during all three of her father's marriages. Like her brothers, she was trained in art from a young age. She learned painting and drawing. She also shared her father's interest in sciences. In the year 1784, Charles Wilson Peale started the Philadelphia Museum, sometimes called Peale's Philadelphia Museum. For the first two years, it was just an art museum displaying mainly portraits which he'd created and other great works of art. But in the year 1786, the year that Soapy was born, he added a natural history section. You see, Peale wasn't just an artist, he was also a scientist, relishing the fields of taxidermy, taxonomy, botany, natural history, of course, and ornithology. Sophonisba proved to be his great helper and pupil in many of these fields. In her adolescent years, she began learning the art of taxidermy, preserving animals, mainly birds. This was quite a new field at the time, particularly in the United States. Not much studying had been done about the numerous unique animals which were found in the New World but were unknown to the scientists of Europe. Peale and several of his children made great strides in this field by hunting, preserving, and displaying these artifacts, particularly birds, and then sometimes trading them to museums in Europe in exchange for British and other European birds. This helped the Old World understand the unique flora and fauna of New World. By the age of 16, Soapy had learned how to preserve birds in arsenic, and her father was quite delighted by her progress. By the age of 17, she accompanied her father on his hunting expeditions to collect these specimens, and in a letter to one of his sons, Rubens, Charles enthusiastically praised his daughter's skills and her love for hunting with a small shotgun. As a young girl, Soapy was mainly educated alongside her brother Rubens. While some of the older brothers in the family, like Rembrandt and Raphael, became excellent painters in their early days, Rubens had poor eyesight so he wasn't destined for a professional art career. Similarly, as a young woman, Soapy wasn't aiming to be a professional artist either. Thus, they were educated together, learning many intellectual pursuits such as museation. Those two ended up being almost parents of sort to the younger children, and Charles left them as the ones to really oversee the museum when he was away, and to teach other people how to manage it in his retirement. In addition to her scientific and artistic studies, Soapy studied languages. She particularly flourished in the study of Latin, and she proved so excellent at it by the age of 17 that her father wrote in a letter that he had to stop teaching her that so that she could focus on French. This proved very useful in another very important part of the museum, which was taxonomy. That's the science of the naming of different creatures, particularly the method that was developed by Swedish taxonomist Charles Linnaeus. The Peale Museum was the first museum to use the Linnaean system for labeling different artifacts. Numbers and names would be used so that eventually they could replace the textbook that had to be in the display room with a unique label beneath each artifact or specimen. This was a job which Soapy took on. She wrote an accurate and detailed description and label for each artifact in English, French, and Latin. This work was deemed so important that she and her father stayed in Philadelphia in 1803 during the yellow fever epidemic to complete the job. Because of her study, hunting, and preservation of bird specimens, Sophonisba is considered the first female American ornithologist. At the age of 18, Sophonisba began courting Coleman Sellers, an engineer. Their correspondence is proof of the fact that she was not only gifted in art and science, but that she clearly had studied a lot of literature because the letters she wrote are almost poetry. The next year, they were married, and during their marriage she had six children. They spent the first year or so of their marriage continuing to live with the Peale family, and then eventually they went to live with his family and branched out on their own. Some have posited that she basically gave up her art and science at this time, but some details from later in her life prove that this was to the contrary. Sophonisba was never really in the public eye as either an artist or a scientist. We mainly know of her early flourishing from letters written by her father, particularly to her brother Rubens. During her marriage, although she was still close with her original family, she wasn't as closely associated with her father as she had been before her marriage, so she doesn't figure in the letters as often. Nevertheless, her will is one example of the fact that she clearly had continued her earlier pursuits. In her will, she left her daughter, all her pictures, and her son, her books, including her scientific writings. Clearly, these pictures and scientific writings weren't the few scraps she'd preserved from her maidenhood 55 years earlier. She no doubt had continued these studies of ornithology and art throughout her marriage and, probably even more specifically, during the 25 years of her widowhood, during which time she didn't remarry. She was a very active member of her children's families, even helping to raise many of her grandchildren. There's no reason to believe that she didn't continue, in a private sense, her earlier art. There are records of her continuing to sketch and create paintings. Now, if you look up art by Sofonisba, you'll find more paintings of her than by her. There are a few noteworthy paintings of Sofonisba painted by her father, including one lovely childhood painting where she's with her younger half-brother and a beautiful profile portrait painted from around the time of her wedding. There's also a silhouette which was rendered by an enslaved artist of the family, Moses Williams. Sofonisba practiced other arts, as well as painting and sketching. Like many women of the colonial era, she was an expert quilter. The quilts she created weren't just for warmth and practicality, however. They displayed a great artistry. There is an example of her quilting in one quilt that's preserved by the which has a beautiful Star of Bethlehem pattern. In one letter by Charles Wilson Peale, there's reference to the fact that his daughter was going to delay her debut in society because, instead, she was perfecting her musical powers and her vocal abilities, in which he said she was progressing every day. That reference gives us reason to believe that Sofonisba may have been the only member of the family to practice musical arts, as well as visual arts. Another proof of her continued artistic development is her children. Two of her sons became engineers and inventors. A third son was eventually admitted to the Philosophical Society, which was closely related to her father, and her daughter became a renowned artist. No doubt, these children were all inspired by the creativity and artistry which their mother continued to display throughout her marriage and her upbringing of them. Charles Wilson Peale started the beginning of a very impressive dynasty of art in the United States. Some of these sons became almost as famous as he. Other of his children didn't leave as many existing examples of art, but they were nonetheless very instrumental in the furthering and development of art in America. Through her support of her father, her brothers, her own children, and generations of future artists, Sofonisba Angushola Peale Sellers was a very important part of American art history. If not for her work in developing the labeling and classification of that early museum, the museum system of America might not be what it is today. She certainly deserves a place of honor in this impressive artistic dynasty as an American legend. Thank you for spending this time with me, and I hope you'll join me next time for more American Legends.