ExclusiveTitian Ramsay Peale I: A Young Pioneer of American Science

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 Some genius is tragically short-lived. Such is the case with many great composers, poets, and writers whose unnaturally short lives have led us to wonder what more they could have achieved if they'd lived decades longer. This is also the case with an early American naturalist, a son of a great artist who lived less than two decades, but who paved the way for natural science in the United States through the important work he did during that time. Titian Ramsey Peale was born in Philadelphia in 1780. He was the third surviving son of Charles Wilson Peale, who was a great portraitist in colonial America. His mother was Rachel, the first of Wilson Peale's three wives. Although many of Peale's 17 children did not live to adulthood, Titian was a sad exception in the fact that he survived childhood illness to suddenly die at the age of 18. Nevertheless, he left a lasting impact on both his family and the growing scientific scene of the American world during his 18 years of life. Like his two older brothers, Raphael and Rembrandt, Titian was named after a great artistic master, Titian, who was the famous Italian Renaissance painter best known for developing a unique shade of almost strawberry blonde, which has been applied to that hair color ever since. Now, when you hear the name Titian Ramsey Peale, you might think that this man lived in the 19th century and lived a long life. That was his half-brother, named in his honor, but we're not talking about him. We're talking about Titian Ramsey Peale I. Like his older brothers, Titian was trained in painting and other forms of art from a young age. After all, his father was an accomplished artist, so he wanted all his children, sons and daughters alike, to have a chance to learn the fine details of brush strokes, sketching, drawing, and museum curation. In Philadelphia, the Peale family home was Philosophical Hall, which was also the home of Peale's Philadelphia Museum, started by Charles Wilson Peale, of course, and which was really the first museum in the United States. It began as merely an art museum, but a few years later, Peale added scientific exhibits to the museum, and that was the scope which really interested young Titian. Although he learned art alongside his brothers, he quickly gained a great passion for the natural sciences, studying ornithology, taxidermy, entomology, and natural science. It was common practice in those days for children to follow in their father's footsteps and help with the family business. However, although Peale trained his children to do this, it wasn't merely being part of the family business, as almost all of the children became personally and passionately interested in some art or science or museum curation. In a 1793 letter to a friend, Peale wrote, I have laboured to instruct my children to be industrious and careful that they may help themselves and be useful members of the community, and as I have several, some amongst them will be able to assist me. Not the least of his assistants was Titian, who was 13 at the time. He was a very intelligent, active, and eager child, so he quickly proved to be one of the best helpers of his father. By the mid-1790s, Rembrandt, the second son, had left home to continue his art studies, as he would become the main portraitist to follow in his father's footsteps. Meanwhile, Raphael, the oldest surviving son, and Titian remained behind to work with their father and to learn the business of maintaining and expanding the museum. While Raphael was eagerly studying art, such as painting, Titian studied the sciences. Titian Peale is best remembered as the subject of a double portrait which his father rendered called The Staircase Group. This was painted in 1795, and it features both Raphael, who was 21 at the time, and young Titian, who was 14. This painting was first created for the Philadelphia Museum, not just as a piece of artwork, but almost a sign. It was displayed in a closed doorway, and this placement wasn't accidental. Because of its being in a doorway, from across the room, it almost looked like there was a real staircase right there, and many viewers and visitors to the museum were tricked by this fact. Peale was noted for the hyper-realism of his portraits, which is one reason why he was frequently chosen to make the likenesses of the great presidents and other notable figures of the day. This painting was intended as almost a sign, as it was inviting visitors of the museum to partake in the whole experience, not just as passive viewers, but to really become involved in the art themselves. This is reflected in the stances and the poses of the boys themselves. In the foreground, we see Raphael, who's holding an art palette in one hand, and an artist's mall stick, which is the prop that a painter would use to steady his hand, in the other. He is mounting the steps, but looking over his shoulder as though inviting the viewer to follow him. A few steps higher, we see the impish Titian peering around the corner, beckoning new friends to journey farther into the museum and see all the great exhibits that they've put together. Any visitors to the museum would likely have recognized the boys by their likenesses, since both brothers were always working around the museum, demonstrating exhibits and helping their father develop more displays to put in there. Taxidermy was a big part of the natural science section of the museum, and the number one exhibit there was bird displays. Now, taxidermy was a pretty new field in the United States at this time, so Charles and his children were always developing new and improved means for preserving these specimens, and he wrote proudly in several letters, one of which was to Thomas Jefferson himself, that his young son, who was 15 or 16 at the time, was developing and perfecting even better styles and techniques for preserving these artifacts. They would go out on hunting trips and collect the specimens they needed, and then they would stuff them and preserve them taxidermically to display them in the museum, and even more valuable for Peale, they would trade them with foreign naturalists and taxidermists, and in return they would receive European bird specimens, which they could display in their museum. So these were very valuable things to have, because people in Europe oftentimes had no idea what kind of flora and fauna could be found in the Americas, and thus the Peales helped American nature become better known to the rest of the world, while they helped natural-born Americans, who oftentimes would have little opportunity to ever visit Europe, understand what kind of nature was present in the rest of the world. Because of his work in displaying the birds and studying them, Titian Peale is considered one of the first American ornithologists. He also was very interested in entomology, the study of insects, and as early as 1796, he was making manuscripts and drafts of collections that were describing all the different insects in the United States. Again, a pretty new field at the time. He used not only his scientific knowledge, but his artistic background to make illustrations of these insects, so again, people who would never see them could understand them by seeing these very accurate and very artistic renderings of insects, including butterflies, moths, and, you know, any other insects he could find. He was working on a larger draft of this manuscript in 1798, at the time of his death. A 1796 draft of this manuscript is included at the National Agricultural Library. It's listed in the library's guide to manuscripts as follows. Drawings of American insects, showing them in their several states, together with such minute insects as require investigation by the microscope. Designed and executed from living specimens is an original manuscript with colored plates, drawings, and watercolors. That cumbersome title is really more of a description than just a title, but it gives you an idea of what kind of displays and drawings he was making. Obviously, he had these insects live and was drawing them from sight, so that he could see not only how they look when they're dead, but how they look when they move, how they fly, how they crawl. Quite an in-depth work at the time, and truly, Titian was a pioneer in this field, and his father was so proud of him, and one could say that although he clearly loved working alongside all his children, he was especially proud of Titian and was very impressed by the foresight and eagerness which the boy was showing in developing these styles of art and scientific discovery. Tragically, the world never got to see this young genius's full potential. On September 18th, 1798, Titian died at the age of just 18 of yellow fever. From some letters from his father, it seems that he had had some illness a bit earlier, so his father was trying to keep him out of Philadelphia, where yellow fever was particularly rampant, and having him be in New York City. But Titian really wanted to be with his father, and two days before his death, he contracted yellow fever, and in a remarkably short time, he succumbed to the illness. In some personal letters, you can see the depth of his father's grief, in which he wrote that he thought this grief might shorten his own life, because it was such a heavy burden on his heart. Now, Charles did live a long life after that, but he clearly never forgot how dear that son was to him, and the next year, when another son was born to him and his second wife, he named him Titian Ramsey Peale II, in honor of his son, who had died the year before. Although he only got to work for really a few years, Titian laid the groundwork for his brothers, including his namesake brother, the continuing work of his father, and countless other scientists who would follow in his footsteps. And to this day, people can continue to look back at the illustrations he made, and the things he preserved, which are still on display, are still held in different collections, as an example of what people were doing, not even in the 19th century, but in the late 18th century, because he didn't even live to 1800. So we can see just a few years after the American Revolution, in the very earliest days of our nation, how there were these talented men, and even boys, who were working so tirelessly to study what kind of a nation we had. And I think we tend to think of these people in the early colonial and first days of the nation as these primitive people who were just trying to struggle and survive. But we see by the legacy of the Peale family that, yes, although Charles Wilson Peale fought in the Revolution, and they were still pioneering and trying to settle the country, that back East, in especially places like New York, and Philadelphia, and Boston, they were very cultured and civilized. They had fine art, they had museums, and they were using those talents and that ingenuity, that great American Yankee spirit, to study more about the natural world and create a lasting legacy of science, which would be beneficial not only to Americans, but to the whole world. And Titian Ramsey Peale, the first, deserves to be remembered as part of that legacy. Thank you for spending this time with me, and I hope you'll join me next time for more American Legends.