When talking about mastodons, as is often the case at Museum Village (we have our own affectionately named “Harry” after its site of discovery—Harriman, New York) the artist Charles Willson Peale and his own exhumation of one of these beasts (the first complete unearthing) in nearby Montgomery, New York is often brought up. Some visitors know of the early mastodon discovery in Orange County ( the location of Museum Village as well) but they really don’t know about the man that was responsible for the considerable task of exhuming a skeleton of this size.

       I have to admit that I didn’t know about Peale’s connection to a mastodon until adulthood, although Peale the artist was well known to me through the ubiquitous blue 5 cent US postage stamp circulated in the 1960s and 70s depicting a portrait of George Washington done by him in the 18th century. It  seemed that this was the only stamp that any of my relatives ever managed to save  for me from their mail piles for my rabid childhood stamp collecting.

      Peale was quite an interesting sort. As a former saddler, he was that important amalgam of crafts person and artist so typical of that first generation of American artists.  Peale was among the first to return back to Colonial America after tutelage under Royal Academician and iconoclast Benjamin West with a new found approach to conventional portrait painting that expanded not only and merely the colonial British oeuvre but western art’s own pictorial record to include more than a mere likeness;  his, like West’s own, defied many classical conventions and provided a view of a new place and a new way of life unique in its own right. It was a record of how Colonial Americans behaved and what things they surrounded themselves  in life with. This was a departure from merely including props in portraits that had been standard to the genre. It brought American portraiture into the world of the candid.

      As something equivalent to a later day Da Vinci, this sometime scientist, inventor, author, and educator realized a variety of subjects in a variety of art media, including miniatures, portraits, historical and mythological genre paintings and landscapes. He and his large family of painters together produced a body of work that could fill his one-time famous  and unmatched Philadelphia museum which he founded and filled with  natural science specimens as well as artifacts of man made origin unrivaled in colonial America and the later United States of the time. The Peales’ body of work provides to this day one of the most significant views of eighteenth century American life.

     Like his contemporary, artist John Trumbull, Peale had fought in the American Revolution; he had served as Washington’s aide-de-camp. It was his artistic output from this time that evidences his realization that artists like himself could serve the Republic in many capacities. This included not only formal portraits but “battle flags for volunteercompanies” and creating “effigies of ‘traitors'” for noisy political parades, transparencies for public displays, designs for nationalistic publications and celebratory arches broadcasting revolutionary ideology through classical symbolism. He also created a number of head and full-length portraits of George Washington on ivory, canvas, and a mezzotint print that are familiar to Americans to this day (Tighe 55).

      Although Peale will forever be remembered for his portraits of America’s first citizen as well as others contributive to the making of this nation, it is his own self-portrait amidst numerous others in the Exhumation of the Mastodon (1805-08) that illustrates his inclination towards both discovering and making available evidence of a landscape uniquely America’s own. In recent reconsideration of this painting,  I couldn’t help but make the connection with the 1950s black and white still photographs of  Roscoe W. Smith with the Harriman mastodon in situ that hang in the Natural History Building at Museum Village to this day.

      It is the Harriman mastodon, through Smith’s own efforts and expense, that was ultimately reconstructed through the assistance of the American Museum of Natural History and put on display here more than fify years ago. In several stills, Smith stands in the semi-formal attire of the era amidst the water and mud which encapsulated tusk and bone, undoubtedly aware of the comparisons that would be made between his actions and its photo documentation with those actions and their documentation by his predecessor museum founder Peale in the same Orange County a hundred fifty years before.   

      Before Peale carried out his 1801 dig for the Mastodon in Montgomery depicted in the painting, “legends” of “a race of giants warring to the death with immense monsters” were popular explanations for bones uncovered in many a spring plowing or struck upon while digging the trenches and wells that would drain and claim land in Orange County, New York and other similar areas of the state that had remained essentially untouched since post Ice Age glacial retreat.  The Harriman mastodon was actually discovered during the construction of a modern Thruway for automobile travel making it truely a discovery of the modern age while in contrast the Montgomery mastodon and many others were discovered during the course of more traditional agricultural activity.        

       The Mastodon lived in the last periods, the Holocene and Pleistocene, of the Ice Age dating as far back as 1.75 million years ago to as recently as tens of thousands of years ago, so Peale’s exhumed mastodon skeleton was one of the last examples of a period of such giants that extended back to the onset date of life in North America some 250 million years ago (Ivanov 300, 305).

      The Peale discovery of the mastodon was a coup, exhuming the entire skeleton of one of these titans in post-colonial America was unprecedented. After contacting Jefferson, “America’s first organized scientific expedition” was immediately supplied with army tents, navy pumps, funds and support from the Philosophiocal Society. A water removal wheel of Peale’s own ingenious design is showcased in the  historical painting depicting not only the challenge of ground water for this son of the Age of Enlightenment, but an impending “Catskill Mountain storm ” in this nation of sublime nature.

       The depiction of this imagery set a precedence whereby the Catskill Mountains became one of several birthplaces of a newly chronicled American history by artists.  By the antebellum era, author Washington Irving and artist Thomas Cole, among others, succeeded at subverting the truths of America’s sublime nature  into an appealing series of  legends that survive in popular culture to this day.  Peale’s portrait of himself with the mastodon was yet another effort beyond the accomplishment to achieve greater status for his museum that he anticipated would one day parallel the museums of Europe as a “national institution”, but Peale’s tangible collection would never become part of the latter reality. (Adams 58-9).

      Peale’s museum eventually passed to P.T. Barnum for his American Museum located on New York’s Broadway. Barnum’s museum holdings began with the “acquisition of the New York museum of Rubens Peale  … eventually absorbing even a large part of of the elder Peale’s celebrated collection, which…[he] bought at [a] sheriff’s sale in Philadelphia and divided with Moses Kimball of the Boston Museum” (Saxon 92-3). These collections were destroyed in fires that gutted Barnum’s American Museum in 1865 and 1868. The mastodon of Peale’s exhumation actually survives outside the nation’s boundaries on display at the Hessisches Landesmuseum in Darmstadt, Germany; it was sold to the museum in 1852.

      As president of the American Philosophical Society, Thomas Jefferson himself had prioritized unlocking the truth of these bones that promised to make critics like the Count de Buffon, who theorized that “the American climate supported only weak and degenerative forms of life”, eat crow.  Jefferson had instructed explorers Lewis and Clarke to bring back further evidence of the mastodon’s existence in the nether regions of the continent where he believed that they mnay have migrated to and might even still exist. Such was the understanding of the prehistoric even among America’s most educated. The Corps of Discovery complied with bones and much more by the time Peale completed this picture, but no living “monsters” were ever found. Many years later, Peale, still proud of his acquisition, chose to portray himself next to the now assembled mastodon central to his museum collection in The Artist in His Museum (1822). A showman of the first order long before P.T. Barnum Peale depicted the  mastodon largely obscured by a curtain as not to reveal all that one could potentially see

Peale's mastodon at Hessisches Landesmuseum, Darmstadt

for the price of admission.

References:

Adams, William Howard, ed. The Eye of Thomas Jefferson. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1976.

Ivanov, Martin. Stanislava Hrdlickova and Ruzena Gregorova. The Complete Encyclopedia of Fossils. Netherlands: Hackberry Press, 2002.

Saxon

Tighe. Mary Ann and Elizabeth E. Lang. Art America. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1977.

Schmick, Robert. A Wilderness For All: The Transmuting and Transmitting of Wilderness Imagery By Print Media and Material Culture For Antebellum America. Ann Arbor. MI: University of Michigan Dissertation Services, 2007.