Reviews of Books

The Work of Autobiography and the Workings of Conscience

In 1825, Charles Willson Peale could look back on an extraordinarily productive life that had included numerous careers. He had started out in the humble trade of saddle making, but rose in rank through his talent for portrait painting; in that calling, he met and depicted many of the most notable Americans of his day. As founder, organizer, and proprietor of one of America's first natural history museums, he played a leading part in fostering international scientific interest in New World fauna and minerals. Among these central threads of his career he interwove a multitude of other pursuits, including participation in the republican politics of the Revolution and invention of a score of devices "to encrease the comforts of Life." Yet Peale did not review his accomplishments in tranquility. In 1822, after more than a decade of "retirement" on his experimental farm in Germantown, Pennsylvania, he returned to Philadelphia to restructure his museum and pay off his debts. Early in 1825, his eldest son Raphaelle died at the age of fifty-one. Amid all these burdens, the eighty-four-year-old painter took up the pen to recount the story of his life.	1
The autobiography Peale composed during 1825 and 1826 has long been recognized by historians of American art as the essential fount of information about its author. Since 1945 the original manuscript and an annotated typescript prepared in 1897 by his great-grandson Horace Wells Sellers have been in the collections of the American Philosophical Society. These sources provided Sellers's son Charles Coleman Sellers with the armature for two biographies of Peale, one of which received the Bancroft Prize in 1970 and remains the standard reference on the polymath's career. Aptly, Lillian B. Miller, the vigorous and visionary first editor of the Peale Family Papers project, stressed the significance of the autobiography in her introduction to the microfiche edition of the Collected Papers of Charles Willson Peale and His Family (Millwood, New York, 1980).	2
By issuing a microfiche edition at the outset of her work with the Peale Family Papers, Miller opened up the richest trove of material concerning what was to be the favorite topic of the final two decades of her distinguished career in American art history. From the intellectual leadership Miller took in the interdisciplinary nexus that might be called Peale studies has developed a succession of dissertations, articles, and books concerning such topics as the history of the Industrial Revolution, the formation of the middle class, the rise of museums of art and natural history, and the evolution of an indigenous fine arts tradition. Although the letterpress series, The Selected Papers of Charles Willson Peale and His Family, has still to publish a concluding volume devoted to Peale's children, it has reached its climax with the long-awaited autobiography. Volume 5 also marks a sea change in the project's fortunes, for after Miller's death in 1997, senior associate editor Sidney Hart assumed the post of editor.	. . .