The Peale Family & The Artist in His Museum
Who was Charles 
Willson Peale?
Step into Peale's extraordinary world--painter, naturalist, museum founder, and patriarch of America's most influential artistic dynasty--with Dr. Wendy Bellion, Sewell C. Biggs Chair in American Art History at the University of Delaware, for an illuminating exploration of the Peale family's outsized impact on American art and culture.
At the heart of this talk is Peale's iconic self-portrait The Artist in His Museum (1822)—a masterwork that captures Peale lifting a curtain to reveal his Philadelphia Museum's natural history wonders, inviting viewers into a space where art, science, and civic education converge. But the Peale story doesn't end with Charles Willson. His children—Raphaelle, Rembrandt, Rubens, Titian, and more—carried forward his artistic legacy, each making distinct contributions to American portraiture, still life, and museum culture.
A Nation of Artists features at least nine works by Peale family members, and PAFA's reinstalled galleries spotlight their enduring influence on American visual culture. Dr. Bellion, a leading Peale scholar, reveals why this family mattered so deeply to the formation of American identity and why their work continues to speak powerfully today.
About Wendy Bellion
Professor Wendy Bellion (Ph.D. Northwestern University) specializes in North American art history. Her teaching and scholarship take an interdisciplinary approach to American visual and material culture, focusing on the eighteenth and nineteenth-century United States and exploring American art within the cultural geographies of the British Atlantic world and early modern Americas. She has served as the Terra Foundation of American Art Visiting Professor in Paris, and she has held research fellowships with the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, Henry Luce Foundation/ACLS, National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture.
Her current research includes projects about the Peale family, the visual culture of the Chestnut Street Theatre, and a co-edited volume about iconoclasm across the early Americas (with Mónica Domínguez Torres and Jennifer Van Horn). A co-edited special issue about “Revolution” is forthcoming in Journal18 (spring 2026).
Her recent publications include Material Cultures in the Global Eighteenth Century: Art, Mobility, and Change (2023, with co-editor Kristel Smentek; Iconoclasm in New York: Revolution to Reenactment (2019); Citizen Spectator: Art, Illusion, and Visual Perception in Early National America (2011), which won the Smithsonian’s 2014 Charles C. Eldredge Prize for Outstanding Scholarship; and Objects in Motion: Art and Material Culture across Colonial North America (Winterthur Portfolio, 2011, with co-editor Mónica Domínguez Torres). She is a frequent podcast guest, appearing recently on Thing4Things and Worlds Turned Upside Down.
Professor Bellion is a past Director of the University’s Center for Material Culture Studies and has served as Associate Dean for the Humanities in the College of Arts & Sciences. She is currently a member of the American Antiquarian Society’s Advisory Council and will be the Robert Sterling Clark Visiting Professor at the Clark Art Institute/Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art during 2027-28.
Artworks by the Peale Family at PAFA
Frances Gratz Etting, 1794
Watercolor on ivory
2 3/8 x 1 9/16 in.
Gift of Frank Marx Etting, 1886.1.4
Madame Lallemand, 1810s
Watercolor on ivory
1 7/8 x 1 ½ in.
Gift of Charles Hare Hutchinson, 1898.10
Strawberries and Cherries, c. 1813–1830
Oil on canvas
10 1/16 x 12 1/8 in.
Provenance unknown, 1924.11
The Old Museum, 1858–60
Oil on tin
14 1/16 x 20 1/16 in.
Bequest of Charles Coleman Sellers, 1980.9
A Nation of Artists
How does memory shape progress? Join us to celebrate Juneteenth at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts for a powerful program for A Nation of Artists with Dr. Willa Cofield, an educator, author, and filmmaker. Through her story, explore how art and activism intersect to protect the voices of freedom and progress.
This special event features a screening of the documentary "The Nine O'Clock Whistle" and a special conversation with Dr. Cofield about her life as an American artist.
Following the screening, we will host a post-film discussion with Dr. Cofield followed by a book signing and social reception with the audience. We are excited to partner with Uncle Bobbie's Coffee and Books, who will be providing copies of Dr. Cofield's book The Nine O'Clock Whistle!
Juneteenth is a federal holiday commemorating the end of slavery in the United States.
On June 19, 1865, 2,000
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