Artist/Maker
Charles Willson Peale
(American, 1741 – 1827)
Depicted
Charles Willson Peale
(American, 1741 – 1827)
Former owner
Sybilla Summers
(American, 1797 – 1861)
Former owner
Eleanor Loretta Durn Summers
Former owner
Lillian M. Summers
Former owner
Adaleane Greenwood
Self-Portrait
1824
Oil on canvas
Overall: 26 1/4 x 22 in. ( 66.7 x 55.9 cm )
Purchase, James B. Wilbur Fund
1940.202
Charles Willson Peale (1741-1827) established himself in Philadelphia in the late eighteenth century as one of the foremost portrait painters in America, having spent two years abroad in the late 1760s studying his craft in London under the tutelage of the American-born artist, Benjamin West. Later in his career, Peale devoted himself mainly to the creation and management of the Peale Museum in Philadelphia. In his last self-portrait, Peale chose to commemorate his greatest contribution to science: the excavation of two fossilized mastodon skeletons from a glacial bog near Newburgh, New York in 1801. Peale is pictured with an enormous leg bone, which was incorporated into the reconstructed skeleton and displayed in his museum. The Society purchased the portrait from a descendant of the artist, Adaleane (Summers) Greenwood, in 1940.
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