A Peek at Peale’s Mastodon

Earlier this month, Ben at Extinct Monsters shared a report on Charles Willson Peale’s mounted mastodon skeleton, now on exhibit at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.

Ben wrote:

Exhumed in 1799 near the banks of the Hudson River and unveiled to the public on Christmas Eve, 1801, this was the very first mounted skeleton of a prehistoric animal ever exhibited in the United States. . . .

After Peale’s Philadelphia museum closed in 1848, the mastodon was sold and wound up at the Hessisches Landesmuseum in Darmstadt, Germany. There it remained for over 170 years, largely forgotten in its home country, until SAAM senior curator Eleanor Harvey had the idea to include it in a new exhibition. . . .

I spoke to Advait Jukar, a Research Associate with the National Museum of Natural History, about his involvement with the mastodon. He inspected the skeleton in early 2020, shortly after it arrived in Washington, DC. As a fossil elephant specialist, Jukar was able to determine that the mastodon was an adult male, and that about 50% of the mount was composed of real, partially mineralized bone.

Fascinatingly, most of the reconstructed bones were carved from wood. This was the handiwork of Rembrandt Peale (Charles’ son), William Rush, and Moses Williams. Most of the wooden bones were carved in multiple pieces, which were locked together with nails and pegs. The craftsmanship is exquisite, and the joins are difficult to make out unless you stand quite close. The mandible is entirely wood, but the teeth are real. These teeth probably came from a different individual—one tooth on the right side didn’t fit properly and was inserted sideways!

The mastodon at SAAM differs from the original presentation at Peale’s museum in a few ways. The missing top of the skull was once modeled in papier-mâché, but this reconstruction was destroyed when the Landesmuseum was bombed during the second world war. It has since been remodeled in plaster.

While the mastodon was never mounted with real tusks, the mount has traditionally sported strongly curved replica tusks, more reminiscent of a mammoth. While Rembrandt Peale published a pamphlet in 1803 suggesting that the mastodon’s tusks should be positioned downward, like a pair of predatory fangs [shown above], it’s unclear if the tusks on the skeleton were ever mounted this way. At SAAM, the mastodon correctly sports a pair of nearly straight replicated tusks, which curve gently upward. 

The exhibit that includes this mastodon, which is actually about the scientist Alexander Humboldt, will be up at the Smithsonian American Art Museum only until 11 July.

“Lafayette: An American Icon” in Boston

The French tall ship Hermione is scheduled to arrive here in Boston on Saturday, 11 July, and to stay for the weekend.

The welcoming events include a parade of reenactors, public tours of the ship, church bells tolling, crafts demonstrations on the Greenway, and the screening of a Gene Kelly film at the Museum of Fine Arts. The last seems like a bit of a stretch, especially since Lafayette didn’t like dancing.

Already the Boston Athenæum has been hosting an exhibit titled “Lafayette: An American Icon.” Curator David Dearinger wrote:

Born into one of France’s wealthiest and most prestigious families, Marie Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier de La Fayette (1757-1834) dreamed of becoming a champion of freedom and a hero of chivalric proportions. . . .

Beginning in 1777, when he left France for America to offer assistance in the American Revolution, he enthralled his countrymen and earned the adoration of the rebellious Americans. Within a year, George Washington thought of the young Frenchman as an adopted son, Lafayette considered himself to be a “citizen of two worlds,” and American patriots commonly referred to him as “Our Marquis.” Lafayette’s fame was assured when he went back to France in 1779 to plead the American cause—and subsequently returned to America with the French government’s promise of troops, ships, and financial support. This alliance turned the tide of the American Revolution and eventually led to the British surrender at Yorktown, Virginia, a historic event in which Lafayette participated.

The Boston Athenæum celebrates Lafayette and his role in the founding of the new United States with an exhibition of portraits and other images of Lafayette (paintings, sculptures, and engravings) as well as a small selection of contemporary documents, manuscripts, and maps. The exhibition is inspired by the recent historic reconstruction of Hermione, the frigate that brought Lafayette back to America in 1780. That ship, with its game-changing news, made landfall in Boston in April of that year.

I have to point out that Lafayette’s news in 1780 was that France was sending more forces. The French navy had already been active off North America for nearly two years at that point. Bostonians had seen thousands of French sailors. L’Hermione was thus neither the ship that first brought Lafayette to America nor the ship that brought news of the French alliance. But it was a grand ship, and its replica is said to be “the largest and most authentically built Tall Ship in the last 150 years.”

The “An American Icon” exhibition includes the statue shown above, “Jean-Antoine Houdon’s great bust of Lafayette, acquired by the Athenæum in 1828 from Thomas Jefferson’s descendants.” Alongside it are works from several other major American museums and libraries,

In the Boston Globe, Mark Feeney wrote of two of the later portraits:

In Samuel F.B. Morse’s painting, of 1825, sapling has matured into oak. The dashing young nobleman who had looked so boyish (and slightly supercilious) hasn’t just aged but thickened. Lafayette has the look of a character out of Balzac, and not necessarily a virtuous one. In contrast, Rembrandt Peale — son of Charles Willson Peale — painted him that same year looking considerably more avuncular, even rather sweet.

The exhibit will be at the Athenaeum until 27 September. Admission is free for members, $5 for everyone else.

The Nose Says No?

Before addressing the changing fortunes of Horatio Gates’s legal father, I thought I’d share visual evidence that might be pertinent to the general’s biological paternity.

You may have noticed that Gates had a long, curved nose. Indeed, it’s hard to miss that prominent facial feature in these portraits of him by Rembrandt Peale (left) and Gilbert Stuart (right).

Here are close-ups of portraits of the three paternity candidates I discussed yesterday: from left to right, Baron Horatio Walpole; his brother, prime minister Sir Robert Walpole; and Peregrine Osborne, the second Duke of Leeds.

The Walpole brothers look a lot alike, and the duke’s nose is the longest of the bunch. But I don’t think any of these gentlemen look strikingly like Gates. And to my knowledge, no one at the time claimed to see any physical resemblance, either.