The Baltimore Museum and Gallery of Fine Arts was the offspring of the redoubtable Mr, Charles Willson Peale, a personage of seemingly inexhaustible energies and spectacularly variegated talents. Silversmith, saddler, watchmaker, wood-carver, violinist, inventor, and painter—as well as the creator of the first set of enamel teeth ever made in America—this remarkably protean genius (who had also done distinguished service in the Revolutionary War) aspired to establish a great public institution dedicated to the cultivation of aesthetic taste and the diffusion of scientific knowledge. In 1786, this dream was realized when Mr, Peale opened his first museum at Philadelphia—“an elegant establishment,” as he advertised it, “for the rational enjoyment of Natural History & the leisurely contemplation of Art,” In 1801, following the discovery of two mastodon skeletons in Orange County, New York, he undertook—largely at his own expense and with the assistance of his sons Raphaelle, Rembrandt, Titian, and Rubens—the painstaking excavation of these remarkable specimens, one of which eventually became the centerpiece of his imposing collection.

The second of these magnificent fossils became the property of his son, Rembrandt, who took up permanent residence in Baltimore in 1813, In August of the following year—impelled by the same worthy ambitions that had inspired his father—the younger Peale opened his own branch of the museum in a three-story edifice on the west side of Holliday Street, just north of Lexington. For a modest admission fee (twenty-five cents for gentlemen and ladies, half price for children), the public gained access to a succession of bright and spacious galleries, each housing a vast—not to say, wildly eclectic—assemblage of artifacts.

In candor, it must be stated that the scientific—aesthetic—and pedagogical—value of these objets was irregular in the extreme, ranging from the truly sublime to the merely bizarre. Here, visitors might see an authentic Egyptian mummy in its ornate sarcophagus, displayed alongside the stuffed remains of a tropical boa constrictor measuring eighteen feet in length; or view an electrostatic generator, arranged next to a hideously shrunken human head from the isle of Borneo; or contemplate a surpassingly graceful brass statuette from Herculaneum, exhibited beside a Barlow knife with ninety-eight blades; or marvel at a working model of Charles Readhjefer’s perpetual-motion machine, situated close beside an armless young woman named “Madame Helene,” who—by wielding a pair of scisssors with the toes of her right foot— could transform a square sheet of white paper into an elaborate snowflake pattern.