In 1822, Daguerre and Bouton opened their first Diorama theatre in Paris: a ‘high tech’ mechanical theatre show. The term, diorama, went on to mean different things, for example the habitat displays in museums for natural history. The diorama phenomena display an interesting tension between entertainment and science, which returns in other posts – but also sometimes in my own work.
In the same year, 1822, the American artist, naturalist, scientist and inventor Charles Willson Peale (1741–1827) painted ‘The Artist in His Museum’ (image below). In the foreground are some of his natural history specimens, alongside a painter’s palette. Peale himself is in the centre of the frame, lifting a red velvet curtain with one hand and inviting the viewer in with the other. The golden-tasselled theatrical curtain makes him look like a showman. Partly visible behind the curtain is the lower half of a mastodon skeleton. The curtain is at the intersection of science, art and entertainment.
Left: Charles Wilson Peale, The Artist in his Museum, 1822. Oil on canvas, 263.5 x 202.9 cm (Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts). Photo by Steven Zucker, licensed CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 DEED, 2021 Right: detail.
The painting can also be seen as an analogy for artistic research. The studio in the foreground operates in tandem with the research behind it, and presenting the research is essentially the act of lifting that curtain, if only slightly. In the painting, Peale reveals ‘The Long Room’ of his Philadelphia museum, with its walls adorned with taxidermied specimens arranged in Linnaean displays (see further below). Crucially, there are also visitors: a woman seemingly gesturing in awe at the mastodon, a man and a child, and another man at the far end of the room.
At the time, Peale presented a radical approach to knowledge sharing; museums were not public institutions, but rather university archives that were only accessible for scholars – women were excluded, as well as children and people with little to none education (or connections).
Peale is considered a pioneer of the museum as a publicly accessible container of knowledge, and one of the first natural history museums in the world. It was centred on a large collection of mounted birds, many prepared by Peale himself, and focused on scientific insight at a time when most public displays still resembled elaborate cabinets of curiosity, catering to fascinations for the fantastic, the exotic, and the uncanny as opposed to science.
In ‘The Artist in his Museum’, Peale appears to be fully aware that he is at the intersection of art, science and entertainment, depicting himself as something of a showman. His expression is one of quiet amusement, his hand invites us in and the curtain is an unambiguous theatrical device. This is a fascinating image because it represents a time when art, science, and entertainment were still blending freely, before the specialised disciplines of contemporary academia, art, and popular culture became the separate spheres we now know.
After Peale’s death in 1827, his museum eventually closed for lack of funding, and its collection kept moving from one location to another until it ended up in the ‘Chinese Museum’, which burned down in 1854.
What remained of the collection was sold to megalomaniac showman P.T. Barnum, who added Peale’s taxidermied specimens to his ‘Barnum’s American Museum’ in central Manhattan: a sprawling combination of zoo, wax museum, freak show, circus theatre, and cosmorama, with some educational elements thrown in. Barnum’s American Museum was destroyed by fire in 1865: a horrible disaster killing most of the caged animals and burning what was left of Peale’s original collection.
The loss of that scientific material directly inspired the establishment of the American Museum of Natural History, which opened in 1871. Although Peale never lived to see the habitat diorama emerge, by this long and winding detour through several fires, his ideas indirectly shaped the institution that would eventually become one of the great diorama museums in the world.
(*) Karen Wonders, Habitat Dioramas. Illusions of Wilderness in Museums of Natural History. Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 1993. Page 28, 29.
Links
C.W. Peale on Wikipedia | The Artist in His Museum on Wikipedia
Note: Peale’s ‘Long Room’ displays his collection in Linnaean order — a hierarchical classification of the natural world into kingdoms, classes, orders, genera, and species, first proposed by botanist and zoologist Carl Linnaeus in his ‘Systema Naturae’ (1735). The foundations of this binomial nomenclature are still in use today, though many revisions have occurred: species that were once grouped together based on appearance have since been reassigned on genetic grounds. Linnaean taxonomy lies at the base of many natural history displays, comprehensively showing variations and relations amongst species, and at the time of Peale’s painting, this orderly presentation was a significant innovation. But displaying specimens as isolated objects in wall-to-wall cases has its own limitations — and it is precisely to those limitations that the habitat diorama, with its insistence on context, ecology, and immersive illusion, would eventually provide an answer.