Rembrandt PealeBorn 22 Feb 1778; died 3 Oct 1860 at age 82. American artist and naturalist, son of Charles Willson Peale, who followed his father as a portrait painter with an interest in natural history. Many of Rembrandt Peale's portraits are of scientists. He also took an interest in the technology of his era, including the pioneering steam navigation of John Fitch and Robert Fulton, gas lighting of Baltimore's streets, and the chemistry of pigments. In 1801, he assisted his father's excavation of mastodon bones from the peat bogs of Orange County, New York, from which they assembled two skeletons. One was mounted in his father's Philadelphia Museum. Rembrandt displayed another as a travelling exhibit around New York (1802) and London (1802, 1803). From the details of its fossil teeth, he believed the mastodon was a carnivor, though Georges Cuvier shortly established it was a herbivor.« |
