The Exhumation of the Mastodon, 1806—08

Oil on canvas, 49 x 61½ inches. Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore, MD.

Peale and his family are represented to the right of the water wheel. Although his son Rembrandt was the only member of the family actually involved in the exhumation, Peale inserted numerous family members in the painting, including

two wives, nine children, a daughter-in-law and son-in-law, his brother James, and his second wife’s sister and her husband. [from The Peale Family: Creation of a Legacy, 1780—1870; edited by Lillian B. Miller, 1996]

The successful exhumation of the mastodon bones were exhibited in Peale’s Museum.

For all their artistic and philosophical brilliance, the Greeks were failures at politics; Hamilton, in the Federalist, expressed horror and disgust at the distractions with which they were agitated. The Romans captured the American imagination because they had done what the Americans themselves hoped to do — sustain an extensive republic over a course of centuries. So the society of Revolutionary War officers called themselves Cincinnati; president, congress, and senate were all Roman terms. But the Roman example was also cautionary, for when they lost their virture, they slid into empire. When Franklin said, in response to a question from Eliza Powel, that the constitutional convention had produced a republic, if you can keep it, he and she would have remembered that the Romans had failed to keep theirs.

— Richard Brookhiser

Founding Father: Rediscovering George Washington (1996)