The most exciting scientific find of the period was Charles Willson Peale’s exhumation in 1801 near Newburgh, New York, of the bones of the mastodon, or mammoth. Peale displayed his mammoth in his celebrated museum and in 1806 painted a marvelous picture of what was perhaps the first organized exhumation in American history. Peale’s discovery electrified the country and put the word mammoth
on everybody’s lips. A Philadelphia baker advertised the sale of mammoth bread.
In Washington a mammoth eater
ate forty-two eggs in ten minutes. And under the leadership of the Baptist preacher John Leland, the ladies of Cheshire, Massachusetts, late in 1801 sent to President Jefferson a mammoth cheese,
six feet in diameter and nearly two feet thick and weighing 1,230 pounds.
Marquis de Lafayette
Oil on canvas. Stratford Hall, Home of the Lees of Virginia, Stratford, VA.
Oil on canvas; 93" x 64". Annapolis Complex Collection (in the old Senate Chamber at Maryland State House), Annapolis, MD.
Cast when Marquis de Lafayette was 28.
Based on the life mask cast by Houdon in 1785.
Marble. State Artwork Collection, Library of Virginia, Richmond, VA.
Bronze; H: 60 m.; W: 47 m.; D: 26 m. Musée franco-américain du château de Blérancourt, Picardy, France.
Terra cotta; 21 x 18 3/4 x 11 1/4 in. (53.34 x 47.625 x 28.575 cm). Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA.
Oil on canvas. Independence National Historical Park, Portrait Collection (Second Bank of the United States), Philadelphia, PA.
Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815 (2009)