Charles Willson Peale moved from a trade apprenticeship into painting, natural history, and museum management. After working as a saddlemaker, he received instruction from colonial artists and studied with Benjamin West in London from 1766 to 1769. Returning to Maryland, he established a portrait practice and painted George Washington from life in 1772, beginning a long association with the visual record of the revolutionary generation.

Peale moved to Philadelphia in 1776 and served in its militia during the Revolution, including the campaigns around Trenton and Princeton. He also participated in Pennsylvania politics and served in the state assembly. His portraits represented soldiers and political leaders as identifiable individuals while helping create a public image of the new republic. Commissions for Washington portraits combined artistic employment with the political commemoration of military leadership.

During the 1780s he developed a portrait gallery and a museum that brought pictures together with natural specimens and historical objects. The Philadelphia Museum emphasized classification and public education, displaying birds, mammals, and other material in arrangements intended to make nature intelligible. In 1801 he organized the excavation of mastodon remains in New York and exhibited the reconstructed skeleton, linking field investigation, spectacle, and commercial enterprise.

Peale helped establish the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1805 and trained members of his family in artistic work. His museum also depended on collaborators, collectors, and the labor of people whose contributions received less public recognition. He pursued inventions and agricultural experiments while continuing to paint. The Artist in His Museum, completed in 1822, presents him lifting a curtain on his collections and makes the museum itself a subject of art. He died in 1827, having made portraiture and natural history related methods of public education.