Hours: Mon-Fri 9am-4:30pm
Sat & Sun 9am-6pm
Cost: Free
Hours: Wed-Sun 11am-5pm
Cost: Free
On visiting the second floor of Independence Hall, where Charles Willson Peale kept his museum, the floor was furnished to recreate a different time and although it was not set up like his museum, luckily there are his own paintings of the space, which is pretty straightforward – a long room, to help envision how the museum was set up. We then went half a block to the Second Bank Portrait Gallery where many of the portraits that had been hanging in the Independence Hall museum are now located. It is here that the National Park Service uses many of Peale's paintings to do a partial reconstruction of his museum. The portraits are located at the top of the wall, just as Peale had them, and below where his specimens would have been, there is a layered wall lit from behind so that you can see images, drawings and so forth of the objects that would have been below the portraits, along with plaques describing Peale's museum and his influence. Something that I think is interesting is that the Second Bank Portrait Gallery is something of a museum preserving parts of another museum. Unfortunately the space could not be kept and many of Peale's natural history objects were sold off by his family after his death. In Susan Crane's essay, “Time, Memory, and Museums” she suggests that, “time is frozen in museums to the extent that its objects are preserved, their natural decay intentionally prevented.” Many different things could have been done with the remaining paintings that the City of Philadelphia bought from the auctioning of them, but the Second Bank chose to display his paintings in a similar fashion to the way Peale had, in a space not unlike the space in Independence Hall, and educate on his museum. In that aspect, the room preserves Peale's museum and the memory of Peale. Perhaps if all his museum objects he had had been destroyed or sold off all over the country or world, the memory of Peale's place in history would also be fainter than it is today.
