Peale, Titian Ramsay, 1799-1885

Titian Ramsay Peale was a naturalist, explorer, and artist.

Painter and naturalist.

Titian Ramsay Peale was an artist and naturalist, and a son of Charles Willson Peale.

Charles Nicoll Bancker was a merchant and financier.

Naturalist and artist.

Titian Ramsay Peale, American naturalist and artist, son of Charles Wilson Peale. With the death of his father, the founder of the Peale's Museum in Philadelphia, Peale became the museum's curator. In 1838-1842, he took part in the American Scientific expedition, and in 1843 obtained a temporary position to work on the specimens and drawings he had made during the voyage. In 1849, he accepted the position of an assistant examiner in the U. S. Patent Office, where he worked primarily with innovations in photography and fine arts. He retired in 1873.

Painter and naturalist, member of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia; examiner of the Patent Office in Washington, 1849-1872.

Titian Ramsay Peale was an artist and naturalist, and was a son of Charles Willson Peale.

Titian R. Peale, the youngest son of Charles Willson Peale, was an American naturalist and artist.

Titian Ramsay Peale (1799-1885), an American naturalist and artist was chief examiner in the United States Patent Office. He also collected specimens on the United States Exploring Expedition (1838-1842).

Artist and student of natural history. Peale sailed as naturalist on board the Peacock, one of two vessels of the United States Exploring Expedition.

The youngest son of Charles Willson Peale was born in Philosophical Hall in November 1799 and given the name Titian Ramsay Peale, after a brother who had died in the yellow fever epidemic of 1798. Educated primarily at home, the young Titian Peale took advantage of his family connections to meet some of America's most prominent naturalists and to attend Caspar Wistar's lectures in anatomy at the University of Pennsylvania. A precocious boy, he was apprenticed out at 13 to learn machine manufacturing, but soon returned to take part in the family business, the Philadelphia Museum, learning how to preserve natural historical specimens and take part in management of the museum.

Having inherited his father's artistic, as well as scientific inclinations, Titian Peale began to contribute as an scientific illustrator while still in his teens. His first professional work of note, the six colored plates for the prospectus to Thomas Say's American Entomology (Philadelphia : Mitchell & Ames, 1817), won him a measure of acclaim and election to the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. More importantly, it opened the door to further work in natural history. In December of that year, he joined Say, George Ord, and William Maclure on an expedition to the coastal regions of Georgia and Florida, and in 1819, his father helped arrange a spot for him as assistant naturalist on Stephen Harriman Long's expedition to the Rocky Mountains, a particularly productive venture. With Say, George Jessup, and Edwin James, among others, the Long party traveled up the Missouri River in the steamboat Western Engineer, before heading up west along the Platte to the front range of the Rockies. They are credited with being the first scientific surveyors of the region.

Upon returning to Philadelphia in 1821, Peale resumed work at the Philadelphia Museum, completing his field drawings and preparing the specimens collected on the expedition. His artistic output rapidly expanded. Peale executed several drawings of new American birds for Charles Lucien Bonaparte's supplement to Alexander Wilson's American Ornithology (Philadelphia, 1825-1833), and was hired by Say to prepare 54 colored plates for a three-volume American Entomology (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum, 1824-1828). He exhibited four watercolors at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1822, three from his Long Expedition work, and the fourth of butterflies.

Scientific exploration continued to be a focus for Peale throughout the 1820s and 1830s. In 1825, he returned to south Florida, and from the fall of 1830 through the spring of 1832, he toured the Magdalena River, Colombia, sketching and collecting huge numbers of butterflies and other specimens. His endeavors on these expeditions and his artistic work, more than his relatively few publications, won him election to the American Philosophical Society in 1833 at the young age of 34. The crowning achievement of his career as a naturalist, however, could well have come with his work as assistant naturalist aboard Charles Wilkes' United States Exploring Expedition (1838-1842). A circumnavigation of the globe that included stops at places as far flung as Fiji and the Philippines, the northwest Pacific Coast and California, the Wilkes Expedition was one of the most ambitious American expeditions of the mid-century.

Unfortunately for Peale, the Wilkes Expedition was to be a disappointment. A shipwreck in the mouth of the Columbia River cost him his most important specimens, and upon his return to Philadelphia, friction erupted between Peale and Wilkes over credit for the scientific discoveries and publication plans. Peale's Mammalia and Ornithology (Philadelphia: C. Sherman, 1848) appeared in a limited edition in 1848, but was later suppressed by Wilkes, with John Cassin's Mammalogy and Ornithology (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1858) taking its place.

After these experiences and a period of difficulty supporting his family as an artist or naturalist, Peale took a position as an assistant examiner in the U.S. Patent Office in 1849. Though never free of the usual political intrigues associated with a governmental post, he remained in the Patent Office until his retirement in 1873.

During this last portion of his career, Peale continued painting, but took strong interest in photography, both in his work at the Patent Office and outside, and he became a founding member of the Amateur Photographic Exchange Club, the first club of its sort in the United States. His desire to produce a massively illustrated work on the butterflies of North America became his scientific focus, however it was never completed and never made it to press. Peale died in Philadelphia in 1885.

Bonaparte, Charles Lucien, Prince of Canino (1803-1857, APS, 1824). Charles Lucien Bonaparte, French naturalist and ornithologist, was a nephew of the Emperor Napoleon, the son of the Emperor’s younger brother Lucien.

Charles Lucien Bonaparte, was raised in Italy and shared his father Lucien’s republican political values. He received an extensive scientific education in Italian universities. In 1822 at the age of nineteen he married his cousin Zenaida-Charlotte-Julie, daughter of Joseph, king of Naples and Spain, and brought her to live in the United States for six years. The couple had twelve children.

Before the age of twenty he discovered a warbler, then unknown to science. And would make his greatest contributions to zoology, even though he had begun his scientific career with several essays in botany. While in the United States Bonaparte published numerous ornithological notes in the Journal of the Philadelphia Academy of Sciences. He continued Alexander Wilson’s work on birds, updating the latter’s American Ornithology. He also sponsored the then unknown John James Audobon for membership in the Academy of Natural Science in 1824, although Audobon was not elected.

Returning to Europe in 1828 at the age of 25, Bonaparte settled in Italy and began a period of major political activity. He advocated for the organization of scientific congresses that also provided an opportunity for meetings of independents and reformers. After the accession of the initially liberal Pope Pius IX in 1846, Bonaparte became a member of the Pope’s party, but proceeded to move in a more radical direction, affiliating with the radicals and joining the Supreme Junta that seized power in the Roman states during the Revolutions of 1848. After the flight of Pope Pius in November 1848, Charles Lucien became deputy for Viterbo in the Assemblée Nationale Romaine; he was eventually elected Vice-President of the Assemblée. He also served on a commission to draft a constitution for the Roman Republic. When his cousin Louis Napoleon sent French troops to restore the Pope, Bonaparte participated in the defense of Rome with the Republican army. After its defeat and the fall of the Roman Republic, he fled with his family back to France, first to Marseilles and then Orléans, where he was arrested and released. Louis Napoleon ordered him out of the county and he set sail from Le Havre for England.

While in England, Bonaparte attended the 1849 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Birmingham, then visited the Scottish ornithologist Sir William Jardine. During his sojourn in England Bonaparte started work on a classification of every bird in the world, visiting museums across Europe to study their collections. The following year, 1851, he was allowed to return to France, where he and his family settled in Paris. At this point he gave up politics and concentrated exclusively on his scientific endeavors.

Bonaparte became interested in the principles of biological classification as early as 1831. In his early work he departed from the concepts of Georges Cuvier, of whom he was quite critical. He classified Insectivora before the Rodentia and separated the Chiroptera from the Primates. He made use of location, structure and the relationships of the branchiae in his classification of fish. Also, in developing classifications, he considered physiological data and morphology. Consequently, he raised the Batrachia to a subclass, then united the saurians and ophidians (Reptilia). He devoted the final years of his life to establishing a definitive classification of zoological groups, publishing synopses, conspectuses, and catalogs of the fauna of France. To this end, he not only encouraged fellow zoologists to study local fauna, but in 1857 conceived a general work in collaboration with Victor Meunier on the fauna of France entitled Histoire naturelle generale et particuliere des animaux qui vivent en France. Bonaparte’s death later that year prevented the realization of the project.

Charles Lucien Bonaparte was deeply interested in the French Muséum d’histoire naturelle and hoped to see the addition of a special gallery for native fauna. He bequeathed his library, containing works on the natural sciences, meterology, history and politics, as well as his extensive correspondence, to the Muséum.