American painter best remembered for his portraits of the leading figures of the American Revolution and as the founder of the first major museum in the United States.

As a young man, Peale worked as a saddler, watchmaker, and silversmith. His career in art began when he exchanged a saddle for a few painting lessons from John Hesselius. Peale's interest in art was heightened when he met and received advice from the well-respected portrait painter John Singleton Copley (Copley, John Singleton). In 1766 a group of Maryland patrons sent him to London, where he studied for three years with American expatriate painter Benjamin West (West, Benjamin).

Upon his return to America, Peale immediately became the most fashionable portrait painter of the middle colonies. He moved to Philadelphia in 1775, entered wholeheartedly into the Revolutionary movement, and served with the city militia in the Trenton-Princeton campaign. From 1779 to 1780 he represented the “Furious Whig” party in the Pennsylvania Assembly, an activity that damaged his professional career. He opened a portrait gallery of Revolutionary heroes in 1782 and in 1786 founded an institution intended for the study of natural law and display of natural history and technological objects. Known as Peale's Museum (later known as the Philadelphia Museum), it fulfilled Peale's objective to make wide-ranging collections democratically accessible. The museum grew to vast proportions and was widely imitated by other museums of the period and later by P.T. Barnum. Located in Independence Hall, the museum was a mélange of Peale's paintings, curious gadgets, minerals, and stuffed animals. Its most celebrated exhibit was the first complete skeleton of an American mastodon, which was unearthed in 1801 on a New York farm. Peale, who had accompanied the archaeological expedition, chronicled the excavation in his painting Exhuming the Mastodon (1806). In 1812 the museum was relocated to Baltimore, Maryland, and Peale relinquished its directorship to his son Rubens.