Virtual Tour of The Peale Center

Peale Center

May 27, 2020

TRANSCRIPT PROVIDED BY CAPTIONACCESS LLC [email protected] http://www.captionaccess.com

* * * * * This transcript is being provided in a rough draft format. The transcript reflects the transcriber's best effort to express the full meaning intended by the speakers. It is not a verbatim transcript. * * * * * Virtual Tour of The Peale The Peale Center May 27, 2020

Nancy Proctor: Hello everyone joining us online. I'm Nancy Proctor director of The Peale. We'll start our tour in a minute but we wanted to do a quick sound check and make sure everyone is hearing us okay. If you do have any issues, feel free to post your comments and also any questions you have in the chat bar on the web page you are watching this through. You can also email us at [email protected].

I'll pause for a moment to make sure that's all sounding and looking good.

[Silence]

Okay. We'll be starting in just a moment then.

Okay. We're going to start recording.

Hi everybody and welcome to the Peale's virtual tour online. We're delighted you can join us. Welcome to our friends at Heritage who tried to join us last week but couldn't because of a faulty computer. If you have any problems or questions, feel free to post in the chat panel on the right side of the web page. You can also email us at [email protected]. There's also a phone number you can call if you just want to hear the audio of this tour. Heather Shelton [sp?] will post that information in the chat panel so you can have that number. You should have also received that by email.

This tour is being recorded. It's being captioned and a link will be sent to everyone who has a ticket to join us today and also last week so you can watch that after the event.

I'm going to kick off the tour. I'll be joined by our Chief Experience Officer David London a little bit down the road. And we'll be taking you through a virtual tour of the Peale that was created by Direct Dimensions in Owings Mills [sp?] that does 3d scanning and printing of large interiors to small objects.

I'm going to show you this virtual tour from the outside. One moment while I share my screen.

We are standing out in Holiday Street just out in front of the Peale. The facade and exterior have been recently restored and we have a new roof thank you to the Department of General Services of the City of Baltimore.

I want to show you around Holiday Street a little bit before we go inside. Here's our neighbors Diane Church [sp?] next door and the new City Hall. The Able Walman [sp?] Municipal Building is here. And this is where the farmer's market is every Sunday. Idabee's Table [sp?] is on the corner. They are open and serving their delicious food. Check them out online. You can do pick up or delivery by all the usual means.

Let's go to the front of the building. I hope later on you'll come back. We'll offer tours of some exhibitions we had last year. The Adam Stab and Ellen [Name?] exhibition. Today we'll tour the main part of the Peale building that tell its main stories.

We are standing in the lobby of Peale's Baltimore and Gallery of the Fine Arts, which opened August 14, 1815. If you want to see what Holiday Street looks like around then. I meant to say the year 1814. This virtual tour of the City of Baltimore was produced by UMG's research center. A lot of historians collaborated. Go to earlybaltimore.org and you can explore Baltimore and see what it was like around the time of the and the time Peale opened his museum, which was on an unbuilt up street with a grassy lawn. Do check that out.

This is himself in a portrait painted by his father . We can see him through the doorway. We'll learn about him in a minute.

The original of this painting is in the collection of the Maryland Historical Society. They loaned us this high-quality replica. That's where the Maryland Historical Society -- where the Peale collections were transferred when it was shut down in 1997. It was vacant for 20 years. The roof leaks and this is why we have so much renovation work to do. We used the building again in 2017 as a center for Baltimore Stories and Studies. We'll talk about the Peale's present and future later in the tour.

In 1814, when Peale opened the museum, curiously he chose the height of summer in August. Within a month, the British were bombing Ft. McKinley. People in Baltimore expected that the British would be able to invade the city. Though Peale's museum wasn't built to be a home, for a very brief time, Rembrandt moved his pregnant wife and young children in in order to pretend it was a private residence so any invading British wouldn't invade the building.

We'll turn around here and see the architect of this building, Robert Cary Long, Sr., Maryland's first professional architect. Peale raised private funds for the designing and building of the building. Rembrandt was running his museum like a business and needed to sell tickets to pay back his investors, run his business and support his family.

This is the Peale Gallery. We are seeing it as it was last year before we started renovations. Looking at another painting by Charles Willson Peale, Rembrandt's father, which is also in the Maryland Historical Society collection and on loan to the Smithsonian American Art Museum for an exhibition.

This painting is from a scene in 1801 when Charles Willson Peale got wind of some very large bones discovered in a farm in upstate . He went with his sons, Rembrandt and Raphaelle and led an excavation. In this painting, it's idealized, after the fact painting. We see Charles Willson Peale with his sons Rembrandt and Rubens and Raphaelle, two of Charles Willson Peale's wives, one already deceased, his second wife and some grandchildren. These large bones were enough to complete two mastodon skeletons. The idea of extinction and prehistoric animals was a new idea at this time.

This dig, they really helped people to understand that perhaps not all animals have always been here and it was possible for species to go extinct. So there was much interest and curiosity especially when on display in and Baltimore.

Let's look at Charles Willson Peale in that museum in Philadelphia. Behind the curtain you see the mastodon skeleton and you also see the tools of his trade. The palette he used to paint paintings, which was the family's bread and butter. He named his children after famous European artists. Rembrandt, Raphaelle, Angelica Kaufman [sp?] Peale and Sofieta [sp?] Peale. He taught his children to paint and also his nieces and his brother James to paint. , his niece, was about 18 when she came to Rembrandt Peale's Baltimore museum and stayed here and painted with Rembrandt. Sarah Miriam Peale became a very accomplished portrait painter with a long and celebrated career both in Baltimore and in St. Louis, Missouri.

Charles Willson Peale was as interested in natural sciences as he was in the arts, and so was his family. Some of his children were named after scientists. You can see this science influence in his museum. There's no distinction between it being a fine art museum and a science museum. There's a mastodon, portraits, and opposite the palette, we see a wild turkey over a taxidermy kit. There are birds in the nooks. And Charles Willson Peale even displayed animals in a diorama. There was this sense of immersion.

We talk about Rembrandt Peale's museum as the first purpose-built museum, opened in 1814.

This was a key reference that Rembrandt had in mind where he really learned the museum business before coming to Baltimore to found his own museum.

Charles Willson Peale taught his children to paint. There was another young person in the household who was actually a contemporary of Raphael Peale but was not taught to paint. Moses Williams. On the table in the corner is a sihloute of Moses cut by Raphael Peale. In the center is a smaller one of Angelica. Moses was son of an enslaved couple who was given to Charles Willson Peale in exchange for a couple of portraits he painted. Moses was born to this couple while they were part of the household. Charles Willson Peale eventually emancipated his parents when Moses was 8 years old, but Moses remained in indentured status. He was taught how to operate a silhouette cutting machine. When you visited the museum, you could pay a penny for the machine to cut you a silhouette or you could pay a nickel for Moses to cut it.

He married a cook, a servant and they had two children. He did very well as a silhouette cutter until photography put he and other silhouette cutters out of business.

This is a catalog from Blackout, curated by the chief curator of the Baltimore Museum of [Art?]

The mastodon was a big draw you played extra for. But Rembrandt Peale introduced another novelty that helped attract people. The new technology of gaslight. In this engraving here, we see a 1930s reconstruction of Rembrandt Peale demonstrating to a crowd his new gaslight chandler. This was a new technology at the turn of the 19th century and they say that when Peale would light his museum using gaslight chandeliers, people would stand outside and marvel at the strength of the light because the previous technologies like torches, candles, fireplaces, never produced such an intense light. The gaslight was a big attraction.

We know from many written records of the Peale's, monthly attendance and diaries about ticket sales, Ruben said if it weren't for the evening illuminations, they wouldn't have stayed in business. But that and the mastodon wasn't enough for the Peale's to get out of debt for the cost of the building.

In 1829 they sold the building to the city and it became city hall until the 1870s, the reconstruction era. The new city hall was built just outside this window here. You might be able to see a historic image of that.

The Peale building began being used for male and female colored school 1. We are in Reconstruction Era. The first schools were being built for African Americans. This was called male and female colored school 1 and it was the first to offer a secondary school education. Initially the public schools in colored school system offered only an elementary school education because it was deemed "neither necessary or desirable to provide a high school education for people of color." But thanks to city leaders, they added secondary school education. This was the first school you could come to as a person of color to get a high school degree. That was important because without that degree, you couldn't become a high school teacher. At first all the teachers were white.

This was curated by Tanika Berkley [sp?] to research this history of the Peale, this school 1 and the first years of public school education for people of color for the city. You can learn more about that by taking our YouTube based ghost tour as we call it where Tanika tells more of these stories. You can find out more about male and female colored school 1 on our website also.

Today we call ourselves a center for Baltimore stories. The building itself has lots of stories, including throughout the 20th century when it became the first municipal building. We want to tell those stories and all the voices of people and communities across the city so those narratives are truly inclusive of the city's rich history and diversity.

This is our storytelling studio. We had Mama Goss [sp?] who ran workshops. You can hear a lot of those on our app called Be Here Stories. You can also add your own stories.

We also call ourselves a real lab for reinventing what the museum is for the 21st century. This is exactly what Rembrandt Peale and his family would be doing if they were alive today, always pushing boundaries asking what's next and how to do this better. We have this amazing opportunity for being a platform for that innovation when we reopen the Peale. We use immersive techniques to make history more tangible and accessible to everybody.

One thing we have -- if Rembrandt had his mastodon and gaslight chandlers, we have a cool new thing that we hope will bring you all to the Peale, which is a time travel machine. With that, I'm going to hand it over to David.

David London: Hi everyone. Thank you for joining us. This is the Escapement Time travel agency where we began our time travel tours that ran from September 2018 to about March 2020. This is the back of it. The tours offered were three parts. First part was in the Peale gallery and the second part took place in the time travel agency, set up as an inverse escape room. You had to solve a puzzle to get into the room. The puzzle would transform a door into a portal into the past where visitors were then transported into Rembrandt Peale's private study. This time machine was a 200 year time machine. It would transport people to the year 1818 in Rembrandt Peale's private study. This is a tour of what you would have seen. We see many objects and artifacts from the life and work of Rembrandt Peale. Here's a good example of a diorama in process. The Peales were innovators of natural history displays and how they organized the specimens.

We see artifacts and attractions Rembrandt had collected here.

Another component of the time travel was augmented reality. Visitors were encouraged to locate Rembrandt Peale's eyeglasses. If they were able to do so, there was this device they could be loaded into and you could see what Rembrandt Peale saw through his very own eyes.

This project was interesting not only because it was designed to transport people into the past, but also into the future. As Nancy mentioned, the Peale sees itself moving forward as a place to experiment with what it is and will be in the 21st century. The time travel tours went back in time but also looked forward to the future where emergent and experimental can be used to tell stories to create a higher level of engagement and enhanced learning.

Nancy Proctor: We've lost your audio David. I'm sorry to interrupt.

Online, people can't hear the audio.

David London: Okay.

Nancy Proctor: Do you think a reboot might do it?

David London: No. I think you should take over. Transfer back to the shared screen of you.

Nancy Proctor: I'm currently showing still the virtual tour. I want to do a quick check to see if people can hear me.

David London: I can hear you.

Nancy Proctor: You can hear me on the web page.

I'm sorry we seem to have lost David London's audio there. We are just going to try to pick up where I think you might have dropped off on the audio.

To tell the story of the Peale's future through its past in a sense, we have been aided by this time travel machine you see in the corner. We had a curious situation one day where David opened the locked room and there was a metal briefcase and we opened it and it contained plans to build a time travel machine and we did that. It turned out to be rudimentary. It takes you back exactly 200 years and doesn't move you through space. So we had to activate it in places we knew existed 200 years ago. We wouldn't want to end up in Jones Falls which would have been water.

We took folks back to 1818 and 1819 to Rembrandt Peale's private study. So I think we can look around here.

David London: We're on video now so you're good.

Nancy Proctor: Great. I should just be speaking to what I'm seeing online video?

David London: Yes, just talk about the room.

Nancy Proctor: We activate the time machine and open the portal to Rembrandt Peale's private study 200 years ago. You have the opportunity to rifle through his draws, see what he was painting, see the letters he was writing to Reuben Peale and check out science curiosities and other things Rembrandt was interested in. Sea serpents figured big. This is his desk and the painting he was working on at the time.

This concept of portal has become very important with the pandemic and the Peale is operating almost entirely online now. We are developing use of digital tools further, to allow us to take people back through time and through other parts of Baltimore through this creative storytelling but also take people to other parts of the world connected to Baltimore's rich history and communities. Baltimore is one of the oldest cities in the country. There are lots of stories to tell.

What is the museum in the 21st century and what it can become is our next chapter.

David London: Do you want to go back to your video?

Nancy Proctor: Sure. I'll stop sharing my screen and we'll wrap this up. We hope you enjoyed this. Sorry for the audio drop out. Hopefully I was able to recoup some of the highlights David was pointing out to you. We will offer future tours of the garden, as I mentioned earlier of the Devin Allen and Stab exhibitions about the gaslight history of the Peale which ended up being the company that Rembrandt Peale founded to supply gaslight not just to his museum but through a new street light network in in city, BGE.

If you would like to embark on those future tours with us, sign up for our newsletters and check out our website. The URL is being shared with you now.

With that, I think we will go to see if there are any questions or any other topics that folks would like us to delve into.

Maybe we can just do a quick sound check and see if folks can hear David now. I do see one question.

Question: Is there any furniture in the building that dates to its time in the museum?

No. The contents of the Peale museum, municipal museum when shut down in 1977 were all transferred to the Maryland Historical Society. Some are in the city archives too. The only physical artifact we have is the building itself. This is part of why we found it a great opportunity to think about the nature of both the museum and a museum collection in the 21st century where there's the opportunity for it to be born digital. We have shared and published more than 1500 stories of the city so far. Many historical experiences use props and things people can touch, so they don't have to be safeguarded like an original museum object.

If you do want to see what was in the Peale building, including the mastodon painting by Charles Willson Peale, go to the Maryland Historical Society. They have a lot of their collection digitized and online. You can check out their website.

David London: I'm going to see if everyone can hear me. In the meantime, we'll see if any other questions came in.

Nancy Proctor: Bert Kemora [sp?] is online former director of the Maryland Historical Society and with Mary Blaire leads the Maryland 400 project to connect all the sites of historic interest across the state of Maryland in the runup to Maryland's 400th anniversary as a state. Check out that as well.

Now folks can hear you David. If anyone has a question for David, they are welcome to ask it.

David London: And if not, that's okay too.

Nancy Proctor: Yes indeed.

I think with that, I'll thank everyone for joining us for this quick tour around the Peale. I'm sorry for the sound problems, but we will share a link to the recording and look forward to seeing you in future tours.

Thank you again everyone.

[End of virtual tour]