The painter's husband, Benjamin, sprawls on the ground at the center of the scene, his weight apparently too much for the tree swing. Lilly Martin Spencer's The Artist and Her Family at a Fourth of July Picnic depicts an idyllic genre scene in which well-dressed, middle-class Americans celebrate their country's independence by eating, drinking, and entertaining one another. Yet as the space recedes, so does Peale's life and the intellectual and scientific culture of the time-the American Enlightenment. Likewise the woman nearer to the foreground represents the museum's power to inspire feelings of awe and wonder in the face of the sublime. In the far background a child represents posterity benefiting from the museum's lessons in natural history. To Peale, the behavior of animals served as a model for a moral, productive, and socially harmonious society. Peale believed that physiognomy, whether of humans in portraits or of animal specimens, provided insight into character. The museum's receding shelves display animal species organized by Linnaean classification, and above them are portraits of revolutionary heroes and other notable Americans, whose placement suggests the position of humans in the great chain of being. Peale collected thousands of specimens of birds and other animals for his museum by soliciting donations or hunting them himself. The deep background behind the curtain gives the portrait its unique significance. further drawing attention to and heightening the impact of his creativity." The figure of Peale bridges these realms. Ward, the positioning of Peale "has the effect of creating a dialectic between life and art, painter and audience, the individual and American culture at large, and finally past and present. He used a similar motif on the printed acknowledgments he sent to museum donors, on which a curtain labeled "Nature" is held back to reveal a landscape with animals. In the painting, the artist invites the viewer into his museum he pulls back a draped crimson curtain, which divides the painting's space, to reveal the collection.
The artist's palette and brushes to his left contribute to the autobiographical statement. Peale had unearthed and reconstructed a mastodon in 1800, an event he chronicled in his 1806 painting Exhuming the First American Mastodon (left). To Peale's left lie the bones of a mastodon the assembled skeleton that shows from behind the curtain was the museum's main attraction. On the extreme left is an early donation: a paddlefish from the Allegheny River in an upright case, marked "With this article the Museum commenced, June, 1784".
Another American symbol, the bald eagle, is higher on the left edge of the canvas, mounted by Peale-"the strength of the Eagles Eye is really astonishing"-and is now one of his few surviving specimens. At the front left, a dead wild turkey sits with Peale's taxidermic tools, brought back by his son Titian and waiting to join the collection to reveal its meaning as a national symbol. The foreground of the painting depicts in low light some natural objects of the museum. The nearly life-size painting is in the collection of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.There are three spaces in the work. It depicts the 81-year-old artist posed in Peale's Museum, then occupying the second floor of Independence Hall in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. N 1822 self-portrait by the American painter Charles Willson Peale (1741-1827).
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