"Catastrophism and Peale's "Mammoth

CHARLES WILLSON PEALE'S EXHUMATION OF THE MASTODON OF 1806-08 IS ALready familiar to all students of American art. This painting of an early scientific excavation was one of the most elaborate produced in this country in the early 19th century, and still comprises one of the most arresting scenes in all of our art. In its own time it was practically unique. Historians like to observe that when American painting consisted chiefly of portraiture and a handful of landscapes and history pieces, here, mirabile dictu, was a genre painting,1 or, as Larkin puts it, a painting in the spirit of genre. 2 Everyone knows that an actual event is depicted and that Charles Willson Peale, always the realist, rendered certain details, such as the great wheel lifting water from the marl pit, the plank tool room in the middle ground and the army tent for sleeping in the background with remarkable fidelity. Yet, as Peale scholars are aware, the Exhumation, completed seven years after the digging itself, is a highly imaginative recreation. Of the many in the scene, only three had taken part in the digging on the upper New York farm of a certain John Masten during the summer of 1801: Peale himself, who holds up the drawing of a bone and gestures toward the pit, his eldest son Rembrandt who stands beside him and helps him hold the drawing, and John Masten, who in the foreground climbs out of the pit on a ladder. The Exhumation obviously became more and more elaborate. From a letter to Benjamin West of December 16, 1807, we learn that at one point that year the painting contained upwards of fifty figures at completion the next year there were seventy-five-of which eighteen were portraits

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