Major funding for backstory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation.

From Virginia Humanities, this is backstory.

We're going to start today with an unjustly forgotten American showman and museum owner.

Charles Wilson Peel is best remembered today, if he's remembered at all, for a single painting called The Artist in His Museum.

It's a self-portrait and in it the aged artist gazes intently at us as he pulls back a fated velvet curtain to reveal shelves of stuffed birds.

On the top shelf there's a stuffed American eagle on the floor and American turkey awaits the same fate.

But it turns out that Charles Wilson Peel's ambitions went well beyond iconic American birds.

We know Charles Wilson Peel through his famous portraits of George Washington and others involved with the American Revolution.

But actually he was in his day known almost as much as a proprietor of a major museum in Philadelphia.

It was housed in what is now known as Independence Hall, which was no longer being used for government purposes.

And it contained thousands, literally hundreds of thousands of natural history specimens that he had collected and with the help of others collected from all over the world.

That's Robert McCracken Peck, curator of art and artifacts at the Academy of Natural Sciences at Drexwood University.

Then natural history specimens were arranged in a kind of order of importance from the smallest things in sex and so on, up through birds and mammals,

and ended at the top of his gallery with portraits of the people he considered to be the most important affecting the United States and the rest of the world.

Great men and women were all preserved in his portraits.

And I suppose it was not a far step for him to take since he was already preserving mammals as taxidermy specimens to think that maybe if he could preserve them in oil on canvas, it would be even better to preserve them in reality.

Hold on a second as he's saying, I'm afraid so Nathan Charles Wilson Peel proposed stuffing the founding fathers.

I don't think it's so bad. It's our Thanksgiving show.

And to kick it off, he decided he would stuff Ben Franklin's cat and a couple of golden fissons that had belonged to George Washington.

He made his money by selling portraits, but also through the admission of people at the gate at the museum.

And what better way to attract people in than to have a fesson from George Washington or an Angora cat from Benjamin Franklin.

And so like PT Bardem who interestingly became the ultimate owner of Peel's museum.

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