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 Shomen 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 faded 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.

And so 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.

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.

And to kick it off, he decided he would stuff been Franklin's cat and a couple of golden fesins 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 fessant 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, Peel used the names of celebrities to help increase his attendance.

Well, in 1792, Peel wrote to a group of civic leaders that he had invited to serve as a committee of visitors and directors for his museum.

Now, as boards go, it was pretty impressive. Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton were there. But as many challenges as these men had faced, I bet the founding fathers had never seen a proposal like this one.

There are other means than painting to preserve and hand down to succeeding generations, the relics of such great men whose labors have been crowned with success in the most distinguished benefits to mankind.

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