In 1822, early American painter Charles Willson Peale put the finishing touches on one of his masterworks, “The Artist in His Museum.” Peale depicted himself in full length at the foreground, lifting a red curtain to reveal a gallery of taxidermied birds, fossilized bones, and portraits of the country’s leading men behind him. When he raised the curtain on the canvas, he also debuted a new institution: the Philadelphia Museum Company. After decades of trying to secure a public steward for his collections, Peale filed articles of incorporation with the commonwealth of Pennsylvania in 1821 to form a legal entity that could hold his collection after his death.
This paper examines Peale’s journey to incorporation to explore why U.S. residents regularly turned to corporate rather than national or state ownership of objects of collective significance and what effects incorporation had on the valuation of museum objects. It argues that Peale and his peers made the corporation a defining feature of cultural nationalism in the early United States by making it the favored instrument of historic preservation. To them, incorporation offered a voluntary method for creating a successional owner to hold collections of national import in public trust. Yet, incorporation of historical organizations also placed artifacts in corporate systems of valuation. The trajectory of Philadelphia Museum Company property between 1821 and 1854 exemplifies consequences of corporate shareholding, loan and debt, and financial failure for corporately held historic artifacts. This history reveals a broader story of how corporate laws, deployed in the service of the public interest, have shaped many of early America’s most iconic and seemingly priceless historic collections. This paper concludes by reflecting on the overlooked history of the corporation as the primary mechanism for shaping the concept of “permanent collections” of museums in the United States today.