(b Philadelphia, PA, 4 May 1784; d Philadelphia, PA, 17 July 1865). Museum keeper and painter, brother of (3) Raphaelle Peale and (4) Rembrandt Peale. He became a painter late in life. Poor eyesight dictated a career in museum management, and from 1810 to the 1840s he managed the Philadelphia Museum (1810–22), his brother Rembrandt’s Baltimore Museum (1822–5) and the New York Museum (1825–1840s). Following the Panic of 1837, he sold his enterprise to P. T. Barnum and moved to a farm near Schuylkill Haven, PA. In 1855 he began to paint still-lifes, some after James Peale and Raphaelle Peale, some original. In 1864, with his daughter Mary Jane, also a painter, he returned to Philadelphia and studied landscape painting with Edward Moran. Although Mary Jane occasionally finished his landscapes, the still-lifes are clearly his. Still Life with Grapes, Watermelon and Peaches (1863; Davenport, IA, Mun. A.G.) and Fruit on Pewter Plate (1861; Milwaukee, WI, A. Mus.), with its carefully rendered worm holes, are charming examples of his meticulous attention to detail. Rubens’s lifelong interest in birds is expressed in his naive Two Ruffled Grouse in Underbrush (1864; Detroit, MI, Inst. A.).

Part of the Peale family