(light jazzy piano music)
- [Steven] We're in the Philadelphia Museum of Art
looking at a portrait of Charles Wilson Peale
of Yarrow Mamout, an African Muslum,
a man who had been forcibly brought to the United States
and spent a very long life here and he paints him
with the same regard that he painted American heroes.
- [Carol] It's interesting because he began the portrait
because he wanted to document his age
which was supposedly 134 years old.
The idea of an African American Muslim is interesting
because they're may have been 10% of the total
slave population that came into this country
up until the first quarter in mid-19th Century.
- [Steven] It's extraordinary that we're looking
at a painting from 1819 and yet
this man feels alive in front of me.
- [Carol] Peale was in his late 70s when he painted this
so you have this dialogue between these two older men
looking at each other across their lifetimes.
- [Steven] And these men had just recently met
and despite that, the portrait seems to convey
a deep understanding of who this man was.
You get a sense that Peale wanted to know this man,
wanted to understand him.
- [Carol] Yarrow owned property, he owned his own home.
He owned bank stocks, he had enough money
to offer loans to people.
When you look in his eyes, you see the wisdom,
you see the intellect.
- [Steven] The figure is framed by paint
that is less defined.
The gray coat that he wears over his shoulders
is more loosely painted.
It seems to me that there's an increasing focus
as we move towards the face which comes into
its most precise definition right around the eyes.
- [Carol] Yes there's a connectivity
and you don't see this in so many portraits
and some of this has to do with age, with experience.
With Peale's appreciation of what it took Yarrow
to survive, to persevere.
- [Steven] And he had every reason to be embittered.
He had lost money that he had given to others.
He had been, of course, himself, enslaved.
There was every reason for this man to be bitter
and yet Peale found a man who he described
as having a positive attitude in life
despite his life experiences.
- [Carol] And this was something that
really connected with Charles Wilson Peale
because his motto was perseverance.
In fact, he named his farm
in Germantown initially Persevere.
- [Steven] Peale had founded what was really the first
successful public museum in the United States.
- [Carol] It began as a portrait gallery in 1784
where he had portraits of revolutionary heroes.
It grew as he added natural science specimens
to the museum and then the portrait gallery grew also
to include not just revolutionary heroes or military men,
but also scientists who were dedicated to the study
of natural science, writers, artists and he had
paintings of people of age and here is Yarrow.
Yarrow seems an anomaly in this gallery.
What is he doing next to the portrait of presidents?
What is he doing next to Thomas Say, the great naturalist
and the fact that he was painted when Peale
took a painting trip to Washington to raise federal funds
for his museum and he painted the President.
So he's painting the President
and Yarrow Mamout basically within the same week.
Also the format of the picture is the classic
25 by 30 inch portrait that you saw all of them.
So everybody is put on the same level in this gallery
and that nobody's bitter
and nobody is shown in a different way.
Your head is there, your shoulders are there and that's it.
- [Steven] Yarrow was openly Muslim.
He would praise god in the streets of Georgetown.
He would pray in his garden in back of his house
and Peale was not shying away from that here.
- [Carol] And I think this is a portrait
that reaches back to you.
You can see that the artist looked at Yarrow
and in fact, the great punchline that Peale records
in his diary is about how he showed the portrait to Yarrow
when it was finally finished and Yarrow looked at it
and says it's Yarrow himself.
- [Steven] And the artist was a real American hero.
He had been at Valley Forge with Washington.
He had crossed the Delaware with Washington.
- [Carol] Then of course Charles Willson Peale
has seen all the different manifestations of slavery
at the worst, but also he was seeing before this
and kind of contemporaneously with this,
the rise of the free black population in Philadelphia
which was a unique phenomenon in the country
where people were becoming literate and becoming
competitive in the marketplace.
When the Peale gallery came apart and was finally sold
in 1854 long after Peale's death, nobody knew who this was
and so they figured it could
only be one person, Washington's servant.
So they put Washington's servant in the auction catalog.
That shows how invisible he had become and I think
one of the great things about
this portrait is its visibility.
This is not a black man disappeared.
This is not an African Muslim disappeared.
This is a person that the artist has seen and testified to
with his own skill and his own eyes.
(light jazzy piano music)