Raphaelle Peale

In 1793, he made a trip to South America in order to collect specimens for the Peale Museum founded by his father.

For about two years beginning in 1803, Peale toured Virginia with the "physiognotrace", a profile making machine, with which he was briefly successful.

By 1806 he had begun to suffer the symptoms of arsenic and mercury poisoning brought on by his work as a taxidermist in his father's museum.

[1] In August 1809 he was hospitalized with delirium, and for the rest of his life he suffered debilitating attacks almost yearly—which his father ascribed to "gout of the stomach" caused by consumption of pickles and excessive drinking.

After reportedly indulging in a night of heavy drinking, his health destroyed, he died on March 4, 1825,[1] at age 51 at his home in Philadelphia.

"[3] His style may have been influenced by Spanish still life paintings he saw on his trip to Mexico and by the two works by Juan Sanchez Cotan, exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy in 1816.

A notable exception to this is his trompe-l'œil, Venus Rising from the Sea—A Deception (also entitled After the Bath, 1822, in the collection of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art).