The Peale: First Museum Building in the Western Hemisphere

The building on Saint Paul Street opened in August of eighteen fourteen as the Museum and Gallery of the Fine Arts, founded by the painter Rembrandt Peale. It was the first structure in the Western Hemisphere designed and built from the ground up specifically to be a museum. Architect Robert Cary Long gave it the form of a refined Federal townhouse with a purpose-built gallery at the rear.

Rembrandt was the son of Charles Willson Peale, the Philadelphia painter who had already assembled one of the country's largest natural history collections. The Baltimore museum combined art, science, and public instruction under one roof, a model that was genuinely new. By eighteen thirty the city of Baltimore had purchased the building and converted it into the first dedicated city hall. It served various civic functions for the next century and a half before being restored. It reopened as a community museum in twenty twenty-two.