234                          America's Old Masters

it was a relief. A portrait he executed of his second spouse is a re­vealing document, for it is one of the most disagreeable pictures he ever painted. It shows her as heavy and unattractive, with a large fleshy nose and large fleshy lips protruding over a fatly rounded chin. Her body is square and clumsy, the spine a little hunched. Although her hair is most fancily curled and powdered, the face beneath it is disagreeable, vaguely porcine.

This picture lends credence to the tradition which has come down in Peale's family that Elizabeth de Peyster had nagged her husband because of his tradesman-like enthusiasms, which were continually making him deviate from the dignified pattern of eighteenth-century gentlemen. It is said that the genial disorder of his temperament disgusted her, and certainly he commented on her neatness in his autobiography with awe bordering on horror; "she could," he wrote, "even in the darkest night lay her hands on whatever she wished to take out" of the clothes-press. We know that she resented having to sell tickets or preside at meetings of the museum, insisting that only shopkeepers' wives made themselves conspicuous by helping with their husbands' affairs. Subsequent events indicate that she trained her children to disapprove of their father's unconventional ways.

Peale's new wife, Hannah Moore, was meeker and more oblig­ing. Although almost as old as her husband, she had not been mar­ried before, but had devoted her life first to taking care of her mother, who was for five years "confined to her bed so helpless that she could not take a pinch of snuff but received it from her daughter's fingers," and* after her mother died, to her aged father, who was so feeble he could not walk out of the house except on Hannah's arm. Peale was delighted because she was "a cheerful, discreet, and good-tempered woman, not giddy or frisky in her movements." The third Mrs. Peale wrote to her step-children: "This is my bridal day and you never beheld a more serene sky. Not a cloud is to be seen in any quarter. All is calm as the mind of your dear father, knowing he is going to possess a most endearing companion, who will prove to be a loving mother to you all, and to give us that aid we stand in so much need of to cherish the seeds of virtue which nature has planted in the breasts of the younger branch."

With an amiable new wife to back him up, Peale bustled around Philadelphia like a young man, hurrying from his museum to his art academy to his studio, where he painted or pottered with his inventions. In the course of his life he made many, including a patented fireplace and a new kind, of wooden bridge: He col­laborated with Jefferson in perfecting the polygraph, a machine for multiple writing in which one pen moved several others on auto­matic arms; during two years of Jefferson's second term, they ex­changed some fifty letters on this subject alone. The President, who had frightened the Barbary pirates with the navy, wished to im­press them as well with American ingenuity in the arts of peace; he asked Peale to make three polygraphs, "one for the Bey, one for the Secretary of State, and one for the Ambassador here, but they must be entirely mounted in silver; that is to say, everything which is brass in your ordinary one must be silver." Jefferson himself kept Peale's machines by him all his life, and mourned that they had not been invented thirty years sooner so that he could have preserved copies of his correspondence during the revolution. In 1809 he wrote: "I could not therefore live without the poly­graph."

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