The Baltimore Architecture Foundation is happy to present a Doors Open evening tour of The Peale. Register here to join us Tuesday, August 27 at 5:30pm.

Please join us at The Peale, Baltimore’s Community Museum, for a tour of the first museum that was purposefully built in the Americas. Our building housed many firsts that will be illuminated during the tour – including being the first commercial building to be illuminated by natural gaslight, a material Rembrandt Peale manufactured in the museum’s back garden.  In 1813, Rembrandt Peale, a member of the first family of American artists and museum pioneers, hired Baltimore architect Robert Cary Long to design a museum. Long produced what was essentially a large Federal Period townhouse with a spacious rear gallery extension.  Peale’s “Museum and Gallery of the Fine Arts” opened in August 1814 and hosted exhibitions that would be considered in today’s world as both those belonging in a fine art or natural history museum.  Scientific discovery played an important role in the early Peale Museum – contributing greatly to the new nation’s understanding of science, technology and natural history.

Like many museums of today, Rembrandt had difficulty paying the hefty expenses of operating a museum; and in April 1830, the museum property was sold at public auction.  Over the next 150+ years, the building served many different purposes, finally returning to its original intent as a museum. After a period of vacancy and a multi-year renovation, it reopened as The Peale, Baltimore’s Community Museum in 2022.