In her book, "Geranium," Kasia Boddy gives a poetic reading of Rubens Peale with a Geranium by Rembrandt Peale.

Rubens Peale is the younger brother of Rembrandt Peale, and the brothers have fifteen other siblings. Their parents gave them names like Rembrandt, Titian and Raphaelle, as a none-too-subtle attempt to nudge them in the direction of painting...which seems to have worked. The Peale bunch excelled in many areas, including writing, painting, taxidermy, and engineering.

The family doctor prevented Rubens from engaging in physical activity, applying some obscure remedy to address his weak eyesight, and Rubens celebrated when the doctor expired, rushing outside to take care of his beloved plants. He even invented his own eyeglasses, and he holds two pairs in the picture. In his later years, Rubens would become a painter, competing with his artistic siblings. Like the elderly Claude Monet, he could translate an image to the canvas by intuition, even though his sight was impaired. If he were around nowadays, you'd see him at a farmer's market in rural Pennsylvania, with some paintings, some plants, stuffed animals (the taxidermied kind), and a whole earful worth of information.

The Peales, beginning with Charles Willson Peale, the father of seventeen, sought to systematically categorize all animal and plant life. As a family museum-keeper, Rembrandt's genius in art showed early, with a self-portrait at the age of thirteen and a portrait of George Washington four years later.

According to family tradition, the droopy geranium in this picture is the first geranium in the U.S., and it looks like it had a hard time on the boat over. Author Kasia Boddy mentions the parallel appearances of Rubens and his plant friend. Boddy relates that unlike hunting, art, and politics, botany was a safe, humble, independent occupation which the dogma of the day considered ideal for disabled people and women. Able-bodied men were too busy applying brutal violence with a moral justification. This was an era of revolution, and Rembrandt Peale always wanted to be the propaganda man for the U.S., like Jacques-Louis David was for France. He even founded his own museum in Baltimore, but got distracted by his project to introduce gas lighting to the city, and the gas industry to the U.S.