The portrait was painted in Philadelphia shortly after Clark returned from the Pacific. Lewis and Clark had reached St. Louis on September 23, 1806, and in the months that followed both captains traveled east to report to President Jefferson, settle expedition accounts, and prepare materials for publication. Clark sat for Peale during one of these visits, probably in 1807 or early 1808. By that point, Clark had been appointed brigadier general of the Louisiana Territory militia and principal Indian agent for the western tribes, and was beginning the long collaboration with Nicholas Biddle that would eventually produce the published expedition narrative in 1814. Peale was simultaneously painting Meriwether Lewis, several expedition members, and a number of Native delegates who came east in the wake of the journey.

Peale (1741–1827) was by this date the senior figure in American portraiture and the proprietor of the Philadelphia Museum, where he displayed natural history specimens alongside portraits of figures he considered consequential to the early Republic. The Clark and Lewis portraits were painted for that museum, which functioned as a kind of national gallery of revolutionary and scientific worthies. After the museum’s nineteenth-century dispersal, many of the Peale portraits eventually entered the collection of Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia, where this likeness is now held. The painting has served as the principal visual reference for Clark in scholarly publications, exhibition catalogues, and popular histories of the expedition since the late nineteenth century, and it remains the image most frequently reproduced in studies of the Corps of Discovery.

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Peale painted Lewis in 1807, the year after the Corps of Discovery returned from the Pacific. Lewis had reached St. Louis in September 1806, traveled east to a public reception, and by 1807 was preparing his expedition journals for publication while serving as governor of the Louisiana Territory. The portrait was made for Peale’s Philadelphia Museum, where the artist was assembling a gallery of portraits of distinguished Americans. William Clark sat for a companion portrait the following year. Peale, who had also accepted expedition specimens and Native American artifacts for display in his museum, treated the two captains as figures of national scientific as well as political importance.

Charles Willson Peale (1741–1827) had by this point spent more than three decades painting the leadership class of the early Republic, including multiple sittings with Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin. The Lewis portrait belongs to his late museum series, in which the conventions of state portraiture were adapted to a more documentary purpose. The painting is held by Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia, which inherited a substantial portion of the Peale Museum collection after the museum’s dissolution in the mid-nineteenth century and the dispersal of its holdings. Together with Peale’s portrait of Clark, the image has served as the standard visual reference for Lewis in textbooks, exhibitions, and commemorative materials throughout the bicentennial period and remains the most frequently reproduced likeness of the explorer.

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