Discovery of Charles WIlson Peale portrait in Philadelphia Museum of Art

Now I pick up my new edition of ARAMCO WORLD and there is an article in the July/August issue about this portrait by Charles Wilson Peale which has been reinstalled in the new whole reinstallation of the American wing in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.  I also visited the newly reinstalled American wing in the Baltimore Museum of Art. This portrait is of Yarrow Mamout, a freedman who bought property on a street where Secretary of State John Kerry makes his home and where John and Jackie Kennedy lived.  That is Dent Street in Georgetown.  There were only two houses there when Mamout, a Muslim bought his property.  Charles Wilson Peale was in Washington DC in 1819 to paint President James Monroe's portrait. He had heard of the elderly Mamout, whom "local lore wrongly touted as more than a hundred years old" and sought him out to learn the secret of his longevity.  He recorded the meeting in his diary and penned Mamout's obituary. .

For more details see:  Aramco World p 26-31.  "There is a deep connection between Islam and America that most miss, and Yarrow is an embodiment of that." Thomas Jefferson owned Muslim slaves(Yarrow Mamout was from Guinea) and studied Arabic at the College of William and Mary. (We think we live in a global world! ) Along with France, the Muslim nation of Morocco was the first to recognize American independence.  "  

 So many discoveries to make in this world....

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