Second Bank of the United States Portrait Gallery
Greek Revival temple of fluted marble columns, now hung with over a hundred painted faces of the founding generation.
This guide to the Second Bank of the United States Portrait Gallery in Philadelphia opens with a child prodigy, Nicholas Biddle, who finished college coursework before he was old enough to shave and was running the most powerful financial institution in the country from this building by his mid-thirties. It traces the marble temple he commissioned from architect William Strickland, the political fight with Andrew Jackson that emptied it of its bank by 1836, and the decades painter Charles Willson Peale spent sitting the founding generation in front of his easel, capturing them as they actually looked rather than as legend later imagined them.
Audio guides are written and narrated by AI.