Main content
For teachers
Course: For teachers > Unit 2
Lesson 9: Go deeper: false, misleading, and unreliable images- Wendy Red Star, 1880 Crow Peace Delegation
- The making of an American myth: Benjamin West, Penn's Treaty with the Indians
- Picturing Spanish conquest in an era of U.S. expansion
- Beyond New York — Bellows and World War I
- Damnatio memoriae—Roman sanctions against memory
- The Severan Tondo: Damnatio Memoriae in ancient Rome
- Gros, Napoleon Bonaparte Visiting the Plague-Stricken in Jaffa
- Casta paintings: constructing identity in Spanish colonial America
© 2023 Khan AcademyTerms of usePrivacy PolicyCookie Notice
Picturing Spanish conquest in an era of U.S. expansion
Picturing De Soto for the U.S. Capitol before the Civil War. See learning resources here.
Peter Frederick Rothermel, De Soto Raising the Cross on the Banks of the Mississippi, 1851, oil on canvas, 101.6 x 127 cm (Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, funds provided by the Henry C. Gibson Fund and Mrs. Elliott R. Detchon, 1987.31), a Seeing America video Speakers: Dr. Anna O. Marley, Curator of Historical American Art, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and Dr. Steven Zucker. Created by Beth Harris and Steven Zucker.
Peter Frederick Rothermel, De Soto Raising the Cross on the Banks of the Mississippi, 1851, oil on canvas, 101.6 x 127 cm (Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, funds provided by the Henry C. Gibson Fund and Mrs. Elliott R. Detchon, 1987.31), a Seeing America video Speakers: Dr. Anna O. Marley, Curator of Historical American Art, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and Dr. Steven Zucker. Created by Beth Harris and Steven Zucker.
Want to join the conversation?
- I find it bizarre that this picture would be considered "sanitized". It looks more brutal to me than any direct depiction of war would be. It depicts an act of cultural genocide. The surviving natives are forced to kneel down before their conquerors. The cross looks like a grave monument for their people.(2 votes)
Video transcript
(easy jazz music) - [Steven] We're at the
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, looking at a painting titled De Soto Raising the
Cross on the Mississippi. - [Anna] This painting is by
Peter Frederick Rothermel. - [Steven] This is going back to the early Spanish explorers,
the military that moved into the Americas, claiming
it for the Spanish crown. This is the invention of
an American mythology more than the representation
of American history, and this is an ambitious painting, one that the artist hoped
would become a mural in the United States Capitol. - [Anna] The United States
Rotunda was referred to as America's Gallery. Even before large museums
like the Smithsonian or the National Gallery were
thought of in Washington, DC, people came to the Rotunda
of the United States Capitol to see their history. Now the first series of four paintings were done by Trumbull, and those were scenes from the Revolution. Throughout the 1830s, politicians
from the North and South were fighting about what painting subjects would fill the four vacancies, and they decided that
they would have scenes from before the Revolution. The four panels that were chosen were all scenes of religion. There was the Baptism of Pocahontas, De Soto Raising a Cross
on the Mississippi, the Embarkation of the Pilgrims, and Columbus Planting
His Cross on the Soil of the Caribbean. - [Steven] Of course, the subtext here is about civilizing the
people that are here. This is a deeply racist narrative, but it's also such an
expression of the way in which the 19th century
thought about ideas of progress from the Native Americans
to the Catholic Spanish to the Protestant United States. - [Anna] Exactly. You have the priest in the
center of the composition gesturing to a Native American figure who is praying beneath him, and they are looking up along
the diagonal to that cross, so this idea of progress westward, and on the side is de
Soto, this military leader. His dagger is sheathed,
and maybe next to him is a Native American leader. - [Steven] I think we would
be remiss if we didn't speak about the actual history of this moment. The Spanish were brutal, and
we know that the diseases that they introduced would
have a devastating effect on what were, in fact, large, complex, highly sophisticated towns and even cities in the southeastern United States. - [Anna] Along the Mississippi, before the Spanish explored it, it was the hub of Native
American communities who traded all the way up and
down the Mississippi River, and that population was decimated first by Spanish exploration and diseases and then again by US push westward. - [Steven] But none of that
was seen fit to be expressed in a painting that was being prepared perhaps for the US Capitol. This is a sanitized history, one that tells an idealized story. - [Anna] And it makes it
seem inevitable that first, the Catholics came and
explored the Mississippi. They subjugated the Native Americans. They developed that land,
and now, it's our turn. It's the United States. We're moving westward. We're bringing Protestant
Christianity, and it was built into the fabric of the
United States Capitol. This painting is painted in 1851, after the close of the
Mexican-American War, and when tensions are building
between the United States and its southern neighbor,
Mexico, Rothermel starts painting scenes of the Spanish conquest. He's basing them on these
very romantic tales of history where American authors are looking back to the Spanish conquest as a
kind of prototype for American, that is, US expansion in a
time when the United States is reaching further
west and further south. - [Steven] What strikes me
when I look at this painting is that the artist has placed de Soto in the lower left, standing quietly. You can see a priest, you see a Bible, you see the religious
service that's taking place, but there is no violence here. There is, instead, camaraderie. There is brotherhood. It's as if this painting is
functioning as a corrective to contemporary strife. - [Anna] The best paintings
lodge in our minds so much that we almost see them as truth. Many people, when raised
on images like this, going to see them in the US Capitol and seeing them reproduced
in history books believe that this is the truth, but history
paintings often tell us more about the times that they
were painted than they do about the historic events
that they purport to be about. (easy jazz music)