Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/1052459
35 THE CAPITOL DOME he thought could do it. Henry A. Wise (VA) proposed that the subject be pre-1783 so that it would not curry favor to either current political party. In the end, Con- gress voted to let American artists pick the subjects as long as the narrative dated before 1781. But the panels remained bare. In 1836 another resolution was passed to restrict them to "subjects serving to illustrate the discovery of America; the settlement of the U.S.; the history of the Revolution; or the adoption of the Constitution." 9 The four subjects eventually chosen for the panels were hemispheric in their scope—encompassing the southern United States, with Chapman's The Baptism of Pocahontas at Jamestown, Virginia, 1613, installed on 30 November 1840; New England, with Weir's Embar- kation of the Pilgrims, installed 21 December 1843; the Caribbean, with Vanderlyn's The Landing of Columbus, installed 15 January 1847; and finally the American West, with Powell's Discovery of the Mississippi by De Soto, A.D. 1541, installed 16 February 1855. Originally, the so-called "Western" panel was to be painted by the artist Henry Inman (1801–1846), presi- dent of the National Academy of Design in New York City, with the subject, as of 1836, the "Emigration of Daniel Boone to Kentucky." Upon the death of the artist in 1846, the vacancy set up a flurry of proposals from artists and art connoisseurs around the country to follow in Inman's footsteps. In 1847 the citizens of St. Louis sent a petition to the Senate for the artist Charles Deas (1818–1867) to do a painting, "General Clarke break- ing up the council with the Shawaneca." Eventually, Inman's student William Henry Powell (1823–1879), who had studied in Cincinnati and so was nominally considered to be "western," received the commission in 1848. A joint committee of Congress selected De Soto raising a cross on the Mississippi as the subject matter, taken from two recently published and widely popular U.S. history books: Theodore Irving's The Conquest of Florida under Hernando de Soto (1835); and George Bancroft's History of the United States (1834). 10 In 1852 Powell was still working on the painting in Paris. It was probably this delay that caused Philadelphia's artistic community to see an opportunity for one of their own, Peter F. Rothermel, to take over the commission, and provide his own, and his powerful patrons', view of the American West. The campaign of Rothermel and his supporters to achieve a U.S. Capitol commission in 1852 was the culmination of a decade of history paintings by Rothermel focused on the Spanish conquest of the Americas. Rothermel was director of PAFA from 1847 to 1855 and was one of its most influential instructors at a time when PAFA was one of the most prestigious art schools in the Americas, having been founded in 1805, a few short years after the founding of the nation. As a leader of PAFA in the 1840s and 1850s, and as Philadelphia's most important history painter, Rothermel played a part in broader international trends in history painting in the mid-nineteenth century. Looking to his career expands our understanding of how artists at the United States's most venerable art school negotiated and visualized national identity during the period of territorial conflict between the United States and Mexico known as the Mexican-American War (1846–48) or the primera intervención estadounidense en México. In this period, PAFA was the focal point of Philadelphia's cultural life and a major force on the American art scene. As schol- ars have recently shown, in the 1840s and 1850s a simi- lar cultural renaissance in Mexico emerged around the Academy San Carlos in Mexico City. 11 Rothermel began his series of large-scale history paintings related to the Spanish conquest with Colum- bus before the Queen (1842) (fig. 5). This painting was influenced by a combination of popular literary influ- ences including the Romantic historian William H. Prescott's first book on the history of Spain, History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella (1837), and his contemporary Washington Irving's History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (1828). Each of these histories portrays Isabella as a Christian mission- ary and Columbus as her able knight. This was a popu- lar subject for both American and Mexican academic painters at the time; contemporaneous paintings include Emanuel Leutze's Columbus before the Queen (1843) (fig. 6), exhibited at PAFA in 1848, Powell's Colum- bus Before the Council of Salamanca (1847) (fig. 7), which hung in the library of the U.S. Capitol in 1847 and helped Powell secure his Capitol commission, and Juan Cordero's Columbus before the Catholic Sover- eigns, painted in Rome in 1850 before it traveled to its permanent home in Mexico City (fig. 8). 12 Rothermel's series of scenes of the Spanish conquest was begun after a prominent art connoisseur saw his Columbus before the Queen in an exhibition organized by Rothermel at PAFA and subsequently commissioned a painting of similar size and subject matter. Sartain's Union Magazine wrote of the commission in 1852, not coincidentally the same year Philadelphia was lobbying for Rothermel to receive a Capitol commission: Professor [James] Mapes, who has done so much to encourage art and artists in the coun- try, saw, while on a visit to Philadelphia, the picture of "Columbus before the Queen;" and, being struck with some of its points, left with a friend an order for Rothermel to paint one