Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/1052459
44 THE CAPITOL DOME Mr. Powell is not quite correct in all his facts; the commission to paint the picture was not given to him with quite such unanimity as he states… Judge Campbell of this city, and Mr. Ingersoll of Philadelphia, proposed an open competition that should give all the artists in the country an opportunity to compete for the work, by sending in cartoons of designs, from which a committee should choose the one that was best adapted to the purpose. 25 While Philadelphians wanted Rothermel to execute the painting, New Yorkers had their own suggestions, and Asher B. Durand and others wanted Samuel F.B. Morse to be awarded the commission after Inman's death. Rothermel employs a similar format to his De Soto painting with his Landing of the Pilgrims (1854) (fig. 15); here, American religion and American landscape are paired to create a successful history painting. 26 The landscape dominates the foreground of snow and storm-tossed waves. Landing of the Pilgrims is not part of the Spanish conquest series, but is related, especially when one realizes that the painting was commissioned in 1852, the same year of Rothermel's unsuccessful campaign to complete a panel in the U.S. Capitol. For example, a comparison between Rothermel's Landing of the Pilgrims and Robert Walter Weir's Embarkation of the Pilgrims (painted from 1837–43) (fig. 16) reveals that though Weir chose to focus on figures, Rothermel continued his use of landscape to capture the emotional impact of the historic moment. 27 In progressing from Cortés to De Soto to the Pilgrims, Rothermel moved further and further away from the themes of the Spanish Conquest. It makes sense that this is so, given the conditions in contempo- rary Philadelphia, which by the 1850s was feeling the impending pangs of sectionalism which were to erupt in the U.S. Civil War. In transitioning from Mexico to Fig. 15. The Landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock by Peter F. Rothermel