"The Indian King"

Details

Descriptive Terms

watercolors (paintings)
watercolor (paint)
ink
paper (fiber product)
Picture
Portrait
Portrait

Label

This watercolor from the 1840s depicts a male figure framed by an oval with vegetal motifs and patterns. The figure wears patterned clothes (likely a shirt, belt, skirt, leggings, and boots), a sash, and is holding a bow and arrow while wearing an Indigenous feathered headdress. Lettering above the figure and frame reads "The Indian King." Found nestled between two windows in a large L-shaped room otherwise devoted to ceramics, this painting follows and perpetuates numerous stereotyped and prejudiced ideas about Indigenous peoples. Many of these stereotypes became increasingly popular in the early- and mid-nineteenth century, but persist to this day.

The combination of a feathered headdress, band at the crown of the head, and bow and arrow hearken to Paul Revere’s 1772 and Samuel Drake’s 1825 images of Wampanoag sachem Metacom, later known as King Philip by colonizers. The image reflects common contradictory stereotypes where Indigenous peoples as ferocious and violent, but also noble and regal. The roots of these stereotypes can be traced back to the European vision of the noble savage stereotype a colonizing rhetoric that positioned Indigenous groups as primitive, unspoiled by European advances, and worthy adversaries that fit neatly into European paradigms of conquest, control, and conversion. In New England, this image had a widespread popular reception through so-called "Indian Captivity" narratives like that of Mary Jemison and Mary Rowlandson, a genre that Cotton Mather also contributed to. Over time, these conceptions deepened and evolved, playing into the settler-colonist invention of the "Doomed Indian" that gained particular popularity in the early- to mid-nineteenth century with literary works like The Last of the Mohicans (1826) by James Fenimore Cooper and the play Metamora; or the Last of the Wampanoags (1829) by Edwin Forrest, but also visual art like that of Revere, Drake, and the anonymous painter of this watercolor.

Henry Davis Sleeper did not leave a record of when or why he purchased this watercolor for Beauport, the Sleeper-McCann House in Gloucester. It is currently installed in the Pembroke Room, or Pine Kitchen, later described as "the quintessential expression of his romantic ideal of early America’s hearth and home." The Pembroke Room was one incarnation of the popular "Colonial kitchen" display featured in charity bazaars, centennial exhibitions, and other tourist attractions beginning in the 1860s, which functioned to promote a nostalgic, sanitized, and patriotic image of the New England home by and for wealthy and socially prominent white viewers. The inclusion of images or objects depicting Indigenous people functioned as a means of relegating those groups to the distant past, overlooking or erasing their continued and active presence in New England.

Associated Building

Original to Beauport, Sleeper-McCann House (Gloucester, Mass.),

Maker

Unknown

Dimensions

9 3/4 x 7 1/2 x 3/4 (HxWxD) (inches)

Credit Line

Gift of Constance McCann Betts, Helena Woolworth Guest and Frasier W. McCann

Accession Number

1942.3253