The Indian Princess Pocahontas appears first, in a portrait based on an engraving by the Dutch artist Simon van der Passe in 1616, in England, where she had recently come with her husband Captain John Rolfe; the following year she would die of smallpox at age twenty-two. Pocahontas is first described verbally by William Strachey, in his 1615 memoir of traveling in Virginia, as a "wanton young girl" of about twelve years, whom he observed getting the young boys out "with her in the market-place," where they would do cartwheels, and she herself would follow them about, "and wheel so herself naked as she was all the fort over."

Juxtaposed to Strachey’s amused and somewhat scandalized report is an essay of 1972 by Philip Young, "The Mother of Us All: Pocahontas," in which the scholarly critic points to the process by which Pocahontas became "an American legend," and "one of our few true native myths," after which we quote from Hart Crane in the section called "Powhatan’s Daughter" in his modernist epic of 1930 The Bridge, where Crane verbally enacts that myth-making process, seeing the Princess as the animating spirit of nature in its springtime renewal: "There was a bed of leaves, and broken play, / There was a veil upon you, Pocahontas, bride– / O Princess whose brown lap was virgin May, / And bridal flanks and eyes hid tawny pride."

Moving forward more than two hundred years, we may next consider Daniel Webster, in a painting by Francis Alexander (one of the Gallery’s most recent and most valued acquisitions). The portrait was done in 1835, when Webster, then a Senator from Massachusetts, was making a name for himself as an orator of extraordinary power. This is the Byronic Webster, as perceived by the Bostonian Alexander, who had come under the spell of European Romanticism. It is the figure extolled by the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, in the first of our literary images, for having a "head of magnificent proportions" and a glance that was a "mingling of sunshine and lightening"; a man whose "features were full of intellectual greatness." But in a matching verbal portrait, written into his journal in August 1845, Ralph Waldo Emerson is found acknowledging "the natural grandeur of [Webster’s] face and manners" but feeling that all that splendor is wasted, that Webster is no more than a "fine symbol and mantel ornament," contributing nothing to the national welfare.

If Pocahontas is thus seen on two levels, as wanton child and mythic presence, and Webster viewed in almost diametrically opposing ways, Emerson himself, in a later entry, is perceived rather in three successive perspectives. The Emerson portrait is a bust of 1879 (when Emerson was seventy-six) by Daniel Chester French, who grew up in Emerson’s home town of Concord, Massachusetts, and who practiced his art in the idealistic tradition, producing the huge female figure of The Republic for the Columbian Exposition in 1893 and the Lincoln Memorial in 1912. On the verbal side, three members of the James family are heard from. The elder Henry James, in a letter to Emerson in 1843, expresses his impatience with Emerson’s refusal to answer his philosophical queries simply and clearly: "Oh you man without a handle! Shall one never be able to help himself out of you, according to his needs, and be dependent only on your fitful tippings up?" The younger Henry James, the novelist, in an autobiographical volume of 1914, thinks back more than sixty years to Emerson’s visits to the James family home on West 14th Street in New York: visualizing "the winter twilight of our backparlour at dusk, and the great Emerson—I knew he was great—greater than any of our friends—sitting between my parents, before the lights had been lighted, as visitors consentingly housed only could have done, and affecting me the more as an apparition sinuously and, I held, elegantly slim, benevolently aquiline, and commanding a tone alien, beautifully alien, to any we heard roundabout." And William James, the philosopher, in an address at a centenary celebration of Emerson in Concord in 1903, sees not the elusive philosophical colleague or the benevolent family visitor from afar, but an individual spirit in touch with the divine. "Through the individual fact there ever shone for him the effulgence of the Universal Reason. The Great Cosmic Intellect terminates and houses itself in mortal men and passing hours. Each of us is an angle of the eternal vision." Individuals should therefore respond directly to that divine inner spark, James observed. He concluded, "This faith that in a life at first hand there is something somehow sacred is perhaps the most characteristic note in Emerson’s writings."

It might be added that we lingered over differing portraits of Emerson in the Gallery before selecting the one by French, which essentially gives us the Concord sage, the figure delineated by William James rather than the ones depicted by father or brother.

The next two figures, John Brown and Frederick Douglass, might well be considered in relation to each other, the two of them representing dramatic aspects of the antislavery movement in the years before the Civil War, and each embodying a telling mixture of qualities. Brown is seen in an admiring daguerreotype of 1844 by Augustus Washington, the Connecticut-born son of a former slave and an Asian woman. It is the first known portrait of Brown and a much prized (and expensive) purchase in 1996. Robert Penn Warren, in a 1974 interview, provides an enduringly contradictory image of Brown:

Some fifteen years ago, when Edmund Wilson was working on Patriotic Gore we’d meet at parties, and he would say, "Red, let’s go and sit in the corner and talk about the Civil War," and we always did. And the subject of Brown once or twice came up, and he once said, "But he’s trivial, he’s merely a homicidal maniac—forget him." Now that is half of Brown. In a strange way the homicidal maniac loves in terms of grand gestures and heroic stances, and is a carrier of high values, but is a homicidal maniac!

Warren’s own literary career began in effect with his biography of Brown in 1939, a book which explored the fiery contradictions pointed to in the 1974 interview.

Frederick Douglass is portrayed in a splendid oil-on-canvas, perhaps by Elisha L. Hammond (or so Douglass perhaps inaccurately remembered) in 1844, in Northampton, Massachusetts, where Douglass had just addressed an antislavery meeting. Douglass was twenty-six at the time; he had escaped from his Maryland slavemaster six years before and was already a much sought-after speaker for the antislavery cause in the Northern states. As to the human being, an exceedingly forceful image is supplied, in a letter read at Douglass’s funeral, by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, abolitionist and staunch activist for women’s rights. Stanton evoked her first view of Douglass: "He stood there like an African Prince, conscious of his dignity and power, grand in his proportions, majestic in his wrath, as with wit, satire, and indignation, he graphically described the bitterness of slavery and the humiliation of subjection to those who . . . were inferior to himself." But his biographer Rayford W. Logan, studying photographs of Douglass in his last years (he died in 1895 at age seventy-seven), observes, in our second quotation, a mixture of qualities as striking in its very different way as that of John Brown. Behind the African prince "majestic in his wrath," Logan detects "a man who has suffered much, but also a man who has conquered suffering and achieved repose through the conquest of suffering."

Poetry is the chief source of verbal portraiture in the next four entries that come before us. In the case of Jesse James, the Missouri outlaw who, with his brother Frank and other members of his gang, robbed banks and trains across the Southwest for a period after the Civil War, the poem is an anonymous much-recited ballad:

Jesse James was a lad who killed many
    a man.

He robbed the Glendale train.

He stole from the rich and gave to the poor.

Had a hand and a heart and a brain.

Jesse was a man, a friend to the poor.

He’d never see a man suffer pain.

. . . the dirty little coward that shot
    Mr. Howard

Has put Jesse James in his grave.

It was Bob Ford, a recent recruit to the gang, who shot Jesse James, then masquerading as Mr. Howard, to earn the reward offered by the governor of Missouri. The picture shown, in fact, is an engraving based on a photograph (by one Alexander Lozo) taken immediately after James was killed. "The corpse was strapped to a board and stood upright," a report ran, "so that it could be photographed." And meanwhile, looking at James from a radically different angle, the well-known detective Robert Pinkerton is heard saying that Jesse James was "the worst man, without exception, in America. He is utterly devoid of fear, and has no more compunction about cold-blooded murder than he has about eating breakfast."

Jesse James is imaged at the moment of his death; the great Indian leader, Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce, is described at the moment of final surrender. In 1877, Chief Joseph, harassed and threatened beyond endurance by U.S. authorities, led his tribe from their Oregon home (where they had been a notably friendly and hospitable people) eastward across Idaho and Montana toward what they hoped would be safety in Canada, alongside Sitting Bull and his Sioux warriors. But with too many of the tribe sick or wounded, the 1,500-mile venture came to an end at Bear Paw Mountain, near Chinook, Montana. Here, in October 1877, Chief Joseph surrendered to U.S. General Howard.

Robert Penn Warren, in Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce (1983), hauntingly depicts the fateful ceremony and the Chief’s unforgettable last words. Chief Joseph arrives, leaning over his mount, head bent:

Black braids now framed a face past
     pain,
Hands loose before him, the
    death-giving rifle
Loose-held across.

And then:

Arrow-straight
He suddenly sits, head now lifted.
     With perfect ease,
To the right he swings a buckskinned
    leg over.

The Chief presents his rifle to General Howard. And:

His heart gives words.
But the words, translated, are
    addressed to Howard . . .

Hear me, my chiefs, I am tired.
     I am sick and sad.
From where the sun now stands,
     I will fight no more forever.

Those were indeed the Chief’s recorded words. In the sequel, and after a series of broken promises, Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce tribal members were taken to the Colville reservation in Washington State.

The portrait is by Edward Sheriff Curtis, a photographic artist of remarkable vitality and ambition. Between 1909 and 1920, he wrote, illustrated, and published a twenty-volume series of Indian portraits called The North American Indians, an enterprise funded by J. P. Morgan and carrying an introduction by Theodore Roosevelt. It was taken at the reservation in 1903 and shows a man consumed by sadness and loss. A year later, Chief Joseph, at age sixty-three, died of what was said to be a broken heart.

(More, to Part 2 of 2)