A Pocahontas Gallery:


Long before Walt Disney, American popular art romanticized Powhatan’s daughter Matoaka (“Pocahontas”) with varying degrees of inaccuracy.


Matoaka als Rebecca. The English portraitist Simon van de Passe is believed to have painted Pocahontas from life during her visit to England. This engraving, published in Captain John Smith’s General History of Virginia in 1624, is based on the now-lost painting. The painting of Pocahontas in the National Portrait Gallery, the so-called Booton Hall portrait, is considered to be an inferior 18th


century copy of the engraving.


A Chiefe Herowans wife of Pomeoc and her daughter of the age of 8 or 10 years. Pocahontas might have resembled this young girl in dress when she visited and played in the Jamestown settlement at a similar age. The drawing, part of a famous and invaluable series from life, circa 1586, is by John White, recording artist for several British expeditions to America and for a short time governor of the “Lost Colony” of Roanoake. The young girl is holding an English doll. Original is in the British Museum.


34 AMERICAN INDIAN SUMMER 2013


PHOTO COURTESY OF LIBRARY OF CONGRESS


COURTESY TRUSTEES OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM


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