The Portrait of Hanadagá•yas; or, George Washington Reconsidered

Lori Wassilchuk, I'm the Assistant Director of Public Programs at PAFA. I'm speaking to you from Philadelphia, which was built upon the ancestral lands of the Lenape people. We recognize the histories of land theft, erasure, and oppression that have brought us here, brought us our institution and ourselves here today. I would be happy to help anyone in the audience think about tangible steps you can take to inform yourselves or deepen your engagement with the past and current issues facing Indigenous peoples. You have my email, feel free to contact me. I want to thank our sponsors for Art at Noon. Art at Noon lectures are supported by the Barron family in memory of Rose Susan Herschel Barron, a former docent at the Academy and a great supporter of its educational programs. I'm now going to hand over the mic to Dr. Anna O'Marley, PAFA's Chief of Curatorial Affairs, who will introduce our guest speaker. Thank you, Lori. Thank you for that great introduction and recognizing that we are on Lenape land. I am thrilled to introduce my colleague Janine Uramato-Bolt. I am fascinated by Janine's work and so happy that she's speaking with us today. I had the opportunity to hear Janine speak about another project at our Association of Historians of American Art conference this fall, which was held in Arkansas, but I was really struck by an article that I read that she is going to talk about in portion today because of how well it dovetails with some of the work we are doing at PAFA to reconsider George Washington's role in terms of our collection and in terms of American history. So I know that you're all thrilled for this because we had so many people sign up. I'm so happy. So I'll introduce Janine. Janine Uramato-Bolt is the Associate Curator of American Art at the Chazen Museum of Art at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She previously worked at the American Philosophical Society and Colonial Williamsburg and she earned her PhD in American Studies from William and Mary. She's the researcher behind ColonialVirginiaPortraits.org, a digital project produced in collaboration with the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture. And for those of you who might not know, Omohundro is the leading institute of early American culture in the country, so very, very prestigious organization based out of Colonial Williamsburg. Her scholarship on early American art and culture has been published in Smithsonian American Art, the American Philosophical Society Panorama, which is open source, free, amazing publication of the Association of Historians of American Art. And she has a forthcoming article in which her portfolio. And she has, in addition to all of this, some ties to Philadelphia, where she was a fellow at the American Philosophical Society. So please give a warm Art at Noon welcome to Janine. All right. Thank you so much, Lori, for inviting me here today and Anna for that wonderful introduction and also for thinking of me for this series. I'm so excited to be able to share some of this work with everyone today. All right. So today I am presenting to you from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which occupies ancestral Ho-Chunk land, a place their nation has called Dejo since time immemorial. In an 1832 treaty, the Ho-Chunk were forced to cede this territory. Decades of ethnic cleansing followed when both the federal and state government repeatedly, but unsuccessfully sought to forcibly remove the Ho-Chunk from Wisconsin. This history of colonization informs our shared future of collaboration and innovation. Today, UW-Madison respects the inherent sovereignty of the Ho-Chunk nation, along with the 11 other First Nations of Wisconsin. And I would like to acknowledge that the university is a land grant institution and continues to benefit from stolen land that funded its establishment. And I recognize that land acknowledgments can feel like empty gestures. However, my presentation today explicitly engages with the entangled histories of land dispossession and educational institutions. So I want to at least acknowledge the history of the land and institution where I now live and work as a settler scholar. As many institutions, including PAFA, are approaching historical American art collections and their own histories with the critical eye, my talk today adds to this discussion by focusing on this one particular painting, the first known portrait of George Washington. This portrait, a pre-revolutionary portrait of Washington by the artist Charles Wilson Peale, who's probably very familiar to everyone in Philadelphia, it has long been in the art collection of Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia. The portrait has long been discussed as early evidence of Washington's military leadership. Notably, it is the only known oil portrait of Washington that he commissioned for domestic display at Mount Vernon before the American Revolution, meaning that this portrait was commissioned before he became a national icon. As such, it is evidence of how Washington wanted to be remembered by family and peers before he became General Washington or President Washington, and it reveals his priorities in the early 1770s. Today, I suggest that we think about this portrait in relation to Washington's history of violence against indigenous peoples and to institutional histories of dispossession. Doing so allows us to consider the portrait in the context of Washington's actions around the time it was created, as well as in the portrait's afterlife and the influence it had following its creation. Washington and Lee University, like many institutions responding to racial justice movements, is actively confronting its ties to slavery. Washington Lee is, of course, named after George Washington, a financial benefactor, and Robert E. Lee, who served as the university's president for a period following the Civil War. The university's relationship to Lee and the Confederacy has been widely scrutinized, but Washington's legacy as a slave owner is also contested by many. As you likely remember, on August 11th and 12th, 2017, white supremacists demonstrated in Charlottesville near the University of Virginia over plans to remove a statue of the Confederate General Robert E. Lee. In response, on August 31st of that year, so just a few weeks later, Washington and Lee University in nearby Lexington formed its Commission on Institutional History and Community, tasked with recommending steps to address the so-called problematic aspects of the university's history and physical campus. In practice, this meant removing a number of public markers commemorating Confederate history on campus and taking steps to display a more diverse history. One recommendation of this commission was to diversify the university's portrait collection, which was overwhelmingly white and male. Another was to display only portraits of Lee that portray him in civilian attire, not as a Confederate general, and therefore they wanted to remove the military portraits throughout campus and put them in storage. The idea behind this was to remove visual references to Lee's Confederate military background, while still allowing the school to recognize the role he played as president of the university following the Civil War when he was a civilian. Interestingly, the university tacitly extended that recommendation to a portrait of Washington. In the fall of 2018, the university temporarily exchanged Peale's portrait of Washington and his militia uniform for a portrait by Gilbert Stewart representing Washington in civilian garb that is owned by Mount Vernon, so the Peale painting is now displayed at Mount Vernon in the Stewart portrait at Washington and Lee. Stewart painted the original composition the same year that the statesman saved the school from insolvency, making it particularly relevant to the campus's history, and I'll talk more about Washington's role at the school later. When not on loan to other museums, the Peale portrait had regularly been on view in the Lee Chapel on campus, where Lee happens to be buried. So here is a view of the chapel from before fall 2018 that shows how the Peale portrait of Washington on the left and one of Lee flanked the statue marking the tomb of Robert E. Lee in the center of the building. So both portraits were displayed in very prominent positions. I will note that below the chapel there is a museum and exhibition space where staff is currently working to reinterpret the university's history with new exhibitions and development, and I believe eventually the portrait will likely be displayed in the space. However, right now it's the Mount Vernon Stewart portrait that remains at the school and is in the museum. Underscoring the unresolved tension between past and present, the school's portraiture replacements and exchanges actually obscure the militaristic white nationalism of its two namesakes in an attempt to openly address the school's past. Furthermore, these actions address the school's connections to slavery and the confederacy, but not its history or Washington's history with Indigenous Americans. Missing from Washington and Lee's institutional report are the Peale portrait's references to Indigenous territory, Washington's violence against Indigenous nations, and acts of land speculation, surveying, and dispossession perpetuated by U.S. educational institutions. There is now a Native American and Indigenous cohort of faculty and staff at the school, but there is little official acknowledgment of the institution's historical relationship to Indigenous nations, particularly the Monacan peoples on whose land the university sits. Yet, as the American studies scholar Jody Byrd has long asserted, slavery cannot be understood separately from the colonization and theft of Indigenous lands that provided struggles for freedom their staging ground. My study of Washington and Lee's painting of George Washington aims to demonstrate how art and fiction operate in tandem with institutions to preserve and inspire violent myths of American empire, and now focusing today on its Indigenous histories. I contend that Peale's first portrait of George Washington can be understood as representing Haneda Gaius, the Haudenosaunee name bestowed on Washington. The Haudenosaunee were a powerful confederacy of six allied nations, the Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, Mohawk, and Tuscarora. Charles Cook, a Mohawk scholar, translated this Haudenosaunee name as follows, he bites villages, a sacker of villages, a destroyer of towns, a ravager of communities, a plunderer and pillerer of encampments. Hyperbolically, this verb denotes to destroy, to sack, to plunder, to pillage, to devastate, to demolish, to ravage, to cause distress, to cause havoc, to eat in secret the provisions and crops of others. It is used only in instances of savagery and discomfort, and this is the name that they gave to Washington. The name captures Washington's participation in indigenous dispossession through warfare, land surveying and speculation, and canal construction to facilitate western trade and settlement, all activities that are implicitly referenced in the portrait. Peale painted this earliest known portrait of George Washington at Mount Vernon in May 1772, and it recalls Washington's military service during the Seven Years War of 1756 to 1763. This was a conflict fought between the British and French and their respective indigenous allies over territory in the Ohio River Valley, which stretches from western Pennsylvania to the Mississippi River, so it's the area sort of shaded in green on this map. In the painting, Washington wears his militia uniform, accoutrements like the silver gorget and the rifle, and he stands in front of a landscape which evokes the Ohio River Valley, where Washington served during the war and where members of the Shawnee, Wyandotte, Lenape, Seneca, and Cayuga Nations, among others, resided. There's also a document labeled Order of March tucked into his pocket. The portrait was painted years after Washington's military service ended, and yet in 1772, his experience as a colonel in the militia was still important enough to him that he chose to be painted this way. The painting later became entangled in institutional and national narratives that perpetuated violence against Native Americans. For these reasons, I will refer to the painting as a portrait of Hannah DeGuyas to foreground the acts of dispossession inherent within the iconic portrait itself, as well as the institutions that display it. Washington had previously actually embraced a related name, Hannah DeGuyas, during the Seven Years War. Back in 1753, Virginia's lieutenant governor, Robert Dinwiddie, sent Washington to meet with French and Haudenosaunee representatives at Logstown, near modern-day Pittsburgh, in response to the French construction of forts in the region. The Seneca and other nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy were, in fact, British allies at this time and during the Seven Years War. Their political and economic influence extended from central New York to the Great Lakes region and the Ohio River Valley. According to Washington, during this trip, he was named by the Seneca leader, Tenochtitlan, and the tribes of nations with whom he treated, Conoctocarius, in English, the town taker, which name being registered in their manner and communicated to other nations of Indians. Washington referred to himself at least three times as Conoctocarius, including in a 1754 letter to Tenochtitlan that he signed as Washington or Conoctocarius. This means that Washington was using a Haudenosaunee name to communicate with the Confederacy, and since they were allies at the time, it was given to him in a friendly or diplomatic gesture. Washington's experience during this war shaped his future interactions with Indigenous nations during the American Revolution and later on as president. The portrait's militaristic references to Indigenous territories and Washington's use of the name Conoctocarius, which meant town taker, foretells Washington's later actions against the Haudenosaunee when they were no longer his allies. During the American Revolution, the Haudenosaunee nations either attempted to remain neutral or sympathize with the British, except for the Oneida and Tuscarora, who eventually gave support to the Americans. In 1779, Washington ordered Major General John Sullivan of the Continental Army to attack Haudenosaunee towns, writing, the immediate objects are the total destruction and devastation of their settlements and the capture of as many prisoners of every age and sex as possible. It will be essential to ruin their crops now in the ground and prevent their planting more. Under Washington's orders, the army attacked the Onondaga Nation's primary village, which functioned as the capital of the Confederacy, and other villages of the Cayuga and Seneca Nations, burning homes and crops to the ground and forcing all of the inhabitants to relocate. In 1790, while Washington was president, the Seneca chiefs, Corn Planter, Half Town, and Grape Tree, addressed Washington about this campaign, stating, when your army entered the country of the Six Nations, we called you the town destroyer, and to this day, when that name is heard, our women look behind them and turn pale, and our children cling close to the neck of their mothers. It was desire for the Haudenosaunee's land and interest in the Ohio Valley, where the Confederacy exerted political power, that motivated Washington's attack on them. He was trying to weaken the Confederacy to make claiming Indigenous territory easier. It was this campaign of total warfare that earned him the moniker, Haudenosaunee. Notably, the Haudenosaunee name or title for all U.S. presidents remains Haudenosaunee, each successive president inheriting the title from Washington. So today, President Biden is also referred to as Haudenosaunee. In the Haudenosaunee portrait, Native Americans and their coveted western lands were represented by teepees, the movable shelters used by Indigenous plains nations in the West. And I know it can be difficult to see in a photograph, but where the arrow is pointing, there are two teepees that appear on the far left of the image. The portable structures suggest that the inhabitants were transient, and notably, there are no Indigenous figures represented in the background. The equation of portability or transience with impermanence was itself a settler colonial perspective that ignored many Indigenous nations' relationships with the land. So many nations did not believe you had to live somewhere permanently in order to have a relationship with their land. The inclusion of the teepees in the portrait was therefore a nod to settlers' aspirations, right, and including Washington's aspirations to replace Native Americans on the land, including in the trans-Mississippi West, as teepees were not regularly used by the nations that lived in the Ohio River Valley. So it seems notable that there is an inclusion of teepees, right, which is a reference to western land. In 1772, when he was painted, Washington was very frustrated with King George III's proclamation of 1763, which prohibited settlement west of the Appalachian Mountains following the Seven Years' War. Colonists believed that these restrictions encroached on their British liberties, and their dissatisfaction actually contributed to the growing independence movement. In other words, one of the motivating factors for Washington actually becoming a revolutionary was desire for this western or Indigenous land. Washington believed that Indigenous occupation of American land was fleeting or temporary. He wrote in 1767 that the King's settlement restrictions were temporary and must fall, of course, in a few years, especially when those Indians are consenting to our occupying the lands. Washington's belief that Native peoples would eventually allow white settlement, combined with the teepees in his portrait, suggests that this painting is an early expression of the so-called vanishing Indian myth, American art. The myth of the vanishing Indian became very popular in early American art and literature of the 19th century, and essentially expressed the belief that Indigenous Americans were destined to disappear to make room for U.S. settlement, and we'll return to this myth in a few minutes. When Peale painted him in 1772, Washington was a rampant land speculator, preoccupied with western land improvement projects. In 1770, Washington had taken a surveying trip to the Ohio region, where he claimed land through western land grants that he actually received as a reward from the Virginia government for serving as a colonel during the Seven Years' War. So his land claims were directly related to militia uniform he wears in his portrait. Washington also owned shares in the Ohio Land Company and founded the Mississippi Land Company, both were land speculation ventures in which men like Washington invested in buying and surveying western land with the hope of reselling it at higher prices to settlers. Washington also attempted to develop canals and locks along the Potomac River to connect northern Virginia to the Ohio and Mississippi rivers to facilitate trade and settlement in the west. Just days before Peale began his picture, Washington exchanged several letters about building a Potomac River canal to facilitate trade to Fort Cumberland, located in western Maryland, from one supported to the waters of Ohio must commence. As Mount Vernon was located directly on the Potomac, improving navigation past the falls would greatly benefit Washington, who hoped the river would become the channel of conveyance of the extensive and valuable trade of a rising empire. Indeed, the waterfall in the portrait is likely intended to sort of evoke the falls of the Potomac River. And when you stand on the left, a landscape at Washington commissioned from Mount Vernon from the artist George Beck of the falls of the Potomac River, showing that he was interested in acquiring representations of these landscapes and waterways. Washington's land development projects and surveying funded academic institutions, which is a very important context for understanding the legacy of the Haneda Gaia's portrait at Washington and Lee University. In 1749, Washington received his commission as a county surveyor from the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. The institution did not actually instruct surveyors, but it profited from the exclusive right to license them in Virginia, and they use those funds for operating costs. Notably, the college also operated the Bradfordton Indian School. Students came both willingly and forcibly from Virginia's tributary nations, including the Pamunkey, Nansamand, Nottoway, and Jocomney, and from more distant nations, including the Lenape and Wyandotte from the Ohio River Valley. Colonists hoped that the students would be quote-unquote civilized and become agents of the British Empire. Washington later served as the college's first post-revolutionary chancellor from 1788 to 1799, and in 1796, Washington saved the struggling Liberty Hall Academy, which was later renamed Washington and Lee University, by gifting the school financial shares from the James River Canal Company. The company sought to connect the James River with the Kanawha River, a tributary of the Ohio River, and if you remember, this would benefit Washington as he claimed land along the Kanawha River. The school's origins dated to 1749. It was founded after large numbers of settlers moved into the Shenandoah Valley, displacing Suyan nations, including the Monacan Indian Nation, whose land the school still occupies. Profits from the company's shares remain part of Washington and Lee University's endowment today. Washington also planned to fund a national university with profits from the Potomac Company, established in 1785 to improve the Potomac River. This university never happened, right? However, it is clear that Washington's interest in indigenous territory supported his educational mission. He believed that educating U.S. Americans in a centrally located national institution would help overcome regional prejudices and spread systematic ideas through all parts of this rising empire. Following Washington's death, the Portrait of Haneda Gaius moved into the possession of Washington's step-grandson, George Washington Park Custis, who conflated the painting with the so-called remarkable Indian Prophecy, a story that he published in multiple venues and that emerged in the national consciousness in the antebellum period. Custis was raised by George and Martha Washington and partially grew up at Mount Vernon, and therefore the Portrait of Haneda Gaius was part of his daily life and surroundings as a young child. And so here on the screen you see a photograph of Custis as an adult, but he's also the young boy pictured next to Washington in the well-known Washington Family Portrait by Edward Savage. He later built a home called Arlington House where he hung the Portrait of Haneda Gaius. He treated his home like a museum, welcoming visitors to view Washington Family portraits and relics that he had purchased and inherited. Custis turned the Peale portrait into a national icon through his semi-public display of it, mentioning in publications, and having an engraving of it done for much wider circulation. And the engraving that you see on your screen to the right is the one that Custis helped get published. Custis also happened to be an amateur history painter, orator, and author. He published personal and family stories about Washington in newspapers and he became a playwright. His first major play was titled The Indian Prophecy and was performed in 1827 and published in 1828. The play was a fictionalized account of Washington's 1770 surveying expedition into the Ohio River Valley, specifically an encounter that supposedly occurred along the Kanawha River where Washington had received those tracts of land in exchange for his military service during the Seven Years War. According to James Craig, a surgeon and member of the surveying party, and Custis's source, an unnamed sachem, met with the surveying party. The sachem had witnessed Washington during the Battle of Monongahela in 1755, and this was an absolutely disastrous battle for the British and their allies during the Seven Years War. According to Craig, the sachem remembered that Washington was shot at multiple times, but somehow he survived. Washington's miraculous survival purportedly led the sachem to proclaim when the two met again. The Great Spirit protects that man and guides his destinies. He will become the chief of nations, and the people yet unborn will hail him as the founder of a mighty empire. Custis's play brought national awareness to the so-called prophecy, bolstering the idea that God had ordained Washington and national expansion. In fact, in the play's publication, he included the historical account of the event as a preface. Notably, Washington did not record any such prophecy in his own diary, in which he kept daily records of the surveying trip. He did mention meeting with a Seneca leader named Gaiushuta. However, Gaiushuta was a prominent and well-known figure, and surely if he was the so-called sachem from Craig's story, Craig and or Custis would have named him, because an association with Gaiushuta would have given the story greater legitimacy. In Custis's play, The Indian Prophecy, Washington first appears on stage, seated at a table covered in surveying instruments. His first line reads in part, what a vast country is the West, when it shall have been rescued from the savage, and become the seat of civilization. It will be a world of itself. The play ends with the fictional chief Manawa giving his prophecy, and then immediately dying in the arms of his attendants, thus making way for Washington's ascendancy. And as you can see on the screen, you can see how dramatic the scene is with the italicized stage directions on the page. It reads in part, after a pause, his arms outstretched to heaven, the chief dies. Right, so The Indian Prophecy play is sort of this quintessential example of the vanishing Indian trope in American literature. The play promoted the idea that Native Americans were not only disappearing to allow for national expansion, but that their own leaders recognized the futility of resistance. And I argue that the portrait of Hannah DeGuyas, right, this painting of Washington, very likely inspired Custis while he was writing the play, The Indian Prophecy. So how and why do I think that? Well, in the, in the published list of portraits at Arlington House, which appeared in another publication from 1860, Recollections and Private Memoirs of Washington, the portrait's description stated that it was painted in 1772, which is correct, and included a note stating that it will be remembered that 1772 was the year of the remarkable Indian Prophecy. A footnote then directs the reader to the chapter in the same publication, which is dedicated to a retelling of Craig's historical account of the event. However, if you remember, the actual surveying expedition occurred in 1770, not 1772. But Custis and his family clearly conflated the event with the portrait in their minds, leading to them incorrectly dating the expedition in this publication. Further, the setting of the play, The Indian Prophecy, along the Kanawha River in 1772, was described by Custis as accessible only by Indian paths, which wound through the passes of the mountain, where Washington's party formed a camp on the back of the river, consisting of rudely constructed wigwams or shelters from which they issued to survey. Custis's description is reminiscent of the portrait's landscape. In the Peale portrait, we see a group of teepees with which a man like Custis might easily incorrectly describe as wigwams or rudely constructed shelters along a river in a rocky landscape. And Washington's militia uniform is also a callback to what he wore during the Battle of Monongahela, when he supposedly earned these western lands and was first saved from death. According to Custis, Craig also attested to the accuracy of Peale's portrait. And again, Craig also apparently delighted in sharing the story of the Indian Prophecy, especially during the American Revolution before battle. According to Custis, he used the prophecy to assure his fellow soldiers that Washington could not be killed, and as long as he lived, the American cause was destined to survive. Similarly, this portrait became associated with Washington's military prowess. In many early descriptions of this portrait, mostly from the 19th and early 20th century, historians commented that the painting highlighted Washington's military accomplishments, foreshadowing his later leadership during the American Revolution. These writers overlooked or were unaware of the fact that Washington's actions during the Seven Years War were actually anything but exemplary, and in fact were often disastrous, which is a topic for another lecture. But regardless, the portrait fueled notions of militaristic nationalism during the 19th century. The Custis family later united the portrait of Hanna de Gaius with the legacy of Robert E. Lee and the Confederacy by donating it to Washington and Lee University. Custis's daughter, Mary Anna Randolph Custis, married Robert E. Lee and inherited the portrait along with Arlington House. Following the Civil War, Lee served as the school's president and displayed the portrait of Hanna de Gaius in his campus home. Under Lee's direction, the college built Lee Chapel as a congregational space. Following Lee's death, the chapel became a Confederate shrine when he was actually buried there, and it sort of remains a kind of lost cause pilgrimage site. In 1897, the painting joined an existing portrait gallery in the chapel, where a recumbent statue of Lee was placed behind these dramatic curtains and flanked by portraits of other university heroes. In this setting, Hanna de Gaius participated in an overt celebration of militaristic white nationalism, his image enlisted to support the lost cause. And today, as I discussed earlier, the school continues to struggle to distance itself from this myth embodied by its namesakes on their portraits. Field's portrait of Hanna de Gaius, which Washington paid for with profits from enslaved labor and displayed in his plantation's parlor to proclaim his desire for indigenous territory, reveals the costs of American empire. It also complicates the mythology of Washington as a benevolent leader destined to guide an expansive American empire, a vision that the portrait itself helped construct through these narratives that the family and the institutions created around it. Centering both the portraits and Washington's histories with Native peoples helps tell new stories about American art and sheds light on how art helped construct certain American stories. It can help us rethink iconic portraits of Washington. For instance, we know that one of the motivating reasons Washington even became a revolutionary was his desire for Western indigenous territory. That can help us see his revolutionary activities and his portraits differently. For instance, this portrait of Washington at Princeton from Paffett's collection was painted in 1779, the same year that Washington ordered Sullivan to destroy Haudenosaunee villages and effectively became Hanna de Gaius. The artist of the painting was also Charles Wilson Peale, the same artist who painted the portrait that we've long been discussing. Peale later established a museum in Philadelphia that celebrated national expansion through its collection and exhibition of natural history specimens, portraits, and Native American artifacts. So knowing this information, perhaps we can change how we think about and interpret these paintings. Or this portrait by Gilbert Stewart from 1796, again painted the same year that Washington gave funds to save the struggling school that became Washington and the university. This portrait celebrates Washington as the country's first president. It references the ancient Roman Republic and Washington as a modern day Cincinnatus, a soldier who laid down his arms and embraced rural retreat. Yet we know that the Haudenosaunee called him Hanna de Gaius, the town destroyer, and that the lands Washington promoted as a site of agricultural retreat were stolen from Indigenous peoples. He also ignored or refused to make treaties with Indigenous nations during his term as president. I'm going to end today with this, the contemporary Mohawk artist Alan Michelson's video installation, Hanna de Gaius, Town Destroyer. This installation projects a video onto a bus of George Washington mounted on a surveyor's tripod. So what you see here are three pictures of the same piece, just with different images projected. The bus itself is copied after a well-known bust of Washington by the French sculptor Jean-Antoine Odon. With the projecting images of historic maps, documents, site markers, and other images, the video projection traces the course of Washington's campaign against the Haudenosaunee during the American Revolution and the seizure of their lands in the campaign's aftermath. While the images change, members of the Six Nations of the Grand River Territory repeat the name Hanna de Gaius. This artwork is now at the Peabody Essex Museum in the recently reinstalled American Art Exhibition. Michelson's work provides a contemporary Indigenous perspective on Washington and a reinterpretation of a historic portrait of him. It is a reminder that Washington's legacy as Hanna de Gaius lives on, and that there are many stories that can be told about our American past, and art offers one way to engage with them. Thank you. Thank you so much, Janine. That talk did not disappoint at all. You did an amazing job, I think, tracing that one particular portrait from the moment in which it was created and commissioned, and also its lifetime throughout the 19th century, and how it was used, how it is influential, as well as the ramifications of the power of portraits like this up until the present moment today, which is exactly the kind of work that we are interested in doing here at PEFA. So I really appreciate you bringing in the works that are in Making American Artists as well, our current exhibition that's on view, and then it's going to be traveling around the country. And there were so many things that I wanted to, you know, sort of pick up on that you said, I kind of feel like I'm back in a grad seminar, in a good way, a really good way. But something I always point out to people is George Washington's training as a land surveyor. And then in my dissertation work, I looked at the landscape paintings he commissioned for Mount Vernon, and how they were directly involved in his investment in canals and westward expansionism. And that in my own work on landscape in the early republic, I really think we need to think about those landscapes in terms of issues of land speculation and development and economic impetus. So the way you read, in particular, the landscape in the background of this portrait is fascinating and very welcome. And Charles Wilson Peale, while he didn't do many landscapes, did do some and was very invested in landscapes as a tool of measurement and land. And then I was also really struck by what you said about Custis and that play in 1828. And I noted that it was performed in Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington. And did you also say that Custis was a history painter as well, like an amateur history painter? Fascinating. And so I'm not sure, you probably are familiar with Wendy Bellion's recent work on, she's been working on theater in the early republic, in particular theater in Philadelphia. And something I've been fascinated by is theater, history, painting, and national identity in this period from the 1820s to the 1850s. And I think Custis's creation of this play, as well as that promotion of that image at Arlington House really ties in very much with all of this, with people in Philadelphia and Washington and Baltimore jockeying for how the nation is going to be defined, at the exact same time that they're also looking, they're decorating the U.S. Capitol Rotunda with history paintings, which is where Washington was supposed to be buried, there before he was buried. So as you can see, I have a lot of thoughts about this. I want to congratulate you. And I I just wonder if you want to pick up on any of those, those thoughts. Sure, thank you for that. Yeah, there's a lot that can be sort of built out of this project. So in terms of landscape painting, I'm not familiar with all the landscapes that Washington had. I just I know he has a few and they're all going to be like river sort of gateways to the West. And, and I just think it's his interest in the West continues through his presidency. But we see it in this early early image of him, which like I sort of just briefly alluded to is the only image we have where he was commissioning it as sort of this private citizen, where he was deeply invested in this would have been his personal legacy and how it would have, you know, this would have been inherited by his family and seen by his peers. And so the fact that he's putting these Western landscapes and these references to Western land in this portrait is hugely significant for this moment and says a lot about his motivations for joining, you know, the revolutionary cause and his later actions as president, when he continues to pursue these Western lands. And peel, as you know, I mean, he wasn't necessarily known as a landscape painter, but he has a lot of sort of landscape elements in his portraits where he, you know, fills them with sort of symbols and icons that can easily be interpreted, you know, very symbolic sort of landscape elements. And so I think this is definitely part of that larger tradition here, where he's using that. As for George Washington Park Custis, yeah, he was an amateur history painter. You can look up some of his paintings online. He's not particularly talented. But he was very interested in sort of these large scale paintings of American history scenes. And it's one of his other sort of major play was called Pocahontas. And so he's really interested in sort of this vanishing Indian sort of trope, and a national expansion, which he seems to have inherited from the grandfather who raised him. And so it is very curious that he's promoting all of these things at once, and that this portrait is tied to all of these sort of stories. And his interest in centralizing Virginia, I think, and Virginians as a source of national identity, at a time when he was Philadelphia, New York, and sort of these northern cities that are getting a lot of attention. So we can't forget sort of these early southern examples of these stories and artworks that are coming into play. Yeah, and that's the same time that they're also, you know, putting the painting of Pocahontas into the US Capitol Rotunda. So Virginia as originary, you know, this all these competing identities for who is the originating, except, of course, the native peoples of the land. Yeah, and the Custases are deeply invested in promoting Washington as this founding father figure, promoting Virginia, and using their connection to Washington, like to promote themselves to and turning him turning themselves in sort of celebrities through the Washington connection. Um, may I read a question in the chat, please, for everybody? Thank you, Dr. Yorimoto-Bolt. As always, I learn more and more from you. I like how you brought Washington back to earth by describing his family's creation myth. Can you describe your scholarly research? How do you find these stories? I feel like you are a wonderful artist detective. And on a personal note, she recommends folks to work with you because you are a generous scholar and a dynamo in general. Oh, thank you. Thank you, Estelle. Um, yeah, so I tend to get really interested in sort of single portraits or single, you know, small groups of portraits with these really interesting, I can sort of really interesting iconography to understand why it's there. And, in particular, with this particular portrait, I started working on this Washington portrait, and I was doing my dissertation, sort of one of the last ones I think about my dissertations on colonial Virginia portraiture, and sort of imperial identity and politics. And so this is one of the last ones I was working on from 1772. And I was just struck by Washington's early references to the Western land, and in sort of researching his motivations for this portrait, sort of write about it as this early expression of settler colonialism and the vanishing Indian trope. And, you know, thinking about it as an early, you know, early understanding of revolutionary American identity in 1772. And then when I actually, it was while I was at the APS that I became introduced to the name Honda guy as because the APS has some great indigenous studies resources, and they have that wonderful source by Charles Cook, where it lays out the name on and what it really means. And that was the first time I was really introduced to this history. And then thinking about that name, I was drawn, just kept making all these connections to this portrait, right, where it's all about Western land. And so I just started doing more research into this. And even though Honda guy is that name and title didn't wasn't really given to Washington until about seven years after the portrait was painted, I was learning that he was using other Haudenosaunee names that essentially mean the same thing. And that this, so that this, there's a way to view these portraits of this national icon as an image of the town destroyer, you know, and sort of thinking about, well, let's, let's look at it through a different lens and look at it through the lens of the town destroyer, instead of this lens of him as an American revolutionary. And so that's sort of how that, that story came together. And so it's a little bit of archival research, a little bit of luck, and just some fortuitous circumstances. But I think it's a particularly interesting painting. I have a question. Well, I have two questions. First, I really think this would be an incredible book, with the maps and the and the portraits and all and to try to end the primary resources. It's just it's, it's incredible. Thank you so much for doing this work. I'm wondering if your relationship with Washington and Lee University, what is the relationship there? Because it sounds like you are keeping up to date with how they are, are resolving or trying to contend with their history in there and the way it sits? Yeah. Yes, I know one of the curators there has been there for a while. And then in doing this research, I reached back out to them and connected briefly with their sort of newer director of the museums there. So the new director came on board after this Institutional History Commission was done. And so she is sort of taking the lead on sort of reinterpreting the university's history within their museum setting, which is an ongoing project. I'm excited to see where it goes. I've not stayed super involved with them. And unfortunately, I moved to Wisconsin and it was COVID and everything, I haven't been back. But I do know that the museum staff there is trying to really rethink how they're interpreting the school's legacy. And so I did reach out, it's through them that I've learned about the Native American Indigenous cohort, which is, you know, sort of a group of faculty and staff working to bring more Indigenous programming to this, to the school to support Indigenous students, and to raise awareness of Indigenous issues. But like I said, like the school itself doesn't seem to have officially, you know, even adopted a land acknowledgement, there's not really a large, there's not really an institutional recognition of its Indigenous history. So it seems to be more faculty and staff sort of doing things on their own and students, I'm sure. So we'll see, you know, we'll see how the interpretation goes. But the portrait itself is still at Mount Vernon. So I don't know when they're going to bring it back. Can you talk a little bit about how Mount Vernon interprets that portrait? Yeah, as far as I know, right now, it's still, I don't know if it's in their museum, like separate display, or they just have a, but they have either the original or replica in their parlor, which is where it would have originally been displayed. And so it's part of their historic interior furnishings alongside portraits of Martha, and the grandkids. And as far as I know, like, I don't know how they're interpreting it at the moment. Actually, I know that they talk about it in terms of Washington's history with the Seven Years War. And I know that on their website, they actually don't interpret the tents as teepees, they think that they're military tents. So I'm not sure how much they've actually, like interpret this, this portrait in the context of indigenous history. But their website also has a lot of information about, you know, Washington's relationship with indigenous people, indigenous peoples. And so at least in their educational resources, they talk about these issues a lot, from what I know of their tours, and from when I've it's been a while since I've taken one, but they're not really addressing it necessarily on like the tours of the historic interior. I do know that the curators there are very aware of Washington's conflicting legacies, and are always really trying to be on the forefront of new research and interpretation of Washington. But I, like you haven't been on a house tour in a while. So I don't know how it's interpreted for the general public. Yeah, and I know, like I haven't been on a house for a while. And I also know that they've struggled to get a lot of the they've done some wonderful research, and they've done some great interpretation about slavery at Mount Vernon. But from what I've seen, probably less, less about indigenous history is presented to the public in the same way. So hopefully some more of that, you know, comes out soon, but you know, they also struggle with the legacy of presenting these different legacies to the public and the public response to them. We have about five more minutes if anybody wants to ask another question for Janine. Great. Amanda asked, do you have a sense of how widely performed Custis's play was? So close to the Indian Removal Act, I imagine there might have been some influence. I don't actually. I know it's performed in a few cities, and obviously it's published, but I don't know how widely this particular one was actually performed. I've not done that research yet. There are a couple of studies, or a couple people who have talked more about George Washington Park Custis's plays, including the Pocahontas one. And so that information might be available in their resources, but I just can't, I don't know off the top of my head. I haven't done that research. But he himself was a popular figure, and a lot of his writings appeared throughout newspapers and things. So that's a good question. It's just not one I've followed up on yet. Well, Janine, once we have this lecture up on YouTube, I'll send it to Wendy Billion, and she might know the answer to that, because it's right in her wheelhouse of theater in Philadelphia that she's been working on. I did have another question, since nobody else is asking a question. But I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about the Brafferton Indian School and Washington's relationship with that. Yeah, so as far as I know, Washington didn't have a direct relationship with the Brafferton Indian School. The Brafferton Indian School is actually one of the reasons that the College of William and Mary actually got founded in the first place, because the Brafferton funding originally was to support basically an Indian missionary school, and then they were able to sort of use that funding to build a whole school for the colony. And it remained relatively small, it sort of fluctuated. There's a recent really great study that came out of William and Mary by Buck Woodard and Danielle Moretti-Langholz about the history of Brafferton, but the Brafferton itself also shut down at the American Revolution because funding from England ceased, and the Virginians weren't interested in continuing that sort of missionary work. But they forced, so the tributary nations of Virginia, as part of their treaty with Virginia Colony, were forced to send children to the school. Some other children sort of came willingly because they wanted to basically become diplomats or cultural go-betweens. Washington himself would have been familiar with the school. He was in Williamsburg, Virginia for, you know, business and political reasons. But he actually, Washington was not actually a student at the school. So his primary affiliation was just that he got his surveyor's license from the school, so he would have had to sort of pay the fee to become the surveyor. And then he eventually became chancellor, although by the time he became chancellor, the Brafferton Indian School was actually defunct. But he also would have known at least a couple students who went to the Brafferton. There's been some great research following some of the named students, and at least a couple of them actually fought in the American Revolution alongside Washington. So there were actually at least a couple students who joined the American Army and fought in the Revolution. And so there's really interesting legacies of these students. That sounds like another project. Thank you, Janine. Yeah, absolutely. It's one o'clock. Thank you so much, Janine, for this amazing work and presentation. And I'm going to be sharing the link with everybody in a couple days. I also want to invite you back to our next Art at Noon, featuring Dr. Anna O'Marley, who will be presenting a lecture about Edward Loper. And that will be January 25. So thank you all for joining us today. Thank you, Janine. Thank you, Anna. And we'll see you soon. And Lori, people can visit Making American Artists, right? You can see several of the paintings that Janine pointed out. Yes. Making American Artists is open through April, April 8, I think, or April 5, April 5, I think. And there'll be lots more events if you're in the area. Keep in touch. There's lots that's coming up in the new year around the exhibition. And it's an amazing show. I hope to see you there. And Janine, let us know if you come back to Philadelphia, okay? We'll give you a tour. Definitely will. Thank you, everyone. All right. Thank you, Janine.