Native Americans in Art

This statue of Sakakawea was given to the National Statuary Hall Collection by North Dakota in 2003.

This painting depicts the ceremony in which Pocahontas, daughter of the influential Algonkian chief Powhatan, was baptized and given the name Rebecca in an Anglican church. It took place in 1613 or 1614 in the colony at Jamestown, Virginia, the first permanent English settlement on the North American continent. Pocahontas is thought to be the earliest native convert to Christianity in the English colonies; this ceremony and her subsequent marriage to John Rolfe helped to establish peaceful relations between the colonists and the Tidewater tribes.

This statue of Chief Washakie was given to the National Statuary Hall Collection by Wyoming in 2000.

The first panel contains the only allegorical figures in the frieze. America, wearing a liberty cap, stands in the center with her spear and shield. To her right sits an Indian maiden with a bow and arrows, representing the untamed American continent. Also at America's feet is a female figure representing History, who holds a stone tablet to record events as they occur. An American eagle perches on a fasces (a bundle of rods symbolizing the authority of government).

Designed by American sculptor Randolph Rogers, each scene depicting the life of Christopher Columbus is finely modeled. The doors were installed in 1863 and moved to their present location in 1961 following the extension of the East Front of the Capitol.

The bronze doors are curved, with a semicircular tympanum above two valves that are divided into four panels each. Techniques of Renaissance perspective and different levels of relief give each scene a sense of depth.

Above each of the four Rotunda doors in the U.S. Capitol are scenes from the history of the American Colonies carved in relief into the sandstone walls. The three sculptors who decorated the Rotunda were employed during the rebuilding of the Capitol after the fire of 1814.

Above each of the four Rotunda doors in the U.S. Capitol are scenes from the history of the American Colonies carved in relief into the sandstone walls. The three sculptors who decorated the Rotunda were employed during the rebuilding of the Capitol after the fire of 1814.

This statue of Will Rogers was given to the National Statuary Hall Collection by Oklahoma in 1939.

This statue of Chief Standing Bear was given to the National Statuary Hall Collection by Nebraska in 2019.

Chief Standing Bear of the Ponca tribe was the central figure of an 1879 court case that established that Native Americans are "persons" under the law and are entitled to the same rights as anyone else in the nation.

This painting depicts Christopher Columbus and members of his crew on a beach in the West Indies, newly landed from his flagship Santa Maria on October 12, 1492. The island landing was the first landfall of their expedition to find a westward route from Europe to China, Japan and perhaps unknown lands. American neoclassicist painter John Vanderlyn (1775-1852) was commissioned by Congress in June 1836 to paint the Landing of Columbus for the Capitol Rotunda. It was installed in the Rotunda by early January 1847.

William Henry Powell's dramatic and brilliantly colored canvas was the last of the eight large historical paintings in the Rotunda commissioned by the Congress. It shows Spanish conquistador and explorer Hernando De Soto (1500–1542), riding a white horse and dressed in Renaissance finery, arriving at the Mississippi River at a point below Natchez on May 8, 1541. De Soto was the first European documented to have seen the river.