ABSTRACT
On display in the Portraits Room at the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston, there is a striking portrait of Pocahontas from the (see Figure I.1). This painting of the famous “Indian princess” was created by Mary Woodbury, a schoolgirl from Massachusetts and an untrained artist, who would have been in her early teens at the time the picture was made. 1 Aside from the title of the portrait, which designates the woman as Pocahontas, there are no markers of Pocahontas’s Native American identity, stereotypical or otherwise, in the image. Featuring a stylized representation of Pocahontas in the folk tradition, the oil-on-paper image depicts Pocahontas seated in front of a solid, dark background. She is wearing a dark dress with a low-cut, rounded neckline that is trimmed with pretty floral lace, as are the ends of her three-quarter length sleeves. Her dark hair is done in an updo with a cluster of small flowers at the crown and her long, elegant neck is graced with a choker-style necklace that features a double row of beads and fastens in the back with a ribbon. Pocahontas’s hands are resting lightly in her lap and she is holding a single flower in her left hand. The small, slight smile on her face is reminiscent of Western European ladies and the genteel expressions they adopted in their own portraits—and so is the obviously whitened, Anglicized appearance of the subject. The portrait overwhelmingly depicts an idealized form of eighteenth-century Anglo femininity. From the clothing to the hairstyle to shy smile and creamy pale skin, Mary Woodbury’s Pocahontas is, indeed, white.
