Existing comment:
Karl Free:
French Huguenots in Florida, 1938
Arrival of the Mail in New Amsterdam, 1938
Communication among colonists, native inhabitants, and Europeans was crucial to the earliest explorations of North America.
Depicting historical antecedents of the US Postal Service, Karl Free's murals juxtapose the 1564 arrival of Rene Goulaine de Laudonniere, an early French Huguenot settler in Florida, with that of Captain Jacob Vandergrift, a commander in the Dutch West India Company, who arrived in the port of New Amsterdam around 1650. Spanning almost 100 years of history, these events mark the evolution of the post in the New World, from its foundations in the friendly communications between settlers and Native Americans to the rudimentary systems developed in the early colonies. While both murals depict historical events, neither is entirely accurate. Free's depiction of New Amsterdam is an imagined scene, and his picture of the Timucuan American Indian tribe draws from a variety of early European sources. His composition is based on Theodorus de Bry's 1591 engraving of Jacques Le Moyne's 1564 eyewitness sketch of the Huguenots' landing, and he derived the attire of the figures from John White's 1585 watercolors of the Algonquin people. To encourage continued exploration of the continent, European artists like Le Moyne typically depicted American Indians as dignified but friendly, even subservient.
Free's reinterpretation and combination of various historical sources results in a picture that blends cultural perceptions of the 1930s with the sixteenth-century source material. |