Existing comment:
Simon van de Passe's engraving of Pocahontas, 1616, 1993.192 This is the only portrait of Pocahontas taken from life and thereby the most credible image of her. In rigid, Jacobean attire, twenty-one-year-old Pocahontas seems uncomfortable, but the costume probably hid tattooing and certainly provided the chaste image wanted by the Virginia Company. That organization sponsored the Virginia settlement and Pocahontas's trip to England, and it probably commissioned this print for publicity. |