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Alonzo Chappel

The Landing of Roger Williams in 1636
Now On View

Maker

Alonzo Chappel (American, 1828-1887)

Title

The Landing of Roger Williams in 1636

Year

1857

Medium

Materials/Techniques

Techniques

Materials

oil paint

Supports

Dimensions

50.8 x 61.3 cm (20 x 24 1/8 inches)

Credit / Object Number

Credit

Museum Works of Art Fund

Object Number

43.003

Type

Publications

Exhibition History

United Histories
Mar 23, 2018 – Aug 12, 2018

Label copy

This pair of works demonstrates how artists have used historical representations to address the issues of their own times. In her 2006 print Cotton Hoards in the Southern Swamp, Kara Walker stencils figures onto images from Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War, published in 1866. Walker’s overlayed black figures reassert the stories of African Americans that have gone untold in the historical record.

In the 1857 painting, Alonzo Chappel inventively portrays the 1636 arrival of Roger Williams in what is now Rhode Island, imagining an enthusiastic welcome by the Narragansett people already living here. This heroicized image was created when U.S. policies were forcing many thousands of Native Americans onto reservations, freeing their homelands for European settlement.

While Walker’s work intentionally engages fiction to tell suppressed historical truths, Chappel’s composition embellishes a historical event to support the dominant power hierarchies in the era in which he lived.

To hear Lorén Spears (Narragansett/Niantic) discuss Chappel’s painting, go to https://risdmuseum.org/manual/422_the_landing_of_roger_williams.

[see also: 2006.48]

18th and 19th-Century American Galleries
Jun 19, 2015
Charles Pendleton House
Jan 02, 2015
An American Idyll
19th-Century Paintings and Decorative Arts
Apr 06, 2007 – Jan 06, 2008
After Eden
The Rise and Reform of American Art, 1840-1910
Apr 26, 1996 – Dec 29, 1996

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Public Domain This object is in the Public Domain and available under a CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication

Tombstone

Alonzo Chappel (American, 1828-1887)
The Landing of Roger Williams in 1636, 1857
Oil on canvas
50.8 x 61.3 cm (20 x 24 1/8 inches)
Museum Works of Art Fund 43.003

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