The White Captive

Erastus Dow Palmer

1857–58; carved 1858–59 · Marble · The American Wing

The White Captive portrays a young woman who has been abducted in her sleep (her nightgown hangs from the tree trunk) and held captive by Native Americans. Bound at the wrists, she clenches her left fist behind her back in defiance. Palmer was commended for his choice of a “thoroughly American” subject, which consciously alluded to ongoing frontier skirmishes between Indigenous peoples and white settlers. In 1859 the marble went on view in New York, and the exhibition, along with that of Frederic Edwin Church’s Heart of the Andes (09.95), emerged as the high point of that autumn’s art season.

Artist

Erastus Dow Palmer

Date

1857–58; carved 1858–59

Medium

Marble

Culture

American

Department

The American Wing

Credit line

Bequest of Hamilton Fish, 1894