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Edwin Forrest in the Role of Metamora

Frederick Styles Agate1832

Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery

Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery
Washington, D.C., United States

Edwin Forrest rejected the genteel traditions of British theater and instead originated a vigorous style of acting intended to exemplify the rugged strength of the American character. After beginning his career in Philadelphia, in 1820, he traveled the country, often performing in blackface, before achieving success in New York City. By the 1830s, he had become the country’s highest paid actor.

In 1828, Forrest began commissioning original works of drama aimed at mythologizing national history. Here, he appears as the titular character in Metamora, or the Last of the Wampanoags (1829), John Augustus Stone’s play about the calamitous seventeenth-century war that pitted New England colonists against Wampanoag and Narragansett people. Opening less than a year before Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act (1830), the play rein-forced white supremacist beliefs about the inevi-table demise of Native Americans. The role of the heroic but tragically doomed Metamora became a mainstay of Forrest’s repertoire.

Details

  • Title: Edwin Forrest in the Role of Metamora
  • Creator: Frederick Styles Agate
  • Date Created: 1832
  • Type: Oil on canvas
  • Rights: National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of the Kathryn and Gilbert Miller Fund in memory of Alexander Ince
  • External Link: https://npg.si.edu/object/npg_NPG.66.20
  • Classification: Painting

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