Focus on Audience Given by the Trustees of Georgia to a Delegation of Creek Indians and discuss the Analysis.
The painting is also known as the Common Council of Georgia receiving the Indian Chiefs. Commissioned by Georgia's trustees, it hung in the trustees' offices in London until the trustees dissolved after Georgia became a royal colony in 1752. Anthony Ashley Cooper, 4th Earl of Shaftesbury, acquired the portrait, which stayed in the Cooper family until it was purchased by Henry Francis du Pont circa 1930. The ninth earl presented a copy, painted by Edmund Dyer in 1826, to the State of Georgia in 1926.Author Donald N. Yates argued that most of the Indian delegates were Cherokees rather than Creeks, including Cherokee leader Attakullakulla. Yates walked back these claims in 2020 after reviewing a high-resolution image from the Winterthur Museum. The Indians' names appear in a cartouche, part of the painting's original frame.The painting inspired the design of a towering and nearly nude statue of Tomochichi erected in Atlanta in 2022. Historians and members of the Muscogee Nation criticized the statute as historically inaccurate and its source material as "propaganda" intended to portray Native Americans as "weak and uncivilized."
Tomochichi ninth earl Muscogee Atlanta Anthony Ashley Cooper, 4th Earl of Shaftesbury Henry Francis du Pont Creek London Attakullakulla