Sacagawea

Sacagawea was a Lemhi Shoshone girl of about sixteen when the Corps of Discovery wintered at Fort Mandan in 1804 and hired her husband as an interpreter. She gave birth to a son that February and carried him the whole way to the Pacific and back. In August 1805, at the moment the expedition most needed horses, the Shoshone chief who came to bargain turned out to be her brother. She found food, read the country, and by her presence told every band they met that this was not a war party.

Leonardo da Vinci began the Mona Lisa in Florence around 1503 and was still working on it in France more than a decade later; it has hung in the Louvre since the Revolution. The sitter turns three-quarters toward us with her hands folded on the arm of a chair, and behind her a landscape of water and rock recedes into blue haze. That pose became the template for the Western portrait.

No likeness of Sacagawea exists, so the face here is imagined, and the painting owns that by doing what Leonardo did: placing a composed young woman in front of a country. She sits in the same turn, hands folded on the chair arm, in a fringed hide dress with a beaded yoke, blue beads at her throat, dark braids over a striped blanket. Behind one shoulder a river winds through dry buttes; behind the other stand cottonwoods and snow peaks. The light is on her face, and the two horizons do not quite meet.

She was the only member of the expedition who could speak to the people whose country it was. The seat of honor is the least the picture can do.