Discovery of the Mississippi by DeSotoWilliam Henry Powell’s dramatic and brilliantly colored canvas was the last of the eight large historical paintings in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda commissioned by the Congress. It shows Spanish conquistador and explorer Hernando De Soto (1500–1542), riding a white horse and dressed in Renaissance finery, arriving at the Mississippi River at a point below Natchez on May 8, 1541. De Soto was the first European documented to have seen the river.
