Like the Lange's Iconic Photograph assessment, this question asks students to engage in sourcing, contextualization, and corroboration. To answer this assessment, students must consider key aspects of a painting’s reliability and think about other information that could be used to evaluate the reliability of the document. In Question 1, students consider the background and source information and identify two reasons that the painting might not be reliable evidence of what happened at the Constitutional Convention. Students should understand that Congress’s commissioning of the painting to commemorate the Constitution’s 150th anniversary may have affected how the artist chose to depict the scene. They should also explain how the gap in time between when the image was created and the event it depicted might limit the painting’s reliability as evidence about the past. In Question 2, students should identify other relevant information that would help them evaluate the reliability of the painting.
