Native American portrayals

The New York Public Library presentation of Native American Portraiture is a study in representation. The collection, titled After Columbus: Four-hundred Years of Native American Portraiture is online at the NYPL wesbite and includes "369 prints and drawings by Simon van de Passe (1595-1647), George Catlin (1796-1872), and Karl Bodmer (1809-1893), dating from 1627 to the 1830s; 227 gelatin silver and platinum prints by photographers Edward S. Curtis (1868-1954), Karl E. Moon (1878-1948), and Frank A. Rinehart (1862-1928), and sculptor Frederic Allen Williams (1898-1958), from the late 1890s to 1927."


For me, the most interesting of the items in this presentation is The aboriginal portfolio; or, a collection of portraits of the most celebrated chiefs of the North American Indians. by James Otto Lewis and others - published in 1836. For more on Lewis see online presentation of Lewis's portfolios presented as part of the acquisition of the Lewis work by the University of California, Berkeley, Bancroft Library. The work was the nine millionth book acquired by the library.

The library paid $74,000 for a copy of the book (with several pages missing!).In a short piece on the acquisition process, Anthony Bliss, rare books curator at the library wrote, "My first reaction was that either Lewis or the lithographer was not a great artist. The details in the plates—costumes, ornament, weapons—were wonderful, but the portrayal of the figures did seem crude (perhaps I’d seen too much of McKenney and Hall). Despite this quibble, there is something fascinating about these images. They are not overworked and romanticized, they project a sense of immediacy that is almost unnerving." This sentiment really cuts to what's most interesting about Lewis's work.

Here is Cut-taa-tas-tia, a chief of the Fox tribe.



The painting evokes a lot of feeling. For one, I get the sense that Cut-taa-tas-tia was powerful in mind and spirit. Lewis painted the chief with a stern look on his face, a muscular physique, but holding a pipe and a mostly non-description tool, perhaps a weapon. Also, the chief's feet are so small as to suggest he is almost floating on the landscape. How students interpret Cut-taa-tas-tia will likely reflect their own artistic sensibilities and their expectations for realist portrayal. Contrasting this painting with the photo just below might be an interesting exercise. The painting was completed in 1836, while the photo was captured just thirty years later.

An interesting pedagogical presentation of Native American artistic portrayals can be found in the University of California, Berkeley, Bancroft Library presentation Images of Native Americans. This presentation arrays artistic portrayals of Native Americans in a time line from the 16th century to the present. The presentation went online in 2000 and despite the clunky navigation the look and feel of this presentation have help up well.

Highlights include this photo, thought to be the earlist photographic representation of a Native American in the Bancroft Library