The North American Indians [antikvár]

¦ i-¦ il ; FOREWORD SINCE the discovery of the New World nearly five centuries ago, pictures have been helping people of other lands and cultures to visualize the appearance and life-styles of some of the world's most picturesque ir\habitants - the North American Indians. For the first three-and-a-half centuries - until the appearance of photography - those other people depended upon the creations of graphic artists to help them comprehend how Indians looked and lived. And artists' pictures of Indians varied greatly. Some were highly imaginative works based upon little or no first-hand knowledge of Indians. Some others possessed a kind of spurious realism because their creators looked upon Indians as New World peoples who epitomized the classic ideals of beauty to be found in Greek and Roman sculpture - men and women with sharply defined facial features, and beautifully rounded bodies only partially concealed by lightly draped robes. It is important to recognize that photography is a relatively recent development in the five-century-long pictorial record of Indian-White contact in North America. By the time the first photographs of Indians were taken during the mid-1840s, many of the tribes living nearest the constantly expanding frontiers of white settlement had been displaced from their aboriginal homelands, their numbers greatly decreased as a result of warfare and disease, and their life-styles greatly modified by influences from the white man's culture. Long before the first photographs of Indians were taken, the tribes of the Woodlands forsook their skin garments in favor of the cloth ones worn by whites. The buffalo-hunting Indians on the Great Plains had changed from plodding footmen to mobile horsemen through acquisition of Spanish horses. And the Indians of the North Pacific Coast had adopted white men's sharp metal tools for carving their imposing totem poles, their awesome ceremonial masks, and their wooden boxes and bowls. Photography has documented continued changes in Indian life-styles over the last 140 years. During the first half of that span of years - the years before World War II - cameras served most frequently and effectively to record the physical appearance of individual Indians. In this respect photography followed the precedent set by artists. During the Colonial Period the individual Indian began to emerge as a subject for portraiture when leaders of powerful Indian tribes whose allegiance the English coveted were escorted across the Atlantic to visit London, the seat of English power, to meet the ruling monarch and to be impressed by the strange wonders of English civilization. There professional artists — men trained to observe and to record the subtleties of facial proportions and contours that define the individuality of a sitter - drew or painted likenesses of these prominent Indians. Pocahontas was painted as early as 1616. Many chiefs of the larger tribes of the Eastern Woodlands were portrayed during their visits to London prior to the Revolutionary War. The English custom of picturing chiefly visitors to the seat of government was adopted by the new United States - at first on a sporadic basis, and later as a matter of government policy. As early as 1790 John Trumbull drew a series of pencil portraits of Creek Indians from the pine woods of Georgia and Alabama who had come to the temporary capital of New York City to meet President George Washington and to sign their first treaty with the United States. By the early years of the nineteenth century government officials, recognizing that the Indian population was declining and their traditional customs changing rapidly, conceived the idea of establishing a government collection of portraits of prominent leaders of the many tribes who visited Washington. Beginning in 1822, Charles Bird King, who had studied under Benjamin West in London and become a well-known Washington portraitist, was hired to paint many of these Indian visitors. By 1842 he had painted some one hundred Indian leaders from at least twenty tribes from life, and had copied twenty-six other Indian portraits painted in the Indian country by James Otto Lewis.