Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-rcrh6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-05T02:35:51.728Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

From Pantheon to Indian Gallery: Art and Sovereignty on the Early Nineteenth-Century Cultural Frontier

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 April 2013

ELIZABETH HUTCHINSON
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Between 1821 and 1842, Charles Bird King painted a series of portraits of Native American diplomats for Thomas L. McKenney, founding Superintendent of Indian Affairs. These pictures were hung in a gallery in McKenney's office in the War Department in Washington, DC, and were later copied by lithographers for inclusion in McKenney and James Hall's History of the Indian Tribes of the United States (1836–44). Significantly, the production and circulation of these portraits straddles a period of tremendous change in the diplomatic interactions between the United States and Native tribes. This essay analyzes a selection of these images for their complex messages about the sovereignty of Indian people and their appropriate interactions with European American culture. Paying particular attention to pictures of leaders of southern nations, including the Cherokee, Creek, and Seminole, I discuss the sitters' strategies of self-fashioning within the context of long-standing cultural exchange in the region. In addition, I offer a reading of the meaning of the Indian gallery as a whole that challenges the conventional wisdom that it is an archive produced exclusively to impose US control on the subjects included, arguing instead for the inclusion of portrait-making within this history of interaction.

Type
Art Across Frontiers Forum
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 47 , Issue 2: Special Collection: Art Across Frontiers , May 2013 , pp. 313 - 337
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Berkhofer, Robert F., The White Man's Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (New York: Knopf, 1978)Google Scholar. A recent publication following this model is Truettner, William H., Painting Indians and Building Empires in North America, 1710–1840 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010)Google Scholar.

2 Audio, “Our Peoples: Giving Voice to Our Histories,” National Museum of the American Indian, Washington, DC, transcribed by the author 22 April 2011.

3 Berkhofer, 89.

4 On Wi-Jun-Jon see Truettner, William H., The Natural Man Observed: A Study of Catlin's Indian gallery (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1979)Google Scholar, 179; and Catlin, George, North American Indians, ed. and with an introduction by Matthiessen, Peter (New York: Viking, 1989), 58–59Google Scholar.

5 Catlin, 50–55.

6 Elizabeth Hutchinson, “Osceola's Calicoes,” in Salem State University/Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA, Visual Arts and Global Trade in the American Republic, 19 Nov. 2010.

7 Brilliant, Richard, Portraiture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 45–46Google Scholar.

8 Pratt, Stephanie, American Indians in British Art, 1700–1840 (Norman: University Of Oklahoma Press, 2005)Google Scholar, 7; White, Richard, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Muller, Kevin, “‘From Palace to Longhouse’: Portraits of the Four Indian Kings in a Transatlantic Context,” American Art, 22, 3 (Fall 2008), 26–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sweet, Timothy, “Masculinity and Self-Performance in the Life of Black Hawk,” American Literature, 65 (Sept. 1993), 475–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Hutchinson, Elizabeth, “‘The Costume of his Nation’: Romney's Portrait of Joseph Brant,” Winterthur Portfolio, 45, 2–3 (Summer–Autumn 2011), 209–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar. White, Richard, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Sandweiss, Martha A., Print the Legend: Photography and the American West (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 78Google Scholar.

10 A complete account of the making of the gallery can be found in Viola, Herman J., The Indian Legacy of Charles Bird King (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1976)Google Scholar.

11 McKenney, Thomas L., History of the Indian Tribes of North America, with Biographical Sketches and Anecdotes of the Principal Chiefs (Philadelphia: D. Rice and J. G. Clark, 1842)Google Scholar.

12 Cosentino, Andrew J., The Paintings of Charles Bird King (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1977)Google Scholar, 60.

13 Viola, 92.

14 Brilliant, 107.

15 Ewers, John C., “Charles Bird King, Painter of Indian Visitors to the Nation's Capital,” Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution, 1954Google Scholar, 468.

16 Reynolds, Joshua, “Discourse III,” in Harrison, Charles, Wood, Paul, and Gaiger, Jason, eds., Art in Theory: 1648–1815: An Anthology of Changing Ideas (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 652–55Google Scholar.

17 Rochelle Venuto, “Indian Authorities: Race, Gender and Empire in Mid-Nineteenth-Century United States–Indian narratives,” PhD dissertation, University of California, Santa Cruz, 1998, 45–46.

18 Colbert, Charles, The Measure of Perfection: Phrenology and the Fine Arts in America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997)Google Scholar.

19 Breen, T. H., “The Meaning of ‘Likeness’: Portrait-Painting in an Eighteenth-Century Consumer Society,” in Miles, Ellen G., The Portrait in Eighteenth-Century America (Newark and London: University of Delaware Press and Associated University Presses, 1993), 37–60Google Scholar.

20 Barker, Joanne, “For Whom Sovereignty Matters,” in Barker, , ed., Sovereignty Matters: Locations of Contestation and Possibility in Indigenous Struggles for Self-Determination (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), 1–32Google Scholar, 19.

21 Shannon, Timothy J., “Dressing for Success on the Mohawk Frontier: Hendrick, William Johnson and the Indian Fashion,” William and Mary Quarterly, 53, 1 (Jan. 1996), 13–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 Schimmel, Julie, “Inventing the Indian,” in Truettner, William, ed., The West as America: Reinterpreting Images of the Frontier, 1820–1920 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 149–89Google Scholar, 152.

23 Venuto, 19 ff.

24 McKenney, History of the Indian Tribes, 44.

25 Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, “‘On Deathless Glories Fix Thine Ardent View’: Moorhead, Scipio, Phillis Wheatley, and the Mythic Origin of Anglo-African Portraiture in New England,” in DuBois Shaw, Portraits of a People: Picturing African Americans in the Nineteenth Century (Seattle: in association with University of Washington Press, 2006), 26–43Google Scholar.

26 Fortune, Branden B., “‘Studious Men Are Always Painted in Gowns’: Charles Willson Peale's Benjamin Rush and the Question of Banyans in Eighteenth-Century Anglo-American Portraiture,” Dress, 29 (2002), 27–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27 Viola, Herman, Thomas L. McKenney, Architect of America's Early Indian Policy: 1816–1830 (Chicago: Swallow Press, 1974), 13–14Google Scholar.

28 “Invention of the Cherokee Alphabet,” Cherokee Phoenix, 13 Aug. 1828, 1:24, 2.

29 Granger, James, A biographical history of England, from Egbert the Great to the Revolution: consisting of characters disposed in different classes, and adapted to a methodical catalogue of engraved British heads (London: T. Davies, 1769)Google Scholar. This book was reissued in expanded editions through 1856. See also Pointon, Marcia, Hanging the Head: Portraiture and Social Formation in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre, 1993), 53–78Google Scholar.

30 Branden B. Fortune, “Portraits of Virtue And Genius: Pantheons of Worthies and Public Portraiture in the Early American Republic, 1780–1820,” PhD dissertation, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1987, 3.

31 Ibid., 92.

32 In publications, Peale always treated his portrait gallery and museum as separate, if related, enterprises. Case in point: M. Thomas & Sons, Auctioneers, Philadelphia, Peale's Museum Gallery of Oil Paintings, National Portrait and Historical Gallery Illustrative of American History (Philadelphia: Townsend Ward, 6 Oct. 1854)Google Scholar.

33 Brady, Mathew, Lester, C. E., and Avignon, F. D', The Gallery of Illustrious Americans: Containing the Portraits and Biographical Sketches of Twenty-Four of the Most Eminent Citizens of the American Republic, since the Death of Washington (New York: John Wiley, 1850)Google Scholar.

34 Ewers, “Charles Bird King,” 464–65.

35 Sweet, “Masculinity and Self-Performance,” 478, quoting Viola, The Indian Legacy of Charles Bird King, 65.

36 McLoughlin, William G., The Cherokee Renascence in the New Republic (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1986)Google Scholar, 36.

37 Ibid., 36.

38 The Cherokee Nation v. The State of Georgia, 30 U. S. 1. Supreme Court of the US, 1831.

39 McKenney, , Memoirs, Official And Personal: With Sketches of Travels among the Northern and Southern Indians: Embracing a War Excursion, and Descriptions of Scenes along the Western Borders (New York: Paine and Burgess, 1846)Google Scholar, 1:34, original emphasis.

40 Sweet, 494–95.

41 Barker, “For Whom Sovereignty Matters,” 16.

42 McMaster, Gerald R., “Toward an Aboriginal Art History,” in Rushing, W. Jackson III, ed., Native American Art in the Twentieth Century (London: Routledge, 1999), 81–96Google Scholar, 82.

43 See www.nmai.si.edu/opening/explore/peoples.html, accessed 17 Jan. 2012.