McKenney and Hall's Indian Tribes of North America have long been renowned for its faithful portraits of Native Americans. The portrait plates are based on paintings by the artist Charles Bird King, who was employed by the War Department to paint the Indian delegates visiting Washington D.C., forming the basis of the War Department's Indian Gallery. "the most colorful portraits of Indians ever executed" (Howes). T. L. McKenney's goal in commissioning the Indian Tribes of North America was both to educate the American public about these greatly exotic warriors and chiefs and to preserve them for posterity in a series of beautiful portraits. Most of the original oil portraits were painted from life in studio of Charles Bird King, to whom McKenney brought many of the subjects. The rest were copied from watercolors executed in the field by a young frontier artist named James Otto Lewis. Once finished the portraits were housed in the Smithsonian, where they remained until an 1865 fire burned down the institution and destroyed most of the paintings. Their appearance in McKenney and Hall's magnificent work is thus our only record of the likenesses of many of the most prominent Indian leaders of the nineteenth century. Numbered among King's sitters were Sequoyah, Red Jacket, Major Ridge, Cornplanter, and Osceola. After six years as Superintendent of Indian Trade, Thomas McKenney had become concerned for the survival of the Western tribes. As a result the folio and octavo editions are vital in their "faithful recording of the features and dress of celebrated American Indians who lived and died long before the age of photography" (McKenney-Hall Portrait Gallery, 23)

© 2005 SHIGITATSU

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