“In choosing Indians as subjects for art,” wrote the painter George de Forest Brush in 1885, “I do not paint from the historian’s or the antiquary’s point of view; I do not care to represent them in any curious habits that could not be comprehended by us; I am interested in those habits and deeds in which we have feelings in common.”

Brush was in a better position than most white Americans of his age (or ours) to know what those shared “habits and deeds” might be. In 1882, while in his late 20s, he lived for a time among Shoshone, Arapahoe and Crow Indians in Wyoming and Montana. During this period, he began a remarkable series of paintings of Native Americans engaged in the tasks of daily life, a series he continued to add to upon his return to New York in 1883 and on through the remainder of the decade.