“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.
Brush’s exploration of the Indian as a subject was unsentimental. His 1883 painting “Mourning Her Brave” was warmly received by critics, and quickly sold. In his association with the Indian, Brush found an identity, a commodity far more difficult for a young artist to develop or acquire than mere skill. Beyond commercial success, the Indian gave Brush a metaphor through which to express his misgivings about the country’s increasing reliance on technology and industry, and what he saw as the vanishing virtues of craftsmanship and tradition.
The National Gallery’s current 21-piece exhibit is the first time Brush’s Indian paintings have been the subject of their own exhibition. The show was inspired in large part by the gift to the NGA of “An Aztec Sculptor,” an 1887 painting acquired by Seattle art collectors Tom and Ann Barwick in 2004. At that time, the painting had not been shown in public for 105 years.
“An Aztec Sculptor” is emblematic of Brush’s later Indian paintings in that it was conjured in the studio as an idealized representation — bearing the full fruit of Brush’s Paris-honed technique — of the Indian of Brush’s memory. Contrast that with “An Arapahoe Boy” from a half-decade earlier, wherein the subject almost certainly posed for him. Few of the life studies Brush made during his time in Wyoming and Montana have survived.
When Brush did use models for his later Indian paintings, he did so in his studio — in 1886’s “Before the Battle,” as the exhibition notes point out, he simply replaced the pole on which the model for the Indian in the headdress rested with a spear. He also used prior sources in fine art, as seen in his 1884 “The Picture Writer’s Story,” which appropriates figures from the Sistine Chapel both for the writer and for the boy lying on his back.
Brush’s paintings of the latter part of the decade increasingly depict single Indians absorbed in the sort of individual artistry he believed was threatened by the looming century: weaving, sculpting or drawing. By the 1890s, he had apparently exhausted his interest in the subject, turning to Florentine-styled portraits based on his own wife and children.
Gilded Age America, newly enriched by the forces of industrialization that Brush had so resisted, fairly ate them up.
If you go
George de Forest Brush: The Indian Paintings
Through Jan. 4, 2009
National Gallery of Art
Fourth Street and Constitution Avenue Northwest
Admission: Free
More information: 202-737-4215; nga.gov
