There are countless portrayals of the American Indian available to those who seek them. Less easy is the task of finding images of Native Americans that are unadulterated by centuries of stereotype. Luckily, the National Gallery of Art, in conjunction with the Seattle Art Museum, have compiled a small exhibit of images of American Indians by the painter George de Forest Brush, a late 19th century American artist who fell in love with “the noble savage.”
In 1882, Brush left the art world to spend over a year with the Arapaho and Shoshone Indians of Wyoming and the Crow of Montana. What he witnessed in those months became fodder not only for his personal work, but also for his career as a drawing instructor. While his lessons in the drawing of human anatomy were rooted in the classical tradition that he himself studied, he expressed those principles with images of Indians hunting, talking, riding horses, and even picking flowers. Brush’s work is an appealing synthesis of classical forms and unconventional subject matter—one can easily recognize ghosts of idealized Greek bodies in the lean muscles and carefully proportioned limbs of his hunters.
This amalgamation of the realistically natural with the perfectly classical lends layers of interest to Brush’s work, and makes his paintings much more than spin-offs of a familiar theme. The content of the painting, “The Picture Writer’s Story,” an image of an older man demonstrating visual rhetoric to two recumbent young men, alludes to great classical paintings that dealt with education and the exchange of knowledge, (Raphael’s “School of Athens,” for example). The human forms in the painting echo those of God and Adam as portrayed on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Despite the heavy classical undercurrents, however, Brush’s work has a wild, untouched glow that is unique to its American subject matter.
Many of the paintings on display were created in studios a few years after Brush left the company of the Indians, and have a slightly dreamy, romanticized feel. His standard, unimaginative landscapes leave something to be desired. They seem like an afterthought when compared to the carefully articulated bodies and faces of the American Indians themselves. Many of the paintings depict American Indians with large, graceful birds—a creature whose plight Brush perceived to be similar to that of the Native American (beautiful life forms killed in great numbers as their natural habitat slowly erodes).
Particularly beautiful, and perhaps most famous out of all of Brush’s American Indian paintings, is an image titled, “The Indian and the Lily.” In this picture, a man with two slain swans slung over his back crouches on the swampy banks of a pond, and tenderly extends his fingers toward a pure white water lily floating just inches away. This gem of painting sparkles brown and green, and lulls viewers into a meditation on the delicate dance that man and nature engage in, and is particularly indicative of the work of George de Forest Brush’s gentle soul.
