In the most memorable image in the exhibition, Brush's "Mourning Her Brave,” 1883, a grieving widow stands barefoot on a snowy precipice below the body of her husband, her garb billowing in a wintry wind. "Brush declared that the rituals of mourning varied widely among cultural groups, but that all people experienced death and grief,” says curator Nancy K. Anderson. Gilcrease Museum.
Returning to the United States in 1879, Brush's initial efforts in traditional fields of genre painting, landscape and portraiture received mixed reviews and sold poorly. He needed new subjects to set him apart from his contemporaries, demonstrate his technical skills and attract buyers.
In 1882, he followed his brother, Richard, out West, where Richard was engaged in buying land on which to establish a ranch. Traveling by train and then by packhorse, Brush stopped for a time at Fort Washakie, Wyo., where members of the Arapahoe and Shoshones tribes lived on the Wind River Reservation.
While there, he created his first Indian images from life, starting with an appealing grisaille on canvas sketch, "An Arapahoe Boy," circa 1882, now in the National Gallery's collection. This straightforward, detailed depiction of a handsome young brave suggests Brush's affinity for his Native American subjects.
It was soon followed by an oil sketch of a more complicated figure, "A Young Shoshone," 1882, a wary and vulnerable youth, who presumably reflects his downtrodden status in American society. As Patricia Junker, curator of American art at the Seattle Art Museum, who helped organize the exhibition, observes in the catalog, "Brush was eager to provide an antidote to the increasingly prevalent view among easterners of Indians as the vagrants they might have seen about the railroad towns of the West." Above all, the artist wanted to present Native Americans honestly.
A third life study, "Old Washakie," 1884, depicts the venerable Shoshone Chief Washakie, after whom the fort was named in honor of his assistance to the US Army in fighting hostile Indian tribes. After 40 years as chief, Washakie, weighed down by infirmities and blindness, still commanded respect among his people. Brush emphasized his dignity and powerful presence by painting him without his ceremonial headdress, which would have distracted from focus on his expressive face.
Steeped in the French academic tradition of working from live models, Brush made the Indians in "Before the Battle,” 1886, appear as classical figures. The older man to the right appears to be trying, unsuccessfully, to talk the younger men out of going into combat. Private collection, Wyoming.
A later oil, "Portrait of an Indian," circa 1887, grew out of a brief visit by Brush to observe captured Apaches being held in an old fort in St Augustine, Fla. His "portrayal of this melancholic figure seems to convey the sadness that not only marked the whole episode with the Apaches, but also the saga of Indian resistance," observes Junker.
Brush moved on from Wyoming to Montana, where he sketched and painted among Crow Indians for eight months. On the Crow reservation, he set up a tepee studio, replete with a large stove that allowed him to "paint a nude figure" in the dead of winter. Brush thus "came close to replicating — in the wilds of Montana — the studio environment in which he had learned to draw the human figure" in Paris, notes Anderson.
Brush appreciated tepees for both their aesthetic and practical qualities, featuring them in paintings and lived in them back East. In a wintry view, "Indian Village at Dawn," 1882, tepees offer graceful, conical silhouettes against distant mountains and sky.
For a time in Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y., Brush lived in one tepee and used another for a studio. After marrying Mary ("Mittie") Taylor Whelpley, an Art Students League pupil, they lived for a summer in a tepee on the property of their friend, sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, in Cornish, N.H.
"The Revenge," 1883, painted on the Crow reservation, is perhaps the most animated work in the Indian series. It shows a triumphant brave, scalp in hand, galloping through the snow, pursued by distant, mounted Indians, one of whom has launched an arrow at the fleeing fugitive. When this work failed to sell in New York, Brush was forced to return and take up a teaching position at the Art Students League. (Later, he returned to the West and also sought Indian subjects in Florida and Canada.)
In "The Indian and the Lily,” 1887, painted following a visit to Apaches imprisoned at St Augustine, Brush showed a brave reaching for a lily in a Florida swamp. "In his gesture — reaching hopefully but futilely for a semblance of the ideal — is summed up symbolically the whole tragic story of American Indians, ever hopeful for the restoration of their independence and a return to their former way of life,” says curator Patricia Junker. Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.
In 1883, shortly after his return to Manhattan, Brush sold what is arguably the most memorable of his Crow paintings, "Mourning Her Brave," 1883, a moving depiction of a grieving Indian squaw standing on a snowy, wind-whipped precipice with her brave's body lying above her. Brush said it illustrated the universal theme of death and sorrow, "one of those habits and deeds in which we share feelings in common."
Some critics criticized the artist's technique, while others hailed it as "graphic, forceful and heroic" and "dramatic and almost classic in composition." It bears a striking similarity to Brush's younger colleague N.C. Wyeth's "Winter ('Death')" of 1909.
Throughout his career, Brush remained true to traditional academic art, as exemplified by "Laying Away a Brave (The Chieftain Passes)," 1885, an enormous (7 by 5 feet) extravaganza based on Peter Paul Rubens' "Descent from the Cross" of 1611–1614. It received mixed reviews and did not sell.
Brush's interest in the idealized figure, consistent with his commitment to the historical lineage of art, is evident in numerous paintings. Based on observations during a brief trip to Canada, "Before the Battle," 1886, shows an older man facing five young braves, perhaps trying to persuade them not to go to war. The "bodies and poses [of the younger men], reminiscent of classical sculpture, convey the overconfidence of youth," writes art historian James C. Boyles in the catalog. They are likely to reject counsel not to fight.
Boyles notes the resemblance of "Battle" to Winslow Homer's "Prisoners from the Front" of 1866, in which a stalwart Union officer confronts three Confederate captives.
In a combination of refined technique and narrative appeal, Brush showed a Mandan Indian demonstrating his art on a buffalo hide. The Indian seated on the right in "The Picture Writer's Story,” 1884, may be modeled after Michelangelo's reclining Adam in the Sistine ceiling. The Anshutz collection.
In a late painting, "Indian Hunter," Brush eliminated the usual environmental setting, depicting a fit young brave as an idealized figure posed alone against a deep black background. "The physical perfection of… [Bush's] figures…," says Anderson, "may be traced to lessons learned in the classrooms of Paris rather than on the plains of Montana." "Indian Hunter" appears to have inspired N.C. Wyeth's "The Hunter," 1907.
Brush's fears about the impact of industrialization and mechanization helped prompt a series of canvases of skilled Native American artisans at work, starting with "The Picture Writer's Story," 1884. In keeping with his belief in study of the Old Masters and building works on historical precedent, "The two figures in the foreground," observes Anderson, "are inspired by Michelangelo's "Sistine Chapel."
In another image of a craftsman creating, "An Aztec Sculptor," 1887 (recently rediscovered after missing for a century), a brave sits on a rug carving figures in a huge marble slab. In "The Sculptor and the King," 1888, a tour de force of technical virtuosity, an Aztec sculptor, mallet in hand, awaits the judgment of his sovereign of the bas-relief he has carved on the wall. "The Crane Ornament," 1889, features a sculptor gazing at a dead bird (actually, an egret) that he has used for a model in carving a stylized wall relief.
Another white bird stars in Brush's "The White Swan," 1899, which Anderson terms "one of his most beautifully painted and composed works." Based on observations during a visit to Quebec, in this painting he depicted an Indian gathering a dead or wounded swan into his canoe, with only a small red wound suggesting that the splendid creature is either dead or badly injured.
In "The Weaver," 1889, a Native American bends to his task at an upright handloom, while in "The Head Dress," 1890, a seated Indian plucks feathers from the wings of a red flamingo. Art curator Emily D. Shapiro of Washington's Mount Vernon suggests that Brush's "aestheticized image of a craftsman at work…challenged the dominant period stereotype of the American Indian as a ruthless warrior."
Brush emphasized the tender side of Native Americans in "The Indian and the Lily," 1887, a contrast to the degrading conditions he had observed during his visit to Apaches imprisoned in St Augustine. The image of a man reaching for a waterborne lily was popular with the general populace, but the idea of a stalwart Indian hunter stretching precariously to pluck a lily from a dark Florida swamp seemed implausible to many. This evocative work was displayed at Chicago's World's Columbian Exposition of 1893.
In "The Revenge,” 1882, an intruder, scalp in hand, makes good his dramatic escape from his pursuers, who are slowed by the snow. Based on observations at the Crow reservation in Montana, Brush covered his Indian star with chrome yellow war paint. Philadelphia Museum of Art.
In one of the largest (375/8 by 573/8 inches) and certainly most violent canvas in the Indian series, "The Moose Chase," 1888, Brush depicted an Indian rising out of a canoe to spear a moose. Set in Canada, it is technically accomplished and won praise from critics, but did not sell for nearly 20 years. It is now owned by the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
A concluding highlight of the exhibition is a beautifully painted and elegantly composed ode to the solitude and dignity of Native Americans, "The Silence Broken," 1888. Here, a muscular Indian pauses in his canoe to eye a wild swan cruising above him, amid dark foreground water and a dark, impenetrable background forest. Artist Elliott Daingerfield described the painting as "a poem and an almost perfect work of art."
After about a decade, Brush abandoned the Indian as a subject because he was distressed by their plight. For the remainder of his career, he specialized in academically precise, affectionate mother-and-child depictions and poetic portraits. After 1895, he lived in Dublin, N.H., and sojourned in Europe, especially in Italy.
Brush's Native American series, neglected for years, shines forth in this welcome and rewarding exhibition as a splendid example of the way in which a talented American painter applied his French academic training and fealty to artistic tradition to a rich American subject.
The exhibition travels to the Seattle Art Museum.
The 239-page catalog, with essays by Anderson, Boyles, Junker, Roberts, Shapiro and other experts, is a model of scholarship and visual rewards. Published by the National Gallery of Art in association with Lund Humphries, it sells for $60 (hardcover) and $40 (softcover).
The National Gallery of Art is on the National Mall between 3rd and 9th Streets at Constitution Avenue NW. For information, 202-737-4215, or
www.nga.gov
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