For his service in helping the US Army in fighting hostile Indian tribes, Fort Washakie in Wyoming was named in honor of the venerable Shoshone chief, Washakie. In "Old Washakie,” 1884, Brush captured the nobility and strength of the aging leader plagued by illness and blindness. American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming, Laramie.
:Over the course of a long and productive career, George de Forest Brush (1854/1855–1941) melded academic painting skills acquired in Europe with themes ranging from Native American life to mother-and-child portraits. Much admired in his day for his precise draftsmanship, astute coloring and careful observation, his work was overtaken by changing tastes and is little heard about today.
Stimulated by unearthing of new information and rediscovered lost paintings, "George de Forest: The Indian Paintings," on view at the National Gallery of Art through January 4, assembles for the first time 21 of his remarkable canvases on Indian subjects.
Brush painted in the 1880s, a time of increasing public recognition of the iniquities of repressive government policies on Native Americans, and of the growth of demeaning stereotypes. There were heated arguments about the "Indian Problem," often summed up as "extermination versus assimilation." Brush, who came to admire Native Americans, effectively counteracted images of dissolute Indians with paintings that emphasized their strength and dignity and their shared bonds with Americans in general.
Drawing on first-hand observations of Indian life and culture, Brush depicted what he called "those habits and deeds in which we have feelings in common." According to exhibition organizer Nancy K. Anderson, curator of American and British paintings at the National Gallery, the artist "saw in the subject of the Indian an opportunity to explore the universal, the essential, human experience."
Tepees, in which Brush often lived, were also subjects for his art. Referring to "Indian Village at Dawn,” 1882, painted on the Crow reservation in Montana, National Gallery research associate Jen-nifer Roberts writes, "Rendered as gracefully slanted cones set against broad swathes of color formed by the earth, distant mountains and sky, the tepees become elegant silhouettes in his somber winter scene.” Private collection.
Together, these paintings reveal a master applying disciplined realism to a distinctly American subject, while suggesting Brush's complex meditations on the impact of modern civilization on the Native Americans he admired. As Earl A. Powell III, director of the National Gallery of Art, and Mimi Gardner Gates, director of the Seattle Art Museum, observe in the exhibition catalog, "In choosing the Indian as the subject of his art, Brush found a visual metaphor through which he could address a number of contemporary issues, including his deep skepticism regarding the benefits of rapid industrialization and his concern that a nation racing toward modernism was losing its regard for art born of craft and tradition.
Born in Selbyville, Tenn., Brush was the son of a man who practiced dentistry before becoming a hat broker and a housewife who was an amateur artist. The family soon moved to Brooklyn and then Darien, Conn., where Brush by his midteens showed sufficient artistic talent to enroll at the National Academy of Design in New York City. While there, he met George Catlin, America's leading painter of Native Indians, whose example inspired the initial works of Brush's career.
The young painter showed such promise that, in 1873, an anonymous patron funded further study in Paris. Enrolled at the atelier of famed academic painter Jean-Leon Gerome, Brush undertook rigorous training in academic realism for a year and a half. Thereafter he trained at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts for four years, with summer sojourns in Grez, France.
