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Home>Exhibitions>Past>2008>George de Forest Brush

# George de Forest Brush: The Indian Paintings

September 14, 2008 – January 4, 2009East Building, Ground Floor, Northeast

2005.107.1

George de Forest BrushThe Indian Paintings
*Self-Portrait*, before 1890, oil on canvas, National Academy Museum, New York

**Overview**

 

For more than a year, starting in 1882, George de Forest Brush (1854/1855–1941) lived among the Arapahoe and Shoshone in Wyoming and the Crow in Montana. He began to compose and exhibit studio paintings based on his experiences, declaring, however, that he did not wish to be an ethnographer or historian of Indian people. Painting during a period bracketed by the Battle of the Little Big Horn (1876) and the massacre at Wounded Knee (1890), the artists created stylized images of Indians far removed from the reality of contemporary Indian life. Instead, Brush’s “Indian” paintings are unmistakably personal. Increasingly disturbed by the rapid industrialization and mechanization of American society, Brush offered, in his art, the perfect foil–a seductively beautiful, pre-industrial world where idealized Indians live in a timeless environment undisturbed by the advent of the modern.

Born in Tennessee, raised in Brooklyn and in Darien, Connecticut, Brush began his academic training at the National Academy of Design in New York in 1870. Three years later he journeyed to Paris to continue his training under the tutelage of Jean-Léon Gérôme, one of the most admired academic painters of the day. Following six years of travel and study, Brush returned to New York determined to find an American subject that would set him apart from his contemporaries. In the spring of 1882, at the foot of the Rocky Mountains and among America’s native people, he found his subject.

Brush initially expressed a desire to explore in his paintings experiences common to all, such as the grief of the woman in *Mourning Her Brave*, his first major success. The artist’s agenda was, in fact, more complicated. For Brush, the figure of the Indian became a metaphor through which he could address his concern that a nation racing toward modernism was losing its regard for art born of craft and tradition. The artist’s technically exquisite and contextually rich Indian paintings have been brought together for the first time in this exhibition.

George de Forest BrushThe Indian Paintings
*Mourning Her Brave*, 1883, oil on panel, Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, Oklahoma

George de Forest BrushThe Indian Paintings
**The Revenge**, 1882, oil on canvas, Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Alex Simpson, Jr., Collection, 1944

George de Forest BrushThe Indian Paintings
*An Arapahoe Boy*, c. 1882, oil on canvas (grisaille), Gift of Jane Wyeth, in memory of her parents, Gertrude Ketover Gleklen and Leo Gleklen, 2007.138.1

George de Forest BrushThe Indian Paintings
*A Young Shoshone*, 1882, oil on canvas, Private Collection

George de Forest BrushThe Indian Paintings
*Old Washakie*, 1884, oil on panel, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming, Laramie

George de Forest BrushThe Indian Paintings
*The Picture Writer's Story*, 1884, oil on canvas, The Anschutz Collection

George de Forest BrushThe Indian Paintings
*The White Swan*, 1885, oil on panel, Russell and Michelle Ball Collection

George de Forest BrushThe Indian Paintings
*Before the Battle*, 1886, oil on canvas, Private Collection, Wyoming

**Studio Paintings**

 

In the fall of 1883, after his experiences in Wyoming and Montana, Brush returned to New York, where he began teaching the “Antique Class” at the Art Students League. For generations, aspiring art students had honed their drawing skills by copying plaster casts of classical sculpture. Once the reached a certain level of proficiency, they were permitted to sketch from life models.

 

While teaching young art students how to draw the human figure from casts and models, Brush created a series of Indian paintings that reflected both his own academic training and his reverence for artistic tradition. In their physical perfection, the Indian figures in Brush’s paintings display an ideal of beauty defined centuries earlier in ancient Greece and later perpetuated in art academies in both Europe and America.

 

Many of the figures in Brush’s paintings are shown in poses common in studio classrooms – for example in *Before the Battle*, a warrior’s lance replaces the balance pole that allowed models to hold poses for extended periods. The artist’s Indian figures also echo masterpieces of Renaissance sculpture, including Michelangelo’s monumental *David* – the inspiration for the central figure in *Before the Battle*.

 

The dazzling surface layer of Brush’s paintings, accomplished through a painstaking technique learned in Paris, presents and illusory sense of reality. Beneath the apparent fidelity to nature lies a picture fabricated in the artist’s imagination.

George de Forest BrushThe Indian Paintings
*The Silence Broken*, 1886, oil on canvas, Collection of David H. Koch

George de Forest BrushThe Indian Paintings
*Indian Hunting Cranes*, 1887, oil on canvas, Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, University of Oregon, Eugene, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Harold F. Wendel

George de Forest BrushThe Indian Paintings
*The Indian and the Lily*, 1887, oil on canvas, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas

George de Forest BrushThe Indian Paintings
*Portrait of an Indian*, c. 1887, oil on panel, Private Collection

George de Forest BrushThe Indian Paintings
*Indian Hunter*, 1890, oil on panel, Private Collection

George de Forest BrushThe Indian Paintings
*An Aztec Sculptor*, 1887, oil on wood, Gift (Partial and Promised) of the Ann and Tom Barwick Family Collection, 2005.107.1

**Indian as Metaphor**

 

As the decade of the 1880s drew to a close, Brush increasingly focused on compositions in which a single Indian figure is shown engaged in the creation of art. Whether weaving a rug or carving a stone wall, isolated individuals appear completely absorbed in the creative process. Among the finest of these works are his so-called Aztec paintings, which may have been inspired by the “Aztec Fair,” a popular commercial road show that opened in New York in the fall of 1886. In addition to a “large collection of Aztec antiquities,” the fair boasted more than fifty Mexican artisans demonstrating such skills as weaving and onyx carving.

 

Shortly after the fair closed, Brush exhibited *An Aztec Sculptor*, the first of his Aztec series, which also includes *The Sculptor and the King* and *The Crane Ornament*. In these works, confined interior spaces replace the landscape settings of Brush’s earlier paintings. Artists, rather than warriors or hunters, become the focus. Capitalizing on renewed interest in Central American generated by the Aztec Fair, Brush created images celebrating an American tradition of craftsmanship ancient in origin that he, like his contemporaries, viewed as a parallel to the Greco-Roman tradition claimed by Europeans.

 

Implicitly autobiographical, these paintings reflect Brush’s growing concern that artisanship–the craft of making art–was losing its value as mechanization led to the replacement of the handmade object with the mass-produced. In a surprising way, these spare, late Indian paintings emerge as works of protest–Brush’s visual response to a society eager to embrace the modernism he resisted.

George de Forest BrushThe Indian Paintings
*The Sculptor and the King*, 1888, oil on panel, Portland Art Museum, Oregon, Bequest of Miss Mary Forbush Failing

George de Forest BrushThe Indian Paintings
*The Weaver*, 1889, oil on canvas, Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago, Daniel J. Terra Collection

George de Forest BrushThe Indian Paintings
*The Crane Ornament*, 1889, oil on panel, Private Collection

George de Forest BrushThe Indian Paintings
*The Head Dress*, 1890, oil on canvas, Property of the Westervelt Company and displayed in the Westervelt-Warner Museum of American Art, Tuscaloosa Alabama

**This exhibition is no longer on view at the National Gallery.**

**Overview:** 21 paintings and drawings depicting American Indians created during the 1880s by American artist George de Forest Brush were on display in this exhibition. Included were 2 recent gifts to the National Gallery of Art and loans from museums in the United States and private collections. Some of the works had been in private hands since shortly after they were painted and had only rarely been available for public viewing before this exhibition. Life studies produced while Brush lived on the Shoshone and Arapahoe reservations in 1882 were on view in the first room of the exhibition followed by his later studio paintings of American Indians in the second room.

Curator Nancy K. Anderson presented an opening-day lecture titled *George de Forest Brush: The Indian as Metaphor*. The Wyeth Foundation for American Art Conference on Images of Native Americans, 1600–2000, was held on December 4 and 5 in conjunction with the National Museum of the American Indian, Washington. A family workshop, "Drawing Inspiration," was held on two weekends in October and November. *Film Indians Now!* a film series jointly sponsored by the National Gallery of Art and the National Museum of the American Indian, offered a program of contemporary portrayals of American Indians in movies, followed by lectures and discussions with filmmakers, curators, and scholars. The programs were held weekends in October and November in the East Building Auditorium and the National Museum of the American Indian Rasmussen Theater. On November 9, music performed by the Coast Orchestra accompanied the silent film *In the Land of the Head Hunters*. A concert of music by native American and American composers was given by the Singers' Companye on November 23.

**Organization:**The exhibition was organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, in association with the Seattle Art Museum. Nancy K. Anderson, curator of American and British paintings, National Gallery of Art, was the exhibition curator.

**Attendance:**  71,245

**Catalog:***George de Forest Brush: The Indian Paintings* by Nancy K. Anderson et al. Washington: National Gallery of Art in association with Lund Humphries, Hampshire U.K., 2008.

**Other Venues:**  Seattle Art Museum, February 26–May 24, 2009

Homer and Eakins: American Painters in the Late 1800s

Winslow Homer in the National Gallery of Art

Frederic Remington

                    - Brush, George de Forest
                    - American , 1854 - 1941

                  - George de Forest Brush, Part 2: Tradition and Modernity
                  -                                     Audio, Released:                                    September 23, 2008, (6:52 minutes)                                
                  - George de Forest Brush, Part 1: The Advent of the Indian Paintings
                  -                                     Audio, Released:                                    September 16, 2008, (7:06 minutes)                                
                  - Press Event: George de Forest Brush: The Indian Paintings
                  -                                     Audio, Released:                                    September 9, 2008, (16:18 minutes)                                

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