During the 1880s, George de Forest Brush produced a unique series of paintings of the American Indian. The exhibition George de Forest Brush: The Indian Paintings, organized by the National Gallery of Art and the Seattle Art Museum, put this series on display, with almost all of Brush’s major Indian paintings shown together for the first time. The paintings are remarkable for their combination of an intense style of French Academic realism and American subject matter.

The accompanying catalogue is a collection of five critical essays devoted to the series, with an emphasis on the complex relationship between the artist’s academic training, aesthetic interests, the status of ethnography in the United States during the 1880s, and Brush’s personal involvement with the Crow, Arapahoe, and Shoshone tribes. Questions are raised regarding his motives for painting these exquisite images of Native Americans in unspoiled landscapes, highlighting the tension between his dedication to “art” and his interest in the “Indian question.” Thus, the essays underscore the complex nature of Brush’s (and the American people’s) engagement with Native Americans during a time of forced assimilation and the prediction of a vanishing race. Bringing together much of the current scholarship, the catalogue updates the available research on Brush while considering his work against larger concepts that have evolved in the art-historical discourse on painting in the Gilded Age: masculinity, professionalism, academic training, mechanization, and race and ethnicity. In-depth discussions of the twenty individual works follow, accompanied by high-quality reproductions, as well as a detailed chronology of Brush’s life, which places the Indian paintings in the larger context of his artistic career.

As the first major catalogue devoted specifically to Brush, it is a substantial contribution to the field, providing new critical scholarship about the artist, and underscoring the importance of the Indian paintings in his oeuvre. The exhibition and the catalogue introduce Brush to a new audience, unfamiliar with these images of Native Americans painted in a French Academic style. The appeal of Brush’s exotic realism to a twenty-first century audience mirrors recent public interest in the Orientalist and European Academic painters of the nineteenth century, painters with whom Brush would have closely associated himself. In a larger context, both images and text raise questions about the rarely examined yet important role of native academic painting within the history of American art.

The exhibition’s curator, Nancy Anderson, sets the tone in her introductory essay, “In Choosing Indians As Subjects . . .” (the title of her piece is taken from the seminal 1885 essay that Brush wrote for Century Magazine). Anderson reveals the tension inherent in Brush’s complex relationship with his subject matter, as he made it clear that he chose Indians as subjects for “art,” and was not interested in them from the viewpoint of the historian or the antiquarian (1). And yet, upon learning more of the details of Brush’s life that are scattered throughout the essays and catalogue entries, his life-long engagement and personal association with Native Americans is clearly evident, from living in teepees erected in his backyard in Hastings-on-Hudson, and dressing up as an Indian chief complete with full war paint, to his participation on the Committee on Aboriginal Art. Throughout the text, the question is constantly raised: Was Brush interested in Native Americans purely as an artistic, aesthetic subject, or did he sympathize with their plight when their cultures and very existence were threatened? Close looking at each painting raises this issue more concretely, and, in my opinion, it is the leitmotif of the catalogue and the exhibition.

Anderson’s primary contribution to the catalogue, “Layered Fiction: The Indian Paintings,” provides biographical background on Brush during the 1880s as well as places the series in its historical and cultural context. The piece chronicles Brush’s studies in Paris, his struggles upon his return, and his decision to travel to Wyoming in search of a truly American subject that would allow him to display his academic training and technical expertise. Anderson describes how Brush’s time at the Wind River Reservation with members of the Arapahoe and Shoshone tribes, as well as in Montana among the Crow, differentiates him from the other recognized “Indian” artists whose work was more journalistic/ethnographic. She foregrounds the series against the historical backdrop of “the Indian Problem,” and concludes by aligning Brush’s paintings with an antimodernist tradition. Seeing his search for subject matter from earlier American civilizations as an antidote to the increasing industrialization of the age, she ties it to the broader cultural embrace of the primitive coupled with the rejection of the contemporary (29).

James Boyles’s essay, “Brush and the Academic Tradition,” highlights Brush’s efforts to place his paintings within the history of art through a direct dialogue with images of the past and present, between the art of “the Old and the New Worlds” (52). The Indian paintings testify to the strong influence of Jean-Léon Gérôme on Brush as he tried to re-create his teacher’s North African paintings using an American subject, which was still exotic in its remoteness. While Boyle effectively demonstrates Brush’s references to the Great Masters of the past such as Michelangelo and Rubens in paintings such as The Picture Writer’s Story (1884) and Laying Away a Brave (1885), the claim of direct influence by contemporary artist Winslow Homer is perhaps less tenable. While Before the Battle (1886) does resemble Homer’s Prisoners at the Front (1866), its Native Americans lined up in a row ready for battle also calls to mind the Parthenon Frieze, a more appropriate comparison as Brush likened the American Indians to the young ancient Greeks. In terms of contemporary painters, I would suggest that the influence of John LaFarge in images such as The Indian and the Lily (1887) is not only more direct but also more relevant, given LaFarge’s significant involvement in the Society of American Artists (of which Brush was an early member) and the Arts Students League, as well as his associations with the French Academic tradition. Boyle is strongest when discussing issues of gender in these paintings (the subject of his dissertation), as Brush made the male nude acceptable in the eyes of Americans by providing a rationalization for its appearance: the dark-skinned Native Americans are cloaked in classical allusions and involved in physical exertion, unlike their white counterparts in the more contested image of Thomas Eakins’s The Swimming Hole (1885). Throughout the essay Boyle emphasizes how vital the academic tradition was to Brush’s work, particularly in his desire to reveal beauty in nature and in the human form, and suggests that Brush’s interest in Native Americans was purely aesthetic.

In the other primary essay, “Living for Art: Brush and his Indians,” Mary Lublin uses the image of The Picture Writer’s Story as a metaphor for Brush himself, who creates a sequence of images whose progressive actions construct a larger narrative and attempt to recreate a sense of movement in time. Lublin persuasively argues that Brush’s Indian Paintings are a meditation on the development of human culture and creativity, exploring the idea of the senses as the raw materials for the human thought process, as well as commenting on the human desire to structure the world through language in both written and oral traditions (58). The essay provides a middle ground within the larger question of Brush’s intent, as the images depicted in The Picture Writer’s Story (the buffalo robe, the pictograms, the pottery) are discussed as both ethnographic records and objects of aesthetic beauty. Lublin provides intriguing ideas on Brush’s creation of innate sensory responses in images such as The Silence Broken (1886), and in the relationship of the birds emerging from the marsh in Indian Hunting Cranes (1887) to the sequential narration of a bird in flight as captured in Eadweard Muybridge’s photography studies of the same period. Less compelling is the attempt to include Aztec images into this sensory approach, as Lublin discusses them in terms of Brush’s interest in capturing the human form in both two- and three-dimensional space. Instead, the more pressing questions regarding these particular paintings is why they were more popular with contemporary critics and collectors than his images of North American tribesmen, and why Brush moved away from depicting those timeless figures and their idyllic landscapes; with their specific historical references to the more ancient tradition of MesoAmerica, do the “Aztec” images really belong with these “Indian paintings”? Arguing that the series culminates in images that portray artistic or artisan skill, Lublin states that Brush, “confident of the moral and cultural value of his era’s artistic superiority,” created the Indian paintings as a meditation on “progress in art” (78).

Emily Shapiro’s essay, “‘A Purpose in Every Stroke’: Brush’s Images of Indian Artisanry,” argues that the late paintings not only reflect Brush’s concerns about the dehumanizing aspects of American labor but also represent his antimodernist approach and commitment to a pre-industrial academic tradition. Of all of the essays in the catalogue, Shapiro’s comes closest to capturing Brush’s deep personal involvement with Native Americans, relating how he directly sympathized with the painstaking efforts of the native artisans; she quotes from the painter’s daughter, who recalled how he “got familiar with [Native American] life and habits and dances and mastered many of the Indians’ traditional trades and skills” (88). While he may have stated publicly that he lived for “art not for Indians,” the facts Shapiro brings to light regarding Brush’s lifelong engagement with Native American artifacts, traditions, and customs suggests a deeper attachment than mere aesthetics. In her brief discussion of the “Brush Guild,” Shapiro mentions the system of artistic instruction designed and implemented by Brush during his tenure at the Arts Students League, which was based on a traditional craft model; it would have been nice if the article had also included more details on how Brush’s methods adopted those of Native American artisans, as detailed in Elizabeth Hutchinson’s recent work, The Indian Craze: Primitivism, Modernism and Transculturation in American Art, 1890–1915 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009).

The final essay in the catalogue, “Indians and ‘Indianicity’ at the 1893 World’s Fair” by Diane Dillon, seeks to present the World’s Columbian Exposition as a backdrop to Brush’s Indian Paintings, three of which were on display in the Fine Arts Building. Much of the information here (the Ethnological Exhibits and their Indian camps, the department store-like displays of Indian merchandise, the commercial use of the Indian image, and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show) deals with the fair as a site of cross-cultural exchange, consumerism, and tension between high and low visual culture. Dillon argues that Brush’s motivations for painting the Indian mirrored in many ways the organizers of the fair who sought to exploit the popularity of the subject. I am not sure that the comparison entirely answers the complex questions raised regarding Brush’s personal motivations. In examining the pictures themselves, I would submit that these unique and lovingly painted images belie the contextual and archival data, and confirm Brush’s deep-seated, life-long commitment to Native Americans as both individual craftsman and, collectively, a culture worth preserving.

George de Forest Brush: The Indian Paintings is an important catalogue in its significant contribution to the American art-historical field, providing thought-provoking essays and new archival information on the artist, as well as an in-depth chronology and updated bibliography. In addition to placing many of the issues raised by the “Indian question” in a mainstream art-historical discourse, both the catalogue and the exhibition are also notable for the new attention they pay to the role of academic painting within the larger American art-historical tradition. Lastly, I believe that the greatest legacy of the project is the resurrection of these Indian Paintings, which are not only important in their social, political, and historical contexts, but are, in their own right, rich and beautiful works of art.