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Painting Indians and Building Empires in North America, 1710–1840 by William H. Truettner (review)

In this attractive volume, William H. Truettner considers the practice of “painting Indians,” first by British and later American artists. Rather than examine the entire expanse of American Indian imagery from contact onward, Truettner focuses on two emblematic “campaigns”: the eighteenthcentury effort to represent the likenesses of notable Mohawk and other Iroquois leaders and the nineteenth-century fascination with images of Upper Missouri Indians. Each of these campaigns, he argues, “was conceived, directly or indirectly, to accompany attempts to expand white hegemony across North America” (3). Truettner connects these two series of paintings across time in part to show the transition from Enlightenment-driven ideas about the improvability of the “noble savage” to romantic nationalist thought that permanently relegated Indians (and blacks and women) to a lower level of human development. Scholars have previously explored this paradigm shift in American history, but they have not investigated it in connection with these particular works of art. Truettner primarily examines the paintings of Benjamin West and Gilbert Stuart in the earlier period and George Catlin, Karl Bodmer, and Alfred Jacob Miller in the latter. The majority of the works he analyzes are portraits, but he also devotes attention to mid-nineteenth-century “field” paintings that depicted Indians in action in what was purportedly their natural habitat (chasing buffalo, performing ceremonies, etc.). In considering the portraits of Mohawk leaders such as Joseph Brant, Truettner argues that both the process by which these paintings were created and the finished products reflected and re-inscribed British imperial aims. He details the court visits of numerous Native figures who traveled across the Atlantic to meet British leaders and cement relationships of (at least superficially) mutual benefit. Truettner explains the means by which formal portrait sitting became part of the protocol of these visits and the methods by which artists like West amplified the nobleness of the “noble savage” by employing classical forms and postures. Notable in this analysis is what the author calls Book Reviews