594 AKNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 19 60 



Bodmer 1 year, Eastman had 7 years of residence among the Indians. 

 He had no reason for hasty completing of impressions ; he had ample 

 time for coming to know the ways of his subjects as well as a white 

 man could. "It is not probable [I turn back to the ISIissouri Repub- 

 lican of September 16, 1848] that there is an artist in the land so en- 

 tirely familiar as is this gentleman, by long and familiar intercourse 

 and acquaintance with savage life, scenes, and the natural scenery of 

 the wilds of the V/estern Valley." 



Eastman w^as first of all a painter, not an ethnographer, but by 

 chance he was drawm into a subject matter in which he became expert. 

 His first works, we have seen, were in landscape, and had he remained 

 on duty in the Eastern States he would no doubt have continued to 

 work as a minor member of the Hudson River School. But the chance 

 that sent him to a far-distant frontier post and put him in daily con- 

 tact with the Sioux led him to study the Indian and his landscape and 

 he turned his talents and his leisure to Indian genre subjects and 

 the backgrounds in nature against which they must be set. For half 

 a dozen years he painted and sketched without any attempt to exhibit 

 or dispose of his works — he w^as happily able to paint not for a living 

 but for the sake of painting as he wished. We are fortunate that this 

 was so. 



The most notable qualities of his work are naturalness and fidelity. 

 What the friendly Missouri Republican said of one picture can be said 

 of all: "There is no attitudinizing — no position of figures in such a 

 group that you can swear the artist's hands, and not their own free 

 will, put them there." His pictures are "homely tnith." They present 

 the commonplaces of Indian life. No drama, no sentimentality, no 

 straining after emotion, no romanticizing. He does not wish to amuse 

 or to excitei but to observe, to inform, to interest. Seldom can a 

 painter so free himself from his own personal point of view as East- 

 man does to become the objective and impartial observer. He does not 

 condemn, he does not approve, he does not patronize. He does not 

 present the Indian as low, crude, and contemptible or as noble, abused, 

 and pitiful. He does not show him as villain or as hero. He merely 

 sees him as a man with customs of his own. Consequently, Seth 

 Eastman has left us a record in paint and pencil that is vivid, fascinat- 

 ing, and reliable. 



REFERENCES AND NOTES 



1. McDermott, John Francis. A journalist at Old Fort Snelling : Some letters 



of "Solitaire" Robb. Minnesota History, vol. 31, pp. 200-221, December 

 1950. 



2. Details of Eastman's military career are from Cullum, George W., Bio- 



graphical register of the ofl5cers and graduates of the United States Mili- 

 tary Academy at West Foiut, vol. 1, p. niO ; vol. 3, p. 77. New York, 1S6S- 

 1879. 



