468 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1953 



(Catlin, 1841, vol. 2, pp. 194-200.) Catlin executed a portrait of this 

 man in St. Louis in the fall of 1831 that bears little resemblance to 

 King's portrait of the same man painted only a few months later. In 

 King's front view (pi. 7, left) this putative full-blood Indian looks 

 like a white man, while in Catlin's three-quarter view The Light's 

 Mongoloid characters are pronounced (pi. 7, right). 



On the other hand, King's three-quarter- view portrait of the Iowa 

 Chief, No Heart, painted in 1837 when the subject was about 40 years 

 of age, compares very favorably with the photographic likeness of 

 that Indian taken some years later, and probably not long before 

 No Heart's death in 1862. When we make allowances for changes in 

 No Heart's features due to aging, we certainly can observe a strong 

 resemblance between the Indian in King's portrait and the one in 

 the photograph. ( See pi. 8. ) 



These comparisons suggest that King achieved varying degrees of 

 success in portraying the likenesses of his sitters. Perhaps he was 

 most successful in profile and three-quarter-view portraits. He was 

 not uniformly successful in the more difficult front-view poses. 



A single extant example of King's attempt at an Indian subject 

 other than a portrait is his "Indian Girl at Her Toilet" in the collection 

 of the Redwood Library and Athenaeum, Newport, R. I. (pi. 5, 

 right) . In this sentimental, imaginary canvas is exhibited the work 

 of an artist who had seen and painted many individual Indians in 

 his Washington studio, but who remained ignorant of the cultural 

 background of these people. 



A CHECKLIST OF INDIAN PORTRAITS ATTRIBUTED TO CHARLES BIRD KING 



Listed below are 105 Indian portraits and 1 romantic Indian 

 scene attributed to Charles Bird King. The originals of 89 portraits 

 were in the National Collection in 1859. (Rhees, 1859.) With the 

 possible exception of three portraits now in the U. S. National Museum, 

 these originals were destroyed in the Smithsonian Institution fire of 

 1865. We may assume that other extant versions of subjects in the 

 old National Collection are replicas. 



Of the extant collections, the largest is the series of 21 paintings 

 given or bequeathed by King to the Redwood Library and Athenaeum 

 in his home town of Newport, R. I. Nine oil portraits (seven of them 

 replicas) now in the Nationalmuseet, Copenhagen, Denmark, are 

 illustrated (three in color) in Birket-Smith (1942) . These paintings 

 were presented to Maj. Gen. Peter von Scholten, Governor General 

 of the Danish West Indies, probably by President Jackson in 1831. 

 Six King portraits belonging to the Thomas Gilcrease Foundation of 

 Tulsa, Okla., were exhibited there in 1949. In addition, there are 4 

 portraits in the United States National Museum, 2 in the University 



