Extraordinary skills of indian paintings

Combining extraordinary technical skills acquired in Jean-Léon Gérôme’s studio in Paris with firsthand experience living among the Arapahoe, Shoshone, and Crow in Wyoming and Montana, George de Forest Brush (1854/1855–1941) created an important series of paintings of American Indians much famous by his contemporaries but rarely seen since. Completed during the 1880s, many of these works were fast acquired by major American collectors and have remained in private hands through several generations. Of the twenty featured in this exhibition, several have only newly come to light. These attractively beautiful paintings are studio compositions: complex meditations on the advent of modernism in which the Indian serves as metaphor. The accompanying catalogue, incorporating new research, is the first learned study of this series.