Image-Making By Matthew Clarke
T
he Newberry is not the first place one would expect to find a cache of fine art. Yet amid the vellum-bound incunables and illuminated prayer books in the library’s vault is one of the country’s richest small collections of American Indian portraiture: 25 oil paintings created by early 20thcentury painter and illustrator Elbridge Ayer Burbank. Intimately scaled yet meticulously detailed, the portraits feature Native men and women Burbank encountered during his travels through the Southwest in the late 1890s. Most of
Burbank’s subjects—men like White-Swan, Rain-in-theFace, and Black-Coyote—were unknown outside of their tribal communities. Others, like Naiche, chief of the Nde (also known as the Chiricahua Apache), would have been recognized by a limited white audience. Yet one of the artist’s subjects had been a household name for years when Burbank first painted him in 1897 and was on the verge of transforming into something more mythic. This was the Nde war chief Goyaałé—or Geronimo, as he was by then known. Burbank painted seven portraits of Geronimo, and the Newberry holds two of them. Both are small, measuring about 8 by 10 inches, and both show Geronimo in a red head scarf and robe. While one features the war chief in a frontal pose, facing the viewer head-on, the other—on view now in our new permanent exhibit, From the Stacks— depicts him in profile, a pose reminiscent of Italian Renaissance portraiture. Like his other portraits, Burbank’s paintings of Geronimo show a striking attention to detail; as the painter explained in his 1944 memoir Burbank Among the Indians, he strove to depict “every wrinkle in his face and even a mole on his cheek.” Such detail stood out to contemporary audiences, as suggested by a reviewer for the Chicago Inter-Ocean, who concluded that “they are, from the manner of their painting, and the skill of Mr. Burbank, of genuine artistic value as well as high ethnological interest.” It’s this intersection—of “genuine artistic value” and “ethnological interest”— that is most perplexing, and most problematic, about Burbank’s portraits. Like Burbank, many artists of the 19th and early 20th centuries specialized in ethnologically oriented paintings of American Indians, depicting their subjects in traditional garb—known as regalia—and placing them in idyllic, ahistorical settings.
Geronimo, Fort Sill, O.T., 1897. Elbridge Burbank. Oil on panel.
The Newberry Magazine
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