ARTIST'S PORTRAITS DEFINED HOW AMERICANS VIEWED INDIANS

Portraits of American Indians from Southeast Missouri and Southern Illinois may have been part of one of the nation's earliest and largest collections of art depicting native Americans, a former director for the Smithsonian Institute said Sunday.

Dr. Herman J. Viola, who delivered the annual Beckwith Lecture at Southeast Missouri State University, said Indians from Missouri and Illinois were a part of the many portraits of Indians painted by Charles Bird King.

King, an artist virtually unknown by most Americans today, made his fame in the first half of the nineteenth century painting portraits of Indians who came to Washington D.C. to negotiate treaties with the government.

A collection of King's painting hung in the Smithsonian Institute until they were destroyed in a fire in 1865. The portraits helped define how most Americans of the time viewed Indians.

"King was the first white man to paint a portrait of an Indian wearing a war bonnet," Viola said.

So popular was the painting that many other artist began subsequently to portray Indians wearing the headdress of eagle feathers.

Viola said that King, the only portrait painter living in Washington D.C. during the early 1820s, was commissioned to paint the portraits of Indians by Thomas McKenney, the nation's first director of the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

"McKenney was a devout Quaker who wanted to convert the Indians and turn them into white men," Viola said.

"He believed that Indians were just sunburned whited men who would not exist after a few generations, that all they needed was education to become white people," he said.

But, McKenney also wanted future Americans to know what Indians looked like during the early days of the country and so commissioned King to paint portraits of Indians who came to the nation's capitol.

An irony to the story, Viola said, was that King, whose father was killed by Indians during a raid, made his living painting portraits of Indians.

Not all the Indians who came to Washington would allow their portraits to be painted. Many believed that part of their spirit would be taken into the painting and so did not allow King to paint them.

Others allowed the portraits, but only if they were given copies of the paintings. King made miniature versions of the paintings on pieces of wood, about 12 inches in length, and gave them to the Indians who would take the paintings home with them.

One of the wooden miniatures, a portrait of an Illinois Indian named Coosa Tustennuggee, was discovered in Southern Illinois and sold for $25,000. Viola believes that others may still exist in Southern Illinois or perhaps in Southeast Missouri as a part of family collections.

Viola spoke at Trail of Tears State Park and the Historic Preservation Association's banquet.

The Beckwith Lecture is an annual lecture in honor of Thomas Beckwith, a Charleston farmer who discovered artifacts of the Mississippian mound builders on his farm. Beckwith donated the artifacts to Southeast Missouri State University's museum.

The purpose of the lecture is to bring a topic of interest to the public from the fields of sociology, anthropology, history or the arts, said Dr. Alberta Dougan, chair of the university's history department.

Viola's lectures were funded by the Missouri Humanities Council, the Missouri Department of Natural Resources-Trail of Tears and Southeast Missouri State University, Dougan said.