Émile Vernet-Lecomte (1821–1900)
Minnehaha, c. 1871
Oil on canvas
height: 112 cm (44 in); width: 77 cm (30.3 in)
Private collection
Estimate for 12,000 - 18,000 GBP in Nov 2010
Emile Lecomte-Vernet, born Charles Émile Hippolyte Lecomte, is from a family of famous painters. He began by painting portraits of the wealthy bourgeoisie and the aristocracy . It begins at the Paris Salon in 1843 where he received a bronze medal. Very quickly, he developed a taste for orientalism. His first paintings on this theme are exhibited at the Salon of 1847 ( Syrian head and Syrian woman ) and he produced numerous portraits of Oriental women. News of his time did not leave him indifferent either and so he painted pictures with subject the Crimean War (1853-1855) or the massacre of the Maronites by the Druze in Syria in 1860-1861. More on Emile Vernet Lecomte
Minnehaha is a Native American woman documented in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's 1855 epic poem The Song of Hiawatha. She is the lover of the titular protagonist Hiawatha and comes to a tragic end. The name, often said to mean "laughing water", literally translates to "waterfall" or "rapid water" in Dakota.
Master of Life, Gitche Manito, came down from the skies and told all the people of the Earth to stop fighting and get along. To seal the deal, he had these people make peace pipes, which they take out and smoke together whenever a conflict arises. Then Gitche Manito throws in an added bonus: he tells the people that he will soon send a prophet who will suffer on their behalf so that they will all live better lives.
Ralph Blakelock (1847-1919)
Hiawatha" (Shooting the Arrow)
Oil on canvas
8-3/16 x 6-3/16 inches
Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, Massachusetts.
Ralph Albert Blakelock, (born Oct. 15, 1847, New York, N.Y., U.S.—died Aug. 9, 1919, near Elizabethtown, N.Y.), American painter whose luminous impasto paintings of moonlit scenes convey a mysterious romanticism.
In 1864 Blakelock entered the Free Academy of the City of New York (now City College) with hopes of becoming a physician. After three terms, he left. Largely self-taught, he was influenced by the Hudson River School of landscape painting. He went on to develop a highly original and subjective style of landscape painting as his career progressed, almost always choosing forests as his subjects and often portraying the Native American encampments that he had observed during time spent in the West between 1869 and 1872. These forest scenes are notable for the moody interplay of their nocturnal lighting and their strangely dappled representations of tree branches and foliage. More on Ralph Albert Blakelock
Some time after Gitche Manito's appearance, a boy named Hiawatha is born to a woman named Wenonah. Hiawatha's father is a demigod who controls the west wind, but as a dad he's a deadbeat. He deserts Hiawatha's mother, who ends up dying from heartbreak. In the meantime, Hiawatha grows up to be a strong and wise young man whose great reputation travels all across the land.
Frederic Remington (American, 1861–1909) Pitched It Sheer into the River . . . Where It Still Is Seen in the Summer, c. 1889
Oil on canvas
20 x 28 1/4in. (50.8 x 71.8cm)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
In 1888 Remington was commissioned to illustrate The Song of Hiawatha, the epic poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, for a deluxe edition published in 1891. By then a sophisticated practitioner of the grisaille technique, Remington executed twenty-two black-and-white oil paintings, one for each of the poem’s cantos. This depiction accompanies canto 6, which describes Hiawatha’s two closest friends: Chibiabos, the musician, and Kwasind, the strong man. The jagged boulder in the river alludes to one of Kwasind’s feats of strength. Taunted with accusations of laziness, he threw a huge rock into the Pauwating River, where it remained visible above the waterline during the summer months. More on this painting
Frederic Remington traveled west repeatedly. He loved the idea of the frontier and greatly admired the rough and heroic cowboys and soldiers he met there. Among other things, he admired them for seeming undaunted by the many elements of frontier life that Remington himself could barely tolerate.
On these trips, Remington collected innumerable materials to use as props to create convincingly detailed illustrations, paintings and bronzes in his studio in New Rochelle, New York. He took a camera and made his own photographs, not as art, but as notes. He bought hundreds of widely available western landscapes and portraits of Native Americans. He carried notebooks and sketched everything from distant horizons to the details of creases on leather boots.
He produced over 3,000 signed paintings and drawings. Most of them were illustrations, but many were made as art as he turned away from the publishing world and accomplished masterful art.
He created 22 different subjects in bronze before his death at 48. His worked on increasingly sophisticated artistic goals in his paintings, moving toward impressionism. More on Frederic Remington
Frances Anne Hopkins (1838–1919)
Minnehaha Feeding Birds, c. 1880
Oil on canvas
American Art Museum
Minnehaha in buckskin is seated in a canoe. She feeds red berries to four birds from a birch bark basket on her lap. Flowers in the foreground; trees in the mist in the background.
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Frances Anne Hopkins (February 2, 1838 – March 5, 1919) In 1858, she married a Hudson's Bay Company official, Edward Hopkins, whose work took him to North America. Hopkins travelled along with him. While sailing, she was able to sketch extensively, therefore, capturing a now lost way of living – the last days of the fur trade.
Hopkins painted actively during the 1860s and '70s. Her best-known works are several large paintings made from her sketches. She portrayed a voyageur's life in the mid-nineteenth century. Hopkins, however, remained relatively unknown until recently. At the same time, considering that, she was an artist placed in a context where gender-imposed restrictions were prevalent. In fact, Frances Anne Hopkins was dubbed as a woman who "staked out an identity based on difference: a woman in a group of men."
The Hopkins family returned to England in 1870 where she lived until her death. Hopkins was an artist able to record an important aspect of Canadian history. More on Frances Anne Hopkins
Jonathan Eastman Johnson
Minnehaha, c. 1857
Pastel on Paper
13 x 11 inches
St. Louis County Historical Society
The most finished of Eastman Johnson Grand Portage pictures, this pastel takes its mood and title from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's 1855 poem, The Song of Hiawatha. The picture, like the poem, is a romantic compilation of nature, native lore, and imagination, with the figure of Minnehaha lost in thought in a forest glade. Her dress and the log seat she faces would have been common Ojibwe objects. Johnson collected such a dress at Grand Portage, in fact, using it and his studies of Ojibwe women as models for this work.
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Jonathan Eastman Johnson (July 29, 1824 – April 5, 1906) was an American painter and co-founder of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with his name inscribed at its entrance. He was best known for his genre paintings, paintings of scenes from everyday life, and his portraits both of everyday people and prominent Americans such as Abraham Lincoln, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. His later works often show the influence of the 17th-century Dutch masters, whom he studied in The Hague in the 1850s; he was known as The American Rembrandt in his day. More on Jonathan Eastman Johnson
Eventually, Hiawatha gets lonely and decides to ask a woman named Minnehaha to marry him. She says yes and they live happily together. Along the way, Hiawatha finds the time to invent reading and writing and to teach these things to his people.
After Jean Leon Gerome Ferris
"Hiawatha's Wedding Journey"
Oil on canvas
38" x 31"
Private collection
Jean Leon Gerome Ferris (August 8, 1863 – March 18, 1930) was an American painter best known for his series of 78 scenes from American history, entitled The Pageant of a Nation, the largest series of American historical paintings by a single artist.
His early subjects were Orientalist in nature since that movement was in vogue when he was young. By 1895, he had gained a reputation as a historical painter, and he embarked on his dream of creating a series of paintings that told a historical narrative.
In 1898, he sold General Howe's Levee, 1777, but he later realized that such a series could not be complete if the separate paintings could not be kept together. Consequently, he never sold another, but he did sell the reproduction rights to various publishing companies. This had the effect of greatly popularizing his work, as these companies made prints, postcards, calendars, and blank-backed trade cards to use in advertisements. Laminated cards of these works were still being sold as late as 1984, More on Jean Leon Gerome Ferris
American School, 19th Century
Hiawatha and Minnehaha
Oil on canvas
30.25 x 20 in. (76.8 x 50.8 cm.)
Private collection
An independent America offered more opportunity to everyone, including artists. Although photography (invented 1839) eventually replaced painting as a chronicler of events and experience, 19th century America relied on painters to record these things. Portraiture continued to be financially rewarding, but landscapes of the American wilderness were also popular. The two most famous styles of scenic view painting, both highly romantic, were the Thomas Cole-inspired Hudson River school (c.1825-65) and its later offshoot Luminism (c.1850-75). The French plein-air Barbizon School was also influential, while a style known as Tonalism grew up in the 1880s and 90s. More on 19th Century American Art
Frances Foy
Hiawatha Returning with Minnehaha
Oil on canvas
Gibson City, Illinois Post Office, United States Postal Service®.
Frances Foy (April 11, 1890 – 1963) was an American painter, muralist, illustrator, and etcher born in Chicago, Illinois.
Foy began studying art with Wellington J. Reynolds at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts and later attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she continued studying with Reynolds as well as with George Bellows and Fred Schook. Foy completed commercial work and began to exhibit her work in many venues in the 1920s, including Chicago No-Jury Society of Artists, Chicago Woman's Aid, the Romany Club, and the Art Institute of Chicago. She and other classmates were active in Chicago's progressive movement in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1928, she and husband Gustaf Dalstrom traveled with other artists to Europe, where she was directly exposed to European modernists. She was a member of the Chicago Society of Artists and served on the technical committee of the Federal Public Works of Art Project. More on Frances Foy
William de Leftwich Dodge (1867–1935)
The Death of Minnehaha, c. 1892
Oil on canvas
American Museum of Western Art
William de Leftwich Dodge (1867–1935) was an American artist best known for his murals, which were commissioned for both public and private buildings.
Dodge was born at Liberty, Virginia in the Piedmont near Lynchburg. In 1879, his mother, Mary de Leftwich Dodge, an aspiring artist, moved her family to Europe. After living initially in Munich they moved to Paris, where she worked on art. Dodge later followed her example and became an artist. He studied at the École des Beaux Arts and took first place in the examinations in 1881. He also studied under Jean-Léon Gérôme and with Raphaël Collin at the Académie Colarossi, and traveled to Munich for studies there.
After he and his family settled in New York, Dodge taught at the Art Students League of New York and at Cooper Union.
He became known as a muralist when the genre was at a peak of popularity. Murals were seen as a kind of art that could reach directly to the people. Dodge drew on a variety of styles for his murals, settling on a heroic, neoclassical look.
In his private work, Dodge's paintings show the influence of Impressionism and Fauvism. Toward the end of his career, Dodge became interested in Mayan art. His work is held in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Academy of Design. More on William de Leftwich Dodge
A terrible winter kills Hiawatha's wife Minnehaha with a fever. Hiawatha feels as though there's nothing left in his life to keep him in his village. One night, he has visions of white men arriving in a giant boat and teaching his people a new religion.
Thomas Eakins (1844–1916)
Hiawatha, circa 1874
Oil on canvas mounted on panel
height: 35.7 cm (14 in); width: 44.6 cm (17.5 in
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden Collection
Thomas Cowperthwait Eakins (July 25, 1844 – June 25, 1916) was an American realist painter, photographer, sculptor, and fine arts educator. He is widely acknowledged to be one of the most important American artists.
For the length of his professional career, from the early 1870s until his health began to fail some 40 years later, Eakins worked exactingly from life, choosing as his subject the people of his hometown of Philadelphia. He painted several hundred portraits, usually of friends, family members, or prominent people in the arts, sciences, medicine, and clergy.
In addition, Eakins produced a number of large paintings that brought the portrait out of the drawing room and into the offices, streets, parks, rivers, arenas, and surgical amphitheaters of his city. These active outdoor venues allowed him to paint the subject that most inspired him: the nude or lightly clad figure in motion. In the process, he could model the forms of the body in full sunlight, and create images of deep space utilizing his studies in perspective. Eakins also took a keen interest in the new technologies of motion photography, a field in which he is now seen as an innovator.
Eakins was a controversial figure whose work received little by way of official recognition during his lifetime. Since his death, he has been celebrated by American art historians as "the strongest, most profound realist in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American art" More on Thomas Cowperthwait
V. Tony Hauser
The Last Supper of Hiawatha, c. 1994
Contact platinum print
7 x 17.5 in; Mat: 20 x 32 in
Private collection
V. Tony Hauser is renowned as one of Canada’s leading portrait photographers. His distinctive portraits demonstrate his innate ability to communicate with people. He strives to reveal each sitter’s essence and energy with his camera. His unique approach to the photographic portrait results in images that illustrate a vision and talent that have earned Hauser an international reputation.
Although he is often required to create colour images for modern applications such as corporate websites and business publications, he has honed his craft as a specialist in black and white printing techniques. His silver and platinum photographs are included in permanent collections of the National Archives of Canada, the Portrait Gallery of Canada, the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, the Stratford Festival, and numerous board rooms and private collections around the world.
His work has been celebrated in publications as diverse as American Photographer, View Camera, England’s Photography Magazine and Hong Kong’s Photo Pictorial, as well as Maclean’s and Dance Connection magazines in Canada.
More on V. Tony Hauser
Albert Bierstadt
Departure of Hiawatha, ca. 1868
Oil on paper
26 cm x 31.7 cm
Private collection
This painting was presented to Longfellow by Albert Bierstadt at a dinner at the Langham Hotel in London that Bierstadt hosted in Longfellow's honor on July 9, 1868.
Albert Bierstadt (January 7, 1830 – February 18, 1902) was a German-American painter best known for his lavish, sweeping landscapes of the American West. He joined several journeys of the Westward Expansion to paint the scenes. He was not the first artist to record the sites, but he was the foremost painter of them for the remainder of the 19th century.
Bierstadt was born in Prussia, but his family moved to the United States when he was one year old. He returned to study painting for several years in Düsseldorf. He became part of the second generation of the Hudson River School in New York, an informal group of like-minded painters who started painting along the Hudson River. Their style was based on carefully detailed paintings with romantic, almost glowing lighting, sometimes called luminism. Bierstadt was an important interpreter of the western landscape, and he is also grouped with the Rocky Mountain School. More on Albert Bierstadt
