124 A PORTRAIT AND A SHIRT: Santiago Naranjo and FIG. 1 (above left): Henry C. Balink (1882– 1963), Santiago, August 1940. Oil on canvas. 30.5 x 35.6 cm. Ex Chester College of New England. Tucson Museum of Art, gift from the Howard and Marilyn Steele Collection, inv. 2015.1.21. Photo courtesy of Skinner, Boston. FIG. 2 (above): Agostino Donati (active c. 1900–1945), portrait of Santiago Naranjo, 1928. Hand-colored silver gelatin print. 11.4 x 16.5 cm. Private collection. Henry Balink The Skinner auction in Boston of American Indian and ethnographic arts of September 24, 2011, contained one lot that, specifi cally speaking, was neither American Indian nor Ethnographic. This was a small framed portrait of an elderly Native American man wearing a fringed hide shirt and, in the style of the Renaissance, labeled at the upper right with the artist’s signature and the upper left with “Santiago,” the name of the subject (fi g. 1). This simple painting is a window into a wealth of little remembered history that shifted the perception of Native Americans on the world stage. It also brings to light a rare and interesting artifact. Hendrikus Cornelius Balink was born in Amsterdam in 1882 and from 1909 to 1914 attended the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, where he received training in classical painting emphasizing the Barbizon style. Escaping WWI, he and his wife, Maria Wessing, moved to New York City, where he made a living copying works in the Metropolitan Museum for various European museums. They moved on to Chicago, where he did private portrait commissions and painted murals for the Art Institute of Chicago. A chance encounter with a travel poster for Taos, New Mexico, in a train station was to prove pivotal. He visited Taos fi rst in 1917 and then made several more trips to the Southwest before By Jonathan Fogel permanently relocating to Santa Fe in 1924. His exposure to the Taos art colony (with which he was to develop an uneasy relationship) and to the Southwest itself brightened his color palette. In 1927 he was commissioned by oil tycoon Ernest W. Marland to paint eight portraits of famous Native American leaders for the Indian Museum at the Ponca City Library. For this he was paid $2,000 in gold, roughly $100,000 in today’s currency. Realizing that painting Native American portraits was a profi table endeavor, Balink went on to specialize in it and during his prolifi c career painted portraits of representatives of some sixty-three tribes, as well as innumerable genre scenes of Native American and Southwestern life. He died in Santa Fe in 1963. The subject of this painting, “Santiago,” was Santiago Naranjo, a prominent fi gure in the political landscape of the New Mexico pueblos in the fi rst half of the twentieth century (fi g. 2). He was born around 1849 into the prominent Naranjo family of Santa Clara Pueblo. In an interview by the Honorable Frank Demolli, Santiago’s late grandson remembered him as a “walker,” meaning that he walked everywhere. He was well acquainted with the territory around Santa Clara and Santa Fe, where he became a wellknown fi gure, and his extensive knowledge of the local environment allowed him to serve as a guide OBJECT history
T84 EN Online
To see the actual publication please follow the link above