PORTFOLIO
134
portrait was commissioned by Governor Lewis
Cass of the Michigan Territory, who had negotiated
with Tenskwatawa to return from exile in
Canada to aid in the relocation of the Shawnee
people to northeastern Kansas. Cass sent the
portrait to Thomas McKenney, who had recently
been appointed superintendent of Indian Affairs
within the U.S. War Department, along with the
suggestion that Lewis be retained to create further
portraits of Native American leaders who
were passing through the Detroit region (fi g. 10).
McKenney saw the value of this and agreed.
In 1825, Cass asked Lewis to accompany him
to the treaty congress at Prairie du Chien in
what is now southwestern Wisconsin to make
visual records of the Native American leaders
who were to attend the meeting. He created
more than fi fty paintings and drawings of the
most prominent fi gures, despite the conditions
being adverse to the work of an artist. He later
refers to “The great and constantly recurring
disadvantages to which an artist is necessarily
subject, while travelling through a wilderness,
far removed from the abodes of civilization, and
in ‘pencilling by the way,’ with the rude materials
he may be enabled to pick up in the course
of his progress …”3
Early portraits of Native Americans
are not especially unfamiliar. The fascination
that Europeans and, later, Euro-Americans
found with the new continents was quickly refl
ected in artistic efforts to depict their indigenous
inhabitants, whether as a means of disseminating
notions of their savagery as a justifi cation
for conquest, an effort at documenting alien
and/or disappearing cultures, or as records of
all too frequently reversed political interactions.
The engravings of Theodor de Bry (1528–1598)
were widely distributed in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries and strongly infl uenced European
perceptions of the New World, despite the
fact that the artist himself had never been there.
However, many of his images were based on
FIG. 1 (above): Cover
page from J. O. Lewis, The
Aboriginal Port Folio, no. 1,
Philadelphia, May 1835.
Collection of the University of
Michigan.
paintings by artists who had, notably John White
(1540–1593) and Jacques le Moyne de Morgues
(c. 1533–1588), so these at least are not entirely
lacking in verisimilitude. The rapid westward
expansion of the United States in the nineteenth
century led to an increase in representation.
Names that remain familiar include Karl Bodmer
(1809–1893),1 George Catlin (1796–1872),
and Charles Bird King (1785–1862),2 the latter
in part because of his conspicuous participation
in the creation of images for the three-volume
History of the Indian Tribes of North America
produced by Thomas L. McKenney and James
Hall between 1836 and 1844.
One name that is perhaps less well remembered
is that of James Otto Lewis, an artist
who produced key documentary material that is
largely familiar today through the works of others.
Lewis was born in Philadelphia in 1799 as
one of eight children to German immigrant parents.
They relocated in 1815 to St. Louis, then
part of the Missouri Territory, and by the early
1820s Lewis was living in Detroit, the capital of
the Michigan Territory.
While in St. Louis, Lewis struck up an acquaintance
with portrait painter Chester Harding,
who would later become known for his
many images of U.S. presidents and other notables.
At the time, he was perhaps best known
for having been the only artist to have painted a
portrait of folk hero Daniel Boone from life. He
adapted this bust into a full-length portrait, now
lost, from which Lewis produced a crude stipple
engraving that was published in 1820 and widely
distributed.
Harding is known to have done portraits of
Native American subjects and Lewis apparently
followed suit in his own studio in Detroit.
His earliest known work of this kind was of
the Shawnee prophet Tenskwatawa (fi g. 9), the
younger brother of the Shawnee chief and war
leader Tecumseh. Both brothers were virulent
and infl uential anti-U.S. political fi gures. The
J. O. LEWIS & The Aboriginal Port Folio
By Jonathan Fogel