In 1822, Charles Bird King became one of the earliest artists to paint American Indians when Thomas McKenney, U.S. superintendent of Indian affairs, decided to create a collection of portraits of prominent Indians who visited Washington, D.C., and engaged King to paint them.

King, a wealthy bachelor living in Washington, had broken with a long family tradition by becoming an artist rather than a soldier. Born in Newport, Rhode Island, he displayed artistic talent while still a child and, with his family’s encouragement, went to New York City when he was fifteen years old to begin formal art instruction. Five years later, he traveled to London to study with Benjamin West (1738-1820), the prominent American portraitist and history painter who was court painter to King George III and a founder of the Royal Academy.

King remained in England for seven years, returning to America only after the War of 1812 against the British began. Back in the United States, but before settling in Washington, he became an itinerant portrait painter, traveling back and forth from Philadelphia to Baltimore and Richmond, Virginia, to paint prominent citizens.

King completed more than one hundred portraits of Indians for McKenney, including leaders from at least twenty tribes who met with one another and representatives of the government in Washington during the 1820s and 1830s.

King painted the portrait of Petalesharro (Generous Chief) during the Pawnee chief’s visit to Washington in the winter of 1821-1822. He had traveled with a small delegation of Pawnees to meet President James Monroe, as well as members of Congress and the Supreme Court. The artist depicted the young chief wearing a Monroe peace medal, a buffalo skin robe, and a headdress of eagle feathers and ermine.

On New Year’s Day, 1822, Petalesharro and members of his group performed a war dance at the White House, which was attended by more than 6,000 spectators. The handsome Indian was so popular with Easterners that a New York newspaper published an eleven-stanza poem titled “The Pawnee Brave” recounting his daring acts of bravery. It was Petalesharro’s popularity that inspired McKenney to establish the Indian Portrait Gallery.

King first painted Keokuk, chief of the Sauk and Fox Nation, admired for his skill as an orator and diplomat, when he traveled to Washington, D.C. in 1824 to surrender his tribe’s claims to land located in northern Missouri. The second portrait, from which the lithograph in the Gund collection was copied, was painted in 1837 when Keokuk and his entourage returned to Washington to meet with delegates from other tribes, purportedly to settle boundary disputes but, in effect, to cede yet more land to the United States government. As portrayed in this portrait, Keokuk’s nine-year-old son, Mee-sair-want, sat between his father’s legs during sessions of the intertribal congress. King was paid $150 for the portrait, the most he received for any government commission.

When King painted Mistippee, in 1826, the Creek youth already was an expert with a blowgun, a popular hunting weapon made of a long hollow reed through which hunters shot barbed arrows. In one account, McKenney claimed that the blowgun shot arrows with the speed and accuracy of a rifle ball.

A Chippeway Widow was first painted by James Otto Lewis in 1826, during U.S. treaty negotiations with the Chippewa tribe at Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. King’s copy of Lewis’s rendition was not of an individual, according to McKenney, but was “intended to represent a singular custom” in which a widow would wrap her deceased husband’s belongings into a bundle and carry it with her for a year after his death. According to McKenney, “she calls it her husband . . . and would be considered as . . . treating his memory with disrespect, if she was to part with it even for a moment.”

Wa-Em-Boesh-Kaa arrived at the 1826 treaty negotiations at Fond du Lac wearing a kingly “crown” made of glossy drake and woodpecker feathers. According to an Indian superintendent who was there, the Chippewa chief was the only one present “who seemed to have a right conception of the kingly crown.” He was not an important chief, nor was he a gifted orator or statesman, but his dramatic flair set him apart from the others and caught McKenney’s eye. King painted this portrait from a work by Lewis.

Most of King’s original Indian portraits were lost in a fire that destroyed the art gallery in the Smithsonian Institution’s “castle” in January 1865, three years after his death. Fortunately, Thomas McKenney and James Hall had reproduced nearly all of them as large, full-color lithographs in their three-volume classic History of the Indian Tribes of North America. King also had painted replicas of a number of his most successful portraits for himself and private collectors; they, too, survived.