John Mix Stanley
John Mix Stanley
1814 - 1872
American painter and photographer. He spent his youth in New York State, where, aged 14, he was apprenticed to a coach maker. In 1834 he moved to Detroit, MI, where he gained his first artistic experience, working as a sign painter. One year later he began to study art more seriously, enrolling as a pupil of the Philadelphia portrait painter James Bowman (1793–1842), with whom he opened a studio in Chicago in 1838. From 1839 he was an itinerant portrait painter, travelling from New York to Minnesota and working mostly in Wisconsin and Illinois. His first Indian portraits date from these years.
Throughout the 1840s Stanley accompanied many military expeditions as a documentary artist and photographer, travelling throughout the West, to the Dakotas, New Mexico, California and even Hawaii. In 1853 he visited Oregon and Washington, particularly the Columbus River area. It was at this time that he amassed the sketches and daguerreotypes that he later turned into his ‘Indian Portrait Gallery’, which successfully toured America during the 1850s and was eventually donated to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, in 1852 (mostly destr., 1865). Stanley returned to Detroit in 1864.
Stanley’s paintings are characterized by great naturalism and vigour, partly facilitated by his use of photographs. His scenes of Indians, such as Prairie Indian Encampment (c. 1870; Detroit, MI, Inst. A.), are full of intimacy and lack the selfconsciously dramatic quality often found in such renderings. He also painted panoramic landscape scenes, often with Indians in the foreground, for example Mountain Landscape with Indians (Detroit, MI, Inst. A.). [Leslie Heiner. " Stanley, John Mix." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed September 11, 2014, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T080992.]
Person TypeIndividual
Terms
