The Materiality of Flesh: Technical Study of Henry Inman’s Portraits of Native American Chiefs.

This study is the result of the ongoing technical research and conservation project of eight portraits of Native American leaders, by the artist Henry Inman (1801-1846) held by The Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University (Cambridge, MA). These portraits are copies painted by Inman around 1830, before the originals were destroyed during the great fire of the Smithsonian Castle in 1865. The destroyed paintings, by Charles Bird King (1785-1862), constituted part of a gallery made to honor the memory of the delegations that visited Washington DC from 1820 to 1830. The Inman copies served as models for the lithographed portraits which were included in the most important anthropological publication of the century, the 3-volume set History of the Indian Tribes of North America (1836-44) by McKenney and Hall.

The project seeks to understand the technique developed by Inman to paint flesh tones of Native Americans in comparison with his own work when depicting Anglo-American sitters. The technical choices of the palette and application of color, correspond to the development of a code created by European formed artists. This technique depicts the understanding of individuals that belonged to a culture that was believed to be fading away. The present technical research is carried out and studied in correspondence with technical contemporary treatises addressing the same matter. The technical examination was done using a variety of methods such as IRR, XR and paint samples to reconstruct the artist’s working method and intention.