Not always drawn from life

HISTORY is the master narrative that the victors get to write, and often they get to draw the pictures as well. “Legacy and Legend: Images of Indians From Four Centuries,” a just-opened exhibition at the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens, drives home the point, highlighting visual depictions of Native Americans by Europeans who encountered (and imagined) them. As the shifting images show, as they came in contact with a people so unlike themselves, in so foreign a land, European explorers and settlers projected onto them their hopes, their fears and perhaps even a part of themselves.

Through some 220 prints, posters, photographs and books -- most from the Huntington’s own collection -- guest curator Kathryn Hight, an art historian, traces images of Indians from 16th and 17th century copper-plate engravings and limited-edition books to early 20th century photography, when that medium had became commonplace and was regarded as the baseline of truth. These “artists’ views reveal sincere but skewed impressions of Indian ways of life,” she writes in the introductory wall text.

Take the familiar tale of Pocahontas, who has two display cases in the Boone Gallery devoted to her story -- or, as it turns out, her legend. An engraving from John Smith’s 1624 book “Generall Historie of Virginia” shows Smith, a founder of Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in the New World, lying helplessly on the floor of a long, smoke-filled hut, watched over by flanking galleries of Powhatan Indians. Two warriors hover over him, their clubs held high and ready to dispatch him. A figure beside him extends a protective arm over his torso, while another, larger figure stands to the right as if arguing for his life. One of them is assumed to be Pocahontas, his rescuer. “At the minute of my execution,” his account runs, “she hazarded the beating out of her own brains to save mine; and not only that, but so prevailed with her father, that I was safely conducted to Jamestown.”

Smith is the only source of this story, says Hight, and “today nobody really believes this happened, but instead it might have been part of an adoption ritual which he didn’t understand.” Yet, the story of Pocahontas’ intervention was so compelling that it has been retold for centuries, and the exhibition includes several volumes of poetry and prose, as well as illustrations, spun about her in the 19th century.

One popular myth posited a romance between Smith and Pocahontas, a story central to such recent retellings as Disney’s 1995 animated “Pocahontas” and Terrence Malick’s much acclaimed 2005 feature “The New World.” But there was never evidence of such a relationship. Pocahontas, whose real name was Matoaka, was about 11 when she met Smith, and “Pocahontas,” her nickname, means “playful child.” As for the visual images of her, only one portrait was done in her lifetime. That engraving, included in the show, was made by Simon van de Passe in 1616, when she was visiting England and starchily dressed up like a Jacobean lady.

“Legacy and Legend” is timed to coincide with the 400th anniversary of the founding of Jamestown, and a more tightly focused companion show, “Jamestown at 400: Natives and Newcomers in Early Virginia,” opens July 7 at the West Hall of the Huntington Library.

Peter Mancall, co-curator with Robert C. Ritchie of the “Jamestown” show, describes Smith as “one of great fabulators of his time,” and it’s easy to understand why Smith exaggerated his exploits and dramatized his tale. But interests larger than personal bravado were at play. Commercial publishers were looking to sell rousing adventure and exotic images in the form of prints and books, says Hight, and the Virginia Company of London encouraged Europeans’ view of the New World as a kind of Eden, with the natives as innocents, living in harmony with nature and each other. This idealized notion helped attract settlers to their investment, even though, as the “Jamestown” exhibition makes clear, living conditions for the new arrivals were primitive in the extreme.

Hearsay and imagination

THE first section of “Legacy” focuses on this early period, with sepia maps and depictions of Indians living in villages, cooking over open fires, practicing agriculture, carrying weapons. One shows Indians wading in waist-high water, which would have been a curiosity to contemporary Europeans, who avoided immersion in water. (“John Smith must have smelled awful!” says Hight.) There was some truth to these illustrations, but details could be made up, as they were often based on a few drawings brought back from the Americas mixed with ample doses of hearsay and imagination. They’re also colored by the artists’ European training, as becomes apparent in engravings of Indians striking Baroque poses in generic landscapes.

Most of the exhibition is devoted to material from the 19th century, when interest in Native Americans had a resurgence precipitated by the Louisiana Purchase and the Lewis and Clark Expedition of 1804, which sparked the westward expansion. Advancements in printing techniques, especially in lithography, made it possible for this round of images to be widely disseminated. And these depictions also helped feed a push by poets and writers for a national myth, says Hight. “They were looking for a long history rooted in the land, and Indians were part of that.”

In the early half of the 1800s, four major portfolios featuring Indians’ portraits and their way of life were produced, and Henry Huntington, whose collection and estate are the basis of the museum and library, managed to acquire three of them. (The fourth, by George Catlin, a master of Western genre drawings and paintings was acquired in the 1950s.) A larger gallery of the Boone displays selections from all four portfolios -- some as original prints, some as enlarged reproductions -- as well as the books that accompanied them.

Among the most famous artists is Catlin, who sketched and painted Native Americans in their home territories. Since “Legacy” focuses on prints and photographs -- works that were seen by the masses -- Catlin is represented here by both hand-colored lithographs sold to collectors and seven smaller reiterations produced by Currier & Ives to be sold to the middle class. Catlin was another self-promoter, says Hight, and he exaggerated the amount of time he spent in the West, as well as what he had seen.

Hight has also drawn from portraits done when the Native Americans went East, including a set commissioned by the U.S. government of Indian leaders who visited Washington, D.C. Though the original paintings were lost in an 1865 fire, hand-tinted lithographic versions had been made, and 17 of these are included in the exhibition. These portraits show a variety of facial features and tribal garb -- Kee-She-Waa, a Fox warrior, wears a turban, and Push-Ma-Ta-Ha, a Chactan warrior, donned a European-style military uniform. And yet, by the end of the century, the Indians’ image had been homogenized, becoming identified with the feathered war bonnet and the beaded breastplate, as in the 1907 Edward S. Curtis photograph “High Hawk.”

Sometimes inflammatory

THE bulk of the images throughout “Legacy and Legend” are of men, Hight notes -- “portraits of men, men hunting, men doing things. It was generally assumed that the audience for these pictures would have been men, and they would be more interested in men and what they were doing,” she explains. This had the effect of undermining the importance of women in Native American culture, when some tribes were in fact matrilineal.

As westward expansion met resistance from the Indians whose lands and resources were being taken, darker imagery began to emerge. In a mid-19th century print, “Death Whoop,” artist Seth Eastman depicts an Indian scalping a cowboy. Hight calls it an “inflammatory image,” which was unfortunately reproduced on the title page of a series of books prepared for Congress. And, of course, there is a print of Custer’s last stand, showing Custer brave and stalwart with his handful of men as Lakotas and Cheyennes close in on them -- a scene now considered bogus. But such heroic moments were popular in saloons, and this poster-sized version, after a painting by Cassily Adams, was made in 1896 to advertise Budweiser beer.

By the early 20th century, many believed that Native Americans and their traditions were fast disappearing, and artists, sometimes doubling as ethnographers, rushed to record them. Photographers Curtis and Karl Moon were among them, and their beautifully lighted, elegantly composed portraits and scenes grace one gallery. Curtis ambitiously sought to capture every Indian culture he could find, and in a project that wound up taking three decades, he produced “The North American Indian” in 20 volumes. Henry Huntington began his subscription for the costly set in 1908, and in 1923 he purchased 293 photographs by Moon.

Today these photographs are frequently reproduced, much admired by some for their sublime artistry and much criticized by others for their romanticized aesthetics. Indeed, even these two respected photographers were faking it a little: Curtis took around his own trunkful of clothing and props for his subjects to use, and Moon staged scenes from the bygone past. Perhaps, after all, it’s the artist’s task to improve on reality.

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‘Legacy and Legend: Images of Indians From Four Centuries’

Where: The Huntington, 1151 Oxford Road, San Marino

When: 10:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Tuesdays through Sundays; through Sept. 2

Price: $15; free on the first Thursday of the month

Contact: (626) 405-2100, www.huntington.org