[CHIPPEWA CHIEF PEECHEKIR, ALSO CALLED BUFFALO: A HEAD STUDY BY CHARLES BIRD KING FOR A PAINTING LATER PUBLISHED IN McKENNEY AND HALL'S History of the Indian Tribes of North America]

by King, Charles Bird:

Price: $28,000.00
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[Washington, D.C. ca. 1830].. Black and white chalk with charcoal on gray/green paper, 10 1/4 x 6 3/8 inches. Unsigned. A beautiful image in fine condition. Peechekir (also called Peechekor and Buffalo) was "a solid, straight formed Indian," Col. Thomas McKenney recalled many years after meeting the Chippewa chief at a treaty ceremony in Michigan Territory circa 1825-27. This sketch is one of only sixteen known King studies of Indian heads. It was discovered in 1974 among family papers by Bayard Leroy King of Saunderston, Rhode Island, a descendant of Edward King, the artist's second cousin. The study is illustrated in Cosentino's THE PAINTINGS OF CHARLES BIRD KING, and in Viola's INDIAN LEGACY OF CHARLES BIRD KING. According to Horan, King copied this head from a James Otto Lewis painting, but no such picture survives, and the idea is highly unlikely given the extreme difference in the artists' styles. Had it existed, that Lewis painting would probably have been lost, as were many Lewis paintings and the King oil of Peechekir, in the 1865 Smithsonian fire. Leonard Viola believes this drawing is a life study by King. The McKenney and Hall HISTORY OF THE INDIAN TRIBES OF NORTH AMERICA print of Peechekir is clearly based on this sketch, and it may well have been sketched specifically for the McKenney and Hall. To that point, a large area on the reverse of the drawing is covered with charcoal, creating a "carbon" type paper which allowed the drawing to be traced over, the traced lines transferring the charcoal onto another surface such as a piece of paper or printing plate. A few blind incised lines are visible in raking light on the front and back of the drawing. Charles Bird King (1785-1862) was born in Newport, Rhode Island. He trained in London under Benjamin West. He eventually settled in Washington, D.C. in 1819, calculating it was a good base for one who sought to earn a living mainly by portraiture. He was thus in the right place when Commissioner of Indian Affairs Thomas L. McKenney decided to add portraits of leading Indian chiefs to the collection of artifacts he had begun when he became superintendent of Indian trade in 1816. McKenney conceived the idea of an Indian portrait gallery at the time of the visit of a large delegation of Indians from the Upper Missouri to Washington in 1821-22. King was commissioned to execute the portraits. An exceptionally handsome likeness of a Chippewa chief, sketched by one of the most famous and important, avidly collected portrait-makers of 19th-century American Indians, this study is one of the last fine Indian portraits by Charles Bird King still to be found in the art market. James D. Horan, THE McKENNEY-HALL PORTRAIT GALLERY OF AMERICAN INDIANS (New York: Crown, 1972), pp.206-7. Andrew F. Cosentino, THE PAINTINGS OF CHARLES BIRD KING - 1785-1862 (City of Washington: National Collection of Fine Arts & Smithsonian Institution Press, 1977), pp.203- 4, cat. nos. 409, 641. Herman J. Viola, THE INDIAN LEGACY OF CHARLES BIRD KING (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian, 1976), p.128.

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