John Mix Stanley

born Canandaigua, New York, 1814; died Detroit, Michigan, 1872

BiographyJohn Mix Stanley was born in Canandaigua, New York. He moved to Detroit in 1834 and began studying art under James Bowman, with whom he eventually partnered in a portrait-painting venture that took him to Baltimore. There he saw George Catlin’s Indian Gallery in 1837. Stanley made trips west to Oklahoma in 1842 and Texas in 1843. He was appointed draftsman to Colonel Stephen Watts Kearny’s Army of the West in 1846 and traveled with them from Santa Fe to San Diego. Stanley worked in California, Oregon, and Washington in 1847 and 1848 and then sailed to Hawaii in 1849. Although he painted a wide range of subjects, Stanley is most famous for his Native American portraits, exhibiting 153 portraits as Stanley’s Indian Gallery in New York in 1850. After serving as chief artist for the Pacific Railway Survey led by Isaac Stevens, Stanley lived in Washington DC for 10 years, painting portraits of Native Americans as they passed though the capital. The artist’s collection of Native American portraits was on loan to the Smithsonian when it caught fire in 1865 and much of his work was destroyed. More of his collection was destroyed in a subsequent fire at P.T. Barnum’s American Museum in New York. By the time of his death in 1872, only 225 of his artworks are known to have survived.

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