Henry Inman

Henry Inman started his artistic career at a young age when he moved from his birthplace in Utica, New York, to New York City in 1812. There he began a seven-year-long apprenticeship with the portrait painter John Wesley Jarvis. Inman began working as a portrait painter on his own in 1822 and was immediately successful. He was a founding member of the National Academy of Design in 1826, where he served as vice president twice and exhibited every year until his death. In the early 1830s Thomas McKenney commissioned him to copy portraits of Native Americans made by Charles Bird King and James Otto Lewis. The approximately 100 copies that he completed were subsequently used to create lithographs for Thomas McKenney and James Hall’s three-volume History of the Indian Tribes of North America (1836–1844). Inman spent the remainder of his life in New York, with the exception of a brief trip to England in 1844.