Hiawatha (painting)
| Hiawatha | |
|---|---|
| Artist | Thomas Eakins |
| Year | 1874 |
| Medium | Oil on canvas |
| Movement | Romantic |
| Location | Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden |
Hiawatha is an 1874 oil-on-canvas painting by Thomas Eakins. It depicts the Native American leader Hiawatha in an impressionistic style, one of the only non-Realist paintings Eakins ever completed.[1] It was inspired by Longfellow's 1855 epic poem The Song of Hiawatha.
The oil-on-canvas version shown here was a study for a larger watercolor piece that was ultimately accidentally destroyed in the 1940s.[2][3]
Description
The painting depicts a scene from the Longfellow's epic poem, Hiawatha's Fasting (Canto V), where the leader fasts and prays for a solution to end the starvation of his people.[3]
Hiawatha, an Ojibwa Native American leader, can be seen standing in silhouette in front of a corn field. Various animal-shaped clouds can be seen in the sunset: a bear, buffalo, antelope, and turkey.[4]
Analysis
On the original watercolor painting, Eakins said:[2]
It got so poetic at last that when Maggie would see it she would make as if it turned her stomach. I got so sick of it myself soon that I gave it up. I guess maybe my hair was getting too long for on having it cropped again I could not have been induced to finish it.
Eakins eventually began to loathe his Hiawatha paintings.[5]
References
- ^ Parry, Ellwood C.; Chamberlin-Hellman, Maria (1973). "Thomas Eakins as an Illustrator, 1878-1881". American Art Journal. 5 (1): 20–45. doi:10.2307/1593941. ISSN 0002-7359.
- ^ a b Simpson, Marc. "Thomas Eakins and His Arcadian Works." Smithsonian Studies in American Art 1.2 (1987): 71-95.
- ^ a b Reason, Akela (2010-04-29). Thomas Eakins and the Uses of History. University of Pennsylvania Press. ISBN 978-0-8122-4198-3.
- ^ McHenry, Margaret (1946). Thomas Eakins, who painted.
- ^ Nickerson, Cynthia D. (1984). "Artistic Interpretations of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "The Song of Hiawatha," 1855-1900". American Art Journal. 16 (3): 49–77. doi:10.2307/1594394. ISSN 0002-7359.