Portrait of Charles Bird King

Just a few words of acknowledgment about 19th century painter Charles Bird King (1785-1862).

I first became aware of King through repeated visits to the Redwood Library and Athenaeum in Newport, Rhode Island. My initial interest in the artist was stoked by curiosity as to whether he was a relative (Bird and King are both names in my family tree). I can’t remember what conclusion I came to, but I remained interested in the painter, who studied under Benjamin West in London and is known for overtly emulating the techniques of 17th century Dutch painters.

“…in that region”, it should be clarified

The artist’s father Zebulon King served as a captain during the Revolutionary War. He was from Bristol County, Mass., just over the Rhode Island border. The Birds, his wife’s family, were Newport people. Charles was born in that town, but Zebulon moved his family to the Ohio frontier in his infancy. The child was four when Zebulon was murdered by local Native Americans in 1789. Which seems significant in light of the fact that King would later be known for his portraits of Native American leaders. His widowed mother returned with young Charles to Newport, where he spent his remaining childhood.

After art study in New York and London, King returned to the States as the War of 1812 was raging. He made his career in Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Richmond before settling in Washington, D.C. His famous subjects included John Quincy Adams and members of his family, James Monroe, Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, and John C. Calhoun, et al. He was friends with Thomas Sully, which takes us a little closer to our accustomed beat of the theatre.

Like George Catlin and George Cooke, King is also known for the great number of paintings and lithographs he did of Native Americans, especially tribal leaders. Many are part of a three volume History of the Indian Tribes of North America, which was published between 1836 and 1844. He depicted leaders among the Seneca, Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Ojibwa, Pawnee, and others, who sat for him during their diplomatic visits to Washington. (No doubt his father’s fate gave him pause in terms of personally travelling out west as some artists did).

Today, some criticize the idealized nature of King’s portraiture of these figures, making the work perhaps less useful from a historical or anthropological perspective. The aim, after all, was to capture peoples and cultures who were endangered. Practical photography was still a few years off. But this was also the era of Cooper and Longfellow, an age of Romanticism, and there are other objectives in portraiture besides “accuracy”. Traditionally, diplomacy has always been one of those aims, for example. Artists, then and now, tend to want to make their subjects look good, principally because the subjects want it. By the time of King’s death in 1862, both photography and the Civil War were in full swing, followed by those last major actions in the Plains Indian Wars. We were on to another phase of history entirely.

When Charles Bird King passed, the Redwood Library inherited his works, though other institutions like the Smithsonian, the White House, and many others continue to exhibit them.