The Indian in His Solitude:N.C. Wyeth and the Eastern Woodland Indian

Erin Corrales-Diaz

In a short period between 1907 and 1909, the American illustrator N.C. Wyeth produced an enigmatic series of images of American Indians.  Disseminated in such influential mass-market publications as
Outing Magazine and Scribner’s, they defied the usual conventions of Indian images.  Instead of tomahawk-wielding braves, his were silent and pensive, and engaged in solitary activities in the wilderness.  
And instead of the Indians who had most recently been in the news, those of the Great Plains, he showed the long since vanquished Eastern Woodland Indian.  With these sympathetic portrayals, showing
man and nature bonded in spiritual reverie, the illustrator felt he had “found himself.” Nonetheless, scholarship has invariably ignored or downplayed these formative works of Wyeth’s early career.  This
paper will explore the genesis of these illustrations, Wyeth’s relationship to the tradition of American illustration, and expand into the social-historical perspective of turn-of-the-century Native American
representations. It will also suggest why he reverted to earlier and more derivative artistic convention in his later Last of the Mohicans (1919) and Deerslayer (1925).