On Wednesday, January 17, 2018 I will be delivering a talk on soldier-artist Seth Eastman in The press release is attached below. The US Capitol Historical Society has informed me that C-Span may be recording the event. Please forward this to anyone whom you think might wish to attend. Should you be able to attend, I will be delighted to see you there.
Seth Eastman. 1866
Seth Eastman (b. Brunswick, Maine 1808, d. Washington DC, 1875) was a soldier-artist who taught drawing at West Point, as the assistant to three drawing-masters; Thomas Gimbrede, Charles Robert Leslie and Robert Walter Weir. Eastman was elected an associate member of the National Academy of Design, gaining renown as the “Pictorial Historian of the Indian” during the 1850s, for his collaboration with Henry Rowe Schoolcraft on a monumental archaeological and ethnographic study of indigenous peoples. At the end of his life he produced seventeen canvases representing the Principal Fortifications of the United States, for the House of Representatives. Today owned jointly by the House and Senate art-collections, the paintings hang in a restricted-access office corridor at the U.S. Capitol building. Much scholarship has been devoted to Eastman’s work dealing with Native Americans, but not his final works. I became interested in Eastman during the 1990s, when my paintings were focused on endangered Civil War battlefields, as metaphors for how American landscapes are created through a process of conflict and compromise.
Fort Knox. Prospect, Maine. 1870-1875
Looking North from Knox’s Battery, West Point. 1870-1875
Ballplay of the Dakotas. Amon Carter Museum. Fort Worth, Texas
https://uschs.org/lectures/january-brown-bag-lecture/