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Henry Inman
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| • Nationality: American |
| • Roles: Artist, Painter, Printmaker. |
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Henry Inman |
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Inman, one of the America's eminent portrait artists in the first half of the 19th C, was a founder of the National Academy of Design and its vice-president. An excellent engraver, Inman helped to establish the famous lithographic firm of Childs & Inman. Cephas G. Childs, a pioneering lithographer, had opened a small shop soon after Bass Lewis had published his famous landscape, generally recognized as America's first lithograph.
When Inman moved from New York to Philadelphia to assist Childs Thomas Mckenney and his wife were living in a Chestnut Street boarding-house. McKenney commissioned Henry Inman, the American artist, probably in the winter of 1832-33, to copy the Indian portraits which hung in his former office in the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Washington, D.C. The paintings were used as references for the creation of many of the lithographs in the History of the Indian Tribes of North America.
In 1836 to stimulate sales of the McKenney & Hall portfolio, Inman's portraits were placed on exhibition in Masonic Hall, Chestnut Street, a short distance from McKenney's boardinghouse. As McKenney wrote:
"Visitors to the Gallery will see on comparing the likeness of this Specimen No. with the portraits with what fidelity the portraits are lithographed. The portraits are by Inman, from the celebrated collection in the War Department in Washington, most of which were taken from life by Charles Bird King of that city."
In addition to copying the portraits, Inman evidently also assisted Childs with engraving the lithographs on stone. In conjunction with Childs he prepared what may have been the first plate, Shingaba W'Ossin, for Volume I.
The Inman portraits eventually came into the possession of a Boston firm in partial payment of a debt for paper contracted by McKenney's publishers. In 1882 they were presented to the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, by the heirs of Edmund P. Tileston and Amos Hollingsworth.
Bibliography:
- Catalog of the works of the late Henry Inman, an exhibition for the benefit of his widow, held at the Art-Union Rooms, 322 Broadway, New York City, 1846. The Boston Athenaeum Library, Boston.
- Catalogue of One Hundred and Seventeen Indian Portraits, Representing Eighteen Tribes, by Colonel Thomas L. McKenney and James Hall, Philadelphia, 1836. New York Library.
-McKenney-Hall Portrait Collection, Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Report, Peabody Museum, 1884, Vol. Ill, pp. 189, 199 (additions to the museum).
- Peters, Henry: America on Stone, New York, 1931.
Source:
Horan, James D: Mckenney-Hall Protrait Gallery of American Indians, Crown, New York, 1972.
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