Representations of Native Americans have always played an important role in defining the popular conception of them, which has itself been a factor in shaping public policy. In this beautifully illustrated and stimulating short study, William Truettner's aim is to show a shift in the style of the many paintings of individual Indians which were produced during the course of his chosen period. He wants in addition to demonstrate the underlying motives behind the many portraits, and to show how, while in some ways reflecting a desire to make connections and even establish a commonality between the races, they were also, in their different ways, an exercise in diplomatic and cultural or ideological power, on the part of the white producers and patrons.

Truettner focusses on what he calls two “campaigns” of painting Indians. The first stems from the political encounters with Indian leaders who were powerful enough to be treated with full diplomatic courtesies. Having their portrait painted in London or Washington was an expression of their importance, but also, when combined with the grand tour of the city organized in order to impress them, it was an expression of white power to contain and represent them. Truettner focusses on the Iroquois confederacy, and particularly the prevalence of images of the Mohawk warrior. Looking at the work of Benjamin West, and versions of Joseph Brant by Gilbert Stuart and others, he shows the prevalence of the idea of the noble savage. This involved a coalescence of Enlightenment ideals which stressed both the potential nobility of Indians and their similarities with European nobility. Truettner is interesting on the significance of the mixture of European and Native American dress in many colonial paintings, suggesting that this cultural cross-dressing was to be seen as a demonstration of the similarities between races and the Indian capacity for change, rather than, as it would later be used, as a sign of dangerous hybridity and a degrading fall from purity.

The second “campaign” focussed on tribes further west, and on the Upper Missouri Indians, such as the Osage, Blackfoot and Mandan. Truettner sees in this second set of paintings more emphasis on ethnographic accuracy. His name for the this group is “Republican Indians,” as opposed to the “Noble Savages” of the first campaign, and this seems at first rather odd, given the continuation of the earlier practices and style under Jefferson, and even later, until we realize that by Republican Truettner really means Western, and that he is interested in those portraits and paintings which stress difference and the incapacity to survive in a changing and modernizing America. The contrast is also, then, between paintings produced in studios in the East and those painted in the West, or resulting from field trips – exemplified by George Catlin, Karl Bodmer and Alfred Jacob Miller. His readings of these later paintings brings out their connection with what was later called salvage ethnography, as well as the greater attention to Indian women, and when we compare the later pictures he has chosen with the earlier ones the differences are certainly clear. To this extent Truettner's broad contrast of noble savage and Republican Indian is illuminating, though a fuller account than this short book allows might test the limits and usefulness of his category of “Republican” Indians, and allow more attention to work less easy to categorize, like much of that of George Bird King, and the use of it by Thomas McKenney.