Chapter XCVII: Section 4: Artistic Skill and Methods

Dr. Andree (_d_), in Das Zeichnen bei den Naturvölkern, makes the following remarks, translated with condensation:

The great ability of the Eskimo and their southern neighbors,
the natives of northwest America (Koliushes, Thlinkits, etc.), in
representative art is well known and needs no further insisting.
Among all primitive peoples they have made the greatest advances in
the conventionalization of figures, which indicates long practice
in painting. The totem figures, carved both in stone and in wood
and tattooed on the body, show severe conventionalization and have
perfect heraldic value. Ismailof, one of the earliest Russian
explorers that came in contact with the Koliushes, relates that
European paintings and drawings did not strike them with the least
awe. When a chief was shown portraits of the Russian imperial family
he manifested no astonishment. That chief was accompanied by his
painter, who examined everything very closely, in order to paint
it afterward. He was able in particular “to paint all manner of
objects on wooden tablets and other material (leather),” using blue
iron earth, iron ocher, colored clays, and other mineral colors.
Among these peoples, too, painting is employed as a substitute for
writing, in order to record memorable things.

Far below the artistic achievements of the Eskimo and of the
natives of the American northwest (Haida, Thlinkit, etc.) are those
of the redskins east of the Rocky mountains. They are, however,
very productive in figure drawing; nay, that art has advanced to a
kind of picture writing, which, it is true, is not distinguished by
artistic finish. That “fling” which, depending on good observation
of nature, appears in the drawings of Australians, Bushmen, etc.,
and the good characterization of the figures, are lacking among
the Indians; and though, as is frequently the case, their animals
are better represented than the men, yet they can not compare
with the animal figures of the Eskimo or Bushmen. Dr. Capitan,
who had drawings made by the Omahas shown in 1883 in the Jardin
d’acclimatation of Paris, says concerning them: “It is singular to
note that by the side of very rudimentary representations of human
figures the pictures of horses are drawn with a certain degree of
correctness. If the Indians take pains in anything it is in the
painting of their buffalo skins, which are often worn as mantles.
On red-brown ground are seen black figures, especially of animals;
on others, on white ground, the heroic deeds and life events of
distinguished Indians, represented in black or in other colors.
You see the wounded enemies, the loss of blood, the killed and the
captives, stolen horses, all executed in the peculiar manner of an
art of painting still in the stage of infancy, with earth colors
black, red, green, and yellow. Almost all the Missouri tribes
practice painting on buffalo skins; the most skillful are the
Pawnees, Mandans, Minitaris, and Crows. Among the Mandans, Wied met
individuals who possessed “a very decided talent” for drawing.”

The same author, in the same connection, reasserts the old statement that there is an established difference in artistic capacity between the so-called mound-builders and the present Indians, so great that it either shows a genetic difference between them or that the Indians had degenerated in that respect. This statement is denied by the Bureau of Ethnology, but the point to be now considered is whether it is true that the historic North American Indians are as low in artistic skill as is alleged.

The French traveler Crevaux, as quoted by Marcano (_g_), says that he had the happy idea of giving pencils to the Indians, in order to see whether they were capable of producing the same drawings. The young Yumi rapidly drew for him sketches of man, dog, tiger; in brief, of all the animals of the country. Another Indian reproduced all sorts of arabesques, which he was wont to paint with genipa. Crevaux saw that these savages, who are accused of being absolutely ignorant of the fine arts, all drew with extraordinary facility.

The same idea, i. e., of testing the artistic ability of Indians in several tribes, occurred to the present writer and to many other travelers, who generally have been surprised at the skill in free-hand drawing and painting exhibited. It would seem that the Indians had about the same faults and decidedly more talent than the average uninstructed persons of European descent who make similar attempts. An instance of special skill in portrait painting is given by Lossing (_a_), where a northern tribe in 1812 made a bark picture of Joseph Barron, a fugitive, to obtain his identification by sending copies of it to various tribes. The portrait given as an illustration in the work cited is very distinct and lifelike. This, however, was a special task prompted by foreign influence. While the Indians had no more knowledge of perspective than the Japanese, they were unable or indisposed to attempt the accurate imitation of separate natural objects in which the Japanese excel. Before European instruction or example they probably never produced a true picture. Some illustrations in the present work, which show a continuous series of men, animals, and other objects, are no more pictures than are the consecutive words of a printed sentence, both forms, indeed, being alike in the fact that their significance is expressed by the relation between the separate parts. The illustration which at a first glance seems to be most distinctively picturesque is Fig. 659, but it will be noticed that the personages are repeated, the scene changed, and the time proceeds, so that there is no view of specified objects at any one time and place.

Fig. 1254 shows two drawings from Kejimkoojik, N. S., reduced to one-fourth, each supposed to represent a moose, though possibly one of them is a caribou, and the mode of execution vividly suggests some of the examples of prehistoric art found in Europe and familiar by repeatedly published illustrations.

Fig. 1255 is the etching of a hand from the Kejimkoojik rocks, reduced one-half. Its peculiarity consists in the details by which the lines of the palm and markings on the balls of the thumb and fingers are shown. If this is the real object of the design it shows close observation, though it is not suggested that any connection with the pseudo-science of palmistry is to be inferred.

In connection with this drawing the following translated remarks in Verhandl. Berlin. Gesellsch. für Anthrop. (_d_), may be noted:

The frequency with which partial representations of the eye are
met with appeared to me so striking that I requested Mr. Jacobson
to ask the Bella Coola Indians whether they had any special idea
in employing the eye so frequently. To my great surprise the
person addressed pointed to the palmar surface of his finger tips
and to the fine lineaments which the skin there presents; in his
opinion a rounded or longitudinal field, such as appears between
the converging or parallel lines, also means an eye, and the reason
of this is that originally each part of the body terminated in an
organ of sense, particularly an eye, and was only afterward made to
retrovert into such rudimentary conditions.

GERMAN KNIGHTS AND APACHE WARRIORS.]

The lower character in Pl. LIII is copied from Rudolph Cronau (_c_) Geschichte der Solinger Klingenindustrie, where it is presented as an illustration of the knights of the thirteenth century, after a sketch in a MS. of the year 1220, in the library of the University of Leipsig.

The upper character in the same plate is a copy of a drawing made in 1884 by an Apache Indian at Anadarko, although the insignia of the riders are more like those used by the Cheyenne than those of the Apache. A striking similarity will be noticed in the motive of the two sketches of the mounted warriors and their steeds as well as in their decorations, from which in Europe the devices called heraldic were differentiated. Doubtless still better examples could be obtained to compare the degree of artistic skill attained by the several draftsmen, but these are used as genuine, convenient, and typical. See also the Mexican representation of horses and riders under the heading of meteors, Fig. 1224.

These horses are far less skillfully portrayed than they are by the Plains tribes, which may be explained by the fact that the Mexicans had not yet become familiar with the animal.

A story told by Catlin to the general effect that the Siouan stock of Indians did not understand the drawing of human faces in profile has been repeated in various forms. The last is by Popoff (_a_):

When Catlin was drawing the profile of a chief named Matochiga,
the Indians around him seemed greatly moved, and asked why he did
not draw the other half of the chief’s face. “Matochiga was never
ashamed to look a white man square in the face.” Matochiga had not
till then seemed offended at the matter, but one of the Indians said
to him sportively, “The Yankee knows that you are only half a man,
and he has only drawn half of your face because the other half is
not worth anything.”

Another variant of the story is that Catlin was accused of practicing magic, by which the half of the subject’s head should get into his power, and he was forced to stop his painting and flee for his life. The explorer and painter who tells the story is not considered to be altogether free from exaggeration, and he may have invented the tale to amuse his auditors in his lectures and afterwards his readers, or he may have been the victim of a practical joke by the Indians, who are fond of such banter, and the well-known superstitions about sorcerers gaining possession of anything attached to the person would have rendered their anger plausible. But certain it is that the people referred to, before and after and at the time of the visit of Catlin to them, were in the habit of drawing the human face in profile, and, indeed, much more frequently than the full or front face. This is abundantly proved by many pictures in existence at that time and place which have been seen by this writer, and a considerable number of them are copied in the present work. Thus much for one of the oft-cited fictions on which the allegation of the Indian’s stupidity in drawing has been founded.

Another false statement is copied over and over again by authors, to the effect that from a similar superstition the Indians are afraid to, and therefore do not, make delineations of the whole human figure. The present work shows their drawing of front, side, and rear views of the whole human figure, presenting as each view may allow, all the limbs and features. This, however, is rare, not from the fear charged, but because the artists directed their attention, not to iconography, but to ideography, seizing some special feature or characteristic for prominence and disregarding or intentionally omitting all that was unnecessary to their purpose.

On the other hand the Indians have sometimes been unduly praised for acumen in observation and for skill in their iconography. For instance, in the lectures of Mr. Edward Muybridge, explaining the highly interesting photographs of consecutive movements of animals from which he formulates the novel science of zoöpraxography, the lecturer attributes to the Indians a scientific and artistic method of drawing horses in motion which has excelled in that respect all the most famous painters and sculptors. But Mr. Muybridge bases his statement upon a small number of Indian drawings, apparently seen by him in Europe, the characteristics of which do not appear in the many drawings of horses in the possession of the present writer, a considerable number of which are published in this work. The position of the legs in the drawings praised is doubtless fortuitous. The Indian in his delineation of horses cared little more than to show an animal with the appropriate mane, tail, and hoofs, and the legs were extended without the slightest regard to natural motion. The drawing of the Indians closely resembles the masterly abstractions of the living forms devised by the early heraldic painters which later were corrupted by an attempt to compromise with zoölogy, resulting in a clumsy naturalism if not caricature.

A comparison of artistic rather than of pictographic skill may frequently be made, for instance the art of the Haida in carving, which shows remarkable similarity to that in Central and South America, and made public by Habel, op. cit., and H. H. Bancroft (_i_).

The style of drawing is strongly influenced by the material on which it is made. This topic must receive some consideration here, though too extensive for full treatment. The substances on which and the instruments by which pictographs are made in America are discussed in Chaps. VII and VIII of this work, and the remarks and illustrations there presented apply generally to other forms of drawing and painting. Examples of drawing on every kind of material known to the American aborigines appear in this work. Carving, pecking, and scratching of various kinds of rock are illustrated, also paintings on skins and on wood. The Innuit carving on walrus ivory, of which numerous illustrations are furnished, is notable for its minuteness as well as distinctness. The substance was precious, the working surface limited, and the workmanship required time and care. Birch bark, common in the whole of the northern Algonquian region, was an attractive material. It was used much more freely and was worked more easily than walrus ivory, and in two modes, one in which outlines are drawn by any hard-pointed substance on the inner side of the bark when it is soft and which remain permanent when dry, the other made by scraping on the rough outer surface, thus producing a difference in color. Many examples of the first-mentioned method are shown throughout this work, and of the latter in Pl. XVI and Fig. 659. Having before them this large collection of varied illustrations readers can judge for themselves of the effect of the material in determining the style among people who had substantially the same concepts.

It is universally admitted that the material used, whether papyrus or parchment, stone or wood, palm leaves or metal, wax or clay, and the appropriate instruments, hammer, knife, graver, brush or pen, decided the special style of incipient artists throughout the world. The Chinese at first worked with knives on bamboo and stone, and even after they had obtained paper, ink, and fine hair pencils, the influence of the old method continued. The cuneiform characters are due to the shape of the wooden style used to impress the figures on unbaked clay. It may generally be remarked that in materials having a decided “grain,” of which bamboo is the most obvious instance, the early stage of art with its rude implements was forced to work in lines running with the grain.

Dr. Andree (_e_) gives the illustration presented here as Fig. 1256 with these remarks:

The advances made by the Kanakas of New Caledonia in drawing are
illustrated by the bamboo staves covered with engraved drawings,
which they carry about as objects of fashion, somewhat as we do
our walking sticks, and a number of which are preserved in the
ethnographic museum of Paris (Trocadero). They have been described
by E. T. Hamy. In these finely incised drawings ornaments of the
simplest kind (straight lines and zigzag models) are combined
with figures and tree groups. The artistic execution is a rather
primitive one, yet the figures by no means lack character and
vividness. There are seen on the bamboo the pointed-roofed huts of
the chieftains, turtles, fowl, lizards, and between them scenes from
the life of the Kanakas. A man beats his wife, men discharge their
bows, others stand idle in rank and file, adorned with the cylindric
straw hat described by Cook, which at this day has almost entirely
disappeared.

The explanation of many peculiar forms of Indian drawing and painting is to be found in the stage of mythologic sophiology reached by the several tribes. For instance, Mr. W. H. Holmes, op. cit., discovered that in Chiriqui all the decorations originated in life forms of animals, none being vegetal and none clearly expressive of the human figure or attempting the portrayal of physiognomy. This peculiarity doubtless arose from the exclusively zoomorphic character of the religion of the people. Other mythologic concepts have given a special trend to the art of other tribes and peoples. This results in conventionalism. The sculptures of Persia chiefly express the power and glory of the God-King, and the Egyptian statues are canonical idealizations of an abstract human being, type of the race. It is to be noticed that Indians also show conservatism and conventionalization in their ordinary pictures. Within what may be called a tribal, or more properly stock, system, every Indian draws in precisely the same manner. The figures of a man, of a horse, and of every other object delineated are made by everyone who attempts to make any such figure, with seeming desire for all the identity of which their mechanical skill is capable, thus showing their conception and motive to be the same. In this respect the drawing of the Indians may be likened to that of boys at a public school, who are always drawing, and drawing the same objects and with constant repetition of the same errors from one school generation to another.

In discussing artistic skill only in its relation to picture-writing the degree of its excellence is not intrinsically important, though it may be so for comparison and identification. The figures required were the simplest. Among these were vertical and horizontal straight lines and their combinations, circles, squares, triangles, a hand, a foot, an ax or a bow, a boat or a sledge. Both natural and artificial objects were drawn by a few strokes without elaboration. The fewer the marks the more convenient was the pictograph, if it fulfilled its object of being recognized by the reader. The simple fact without esthetic effect was all that the pictographic artists wanted to show, and when an animal was represented it was not by imitation of its whole form, but by emphasis of some characteristic which must be made obvious, even if it distorted the figure or group and violated every principle of art as now developed.