Elbridge Ayer Burbank was a well-known Chicago portrait artist when he stepped off a train in Fort Sill, Okla., on a mission to paint the legendary Apache rebel Geronimo in 1897.
At 38, he was also a city slicker and a tenderfoot. “The first night I was here I locked my door,” he wrote to his rich uncle. That made him the laughingstock of the sprawling outpost, as it was “the first door that has been locked here in 20 years.”
From that timorous start, Burbank would devote his life to painting portraits of Indians, turning his back on a lucrative living depicting high-society Chicagoans. Over the next 13 years he built an exquisite chronicle of turn-of-the-century Native Americans, with hundreds of paintings and thousands of drawings.
His work, now all but forgotten, goes on display Saturday at Newberry Library in the first major Burbank exhibit since the 1920s.
Burbank’s painstakingly detailed attention to face paint, clothing, feathers and beadwork makes his works valued ethnographic records. But he also seems to tap into his subjects’ inner lives, their eyes mirroring moods of anger, hurt, pride or fear.
“These are very, very strong paintings,” said Melissa Wolfe, associate curator Columbus Museum of Art in Columbus, Ohio, of the trove of Burbank Indian artwork now scattered among museums and private collections.
The Newberry show features dozens of Burbank’s portraits of great leaders and warriors as well as ordinary Indians.
Works show emotions
The perceptive quality of his work is testimony to the trust and respect his subjects had for him. He eventually counted friends among the Apache, Kiowa, Comanche, Sioux, Crow, Nez Perce, Ute, Pueblo, Zuni, Navajo, Hopi and dozens of other tribes. The great Chief Joseph was so fond of the artist that he would personally ride 50 miles on his buckboard to pick up and deposit Burbank at the nearest train station.
Dogged throughout his long life by manic depression, Burbank was on a high during his first weeks in Oklahoma. He could hardly contain his excitement when he wrote to his uncle about meeting Geronimo hours after arriving at the fort:
“I saw him way off in the distance and waited for him pretty soon he came on horseback (he can ride real fine) when he came up to me I said How do you do Chief Geronimo. He looked at me in a surprised way and held out his hand and we shook hands.”
Exiled to the fort as a security measure, Geronimo quickly demanded a higher fee for posing than Burbank had planned to pay.
“Geronimo is a rather mean man,” Burbank soon was reporting to his uncle. “His acquaintance doesn’t wear very well. … He has a very ugly look [and] he is so terribly greedy.”
Over the years the artist painted Geronimo many times, furious because the Apache always upped his sitting fees.
Friendships forged
But Burbank came to love visiting Geronimo’s house, which the old warrior kept so immaculate that, Burbank said, he kept “the cat whiskers clipped close all the time.” For his part, Geronimo made bows and arrows for the artist and would call in friends to critique each new portrait.
In his first stint at Fort Sill, Burbank offered $2 a day to Indians–$2.50 for Geronimo–to sit for him as he painted. Some gladly took it, but some had to be cajoled.
Two Kiowa girls, Gi-aum-e Hon-o-me-tah and Ton-hadle-i-c-o, proved particularly reluctant models.
“They didn’t want to sit anymore,” he complained to his uncle after the girls disappeared one day. “I went after them and they came at noon and said we sit no more, tired of sitting.”
After Burbank complained to the fort commander, who complained to the girls’ fathers, they complied. “Now they sit fine, but how they hate it,” he wrote. “They sing Indian songs most all the time.”
Eventually the girls, who knew English, translated the words for the artist. Burbank was thoroughly charmed when he found the songs were about Jesus.
“I never painted a more beautiful picture in my life,” Burbank wrote of his finished portrait of Gi-aum-e Hon-o-me-tah. Indeed, the girls were so impressed by the portraits that they became lifelong friends of the artist.
Several years ago, when Wolfe took a curator job at the Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, Ohio, she ran across 118 Burbank portraits at that museum.
“I had never heard of him, and I remember thinking, `Wow, who is this guy?’ I wanted to know, because he seemed to reveal a personality and psychology in his best portraits,” Wolfe said.
As she learned more about Burbank and his western adventures, she decided to mount a show, drawing his work from museum and private collections. On tour for two years, the show’s arrival at the Newberry is a kind of homecoming for Burbank, as he knew the library well, and it has the biggest holding of his original work.
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Born in 1858 in Harvard and trained in Chicago, Wales and Germany, Burbank had the requisite talent and reputation to make a good living from painting Chicago’s elite families, but bouts of depression made the work difficult.
He had an immensely wealthy and understanding patron, however, in his lumber baron uncle, Edward Ayer, first president of the Field Museum and a founding board member of the Newberry Library.
Enlightened and civic-minded, Ayer was probably the nation’s most avid private collector of American Indian artifacts. Because of that interest, Ayer commissioned his talented but troubled nephew to paint Geronimo.
Historical moment
Burbank began painting Indians at a crucial and painful moment in their history. The last wars had only recently been fought, and as vanquished people they were still angry and stunned by the loss of their world, yearning for the past and afraid of the future.
The artist was convinced that Indians would soon be assimilated into white society, leaving no trace of their heritage. He proposed to his uncle that he paint people from every tribe before then, stocking Ayer’s collection with artifacts as well.
What the two men did was not unusual. It was the era of “salvage ethnography,” when anthropologists amassed artifacts and information thinking it would otherwise disappear.
Burbank became increasingly obsessed with the West, sometimes not communicating with home for months at a time. It cost him two marriages.
In 1917, he went into such a severe tailspin that he entered a California mental hospital and remained there for 17 years. During that time his rich patron, Uncle Ed, died.
Once out of the hospital, Burbank painted and sold landscapes to tourists in San Francisco. In 1949, at age 91, he was fatally hit by a cable car as he stopped in the street to wave to a friend.