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 [American Indians]
[INDIAN WARRIOR, THOUGHT TO BE A MEMBER OF THE LEAGUE OF THE IROQUOIS]
[ca. 1790 or later]. Oil on thick wood panel, 16 x 13 3/4 inches. Unsigned. In excellent displayable condition, recently conserved. In a modern carved and decorated gold-patinated exhibition frame.
An impressive bust portrait, probably painted late in the 18th century, of a young Indian warrior, believed to be a member of one of the confederation of woodland tribes of the American northeast and lower southeastern Canada known as the League of the Iroquois, or Iroquois Confederacy. His costume is consistent with that worn by the Five Nations that formed the confederation: the Mohawk, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, and Seneca tribes. The warrior wears two feathers in his closely cropped hair, a looped string of small multicolored beads in his ear, a choker made of small red, black, and white beads, a necklace of large blue glass beads, a large yellow metal bracelet over his upper arm, a red robe trimmed with small white beads worn over one shoulder. The Iroquois were traditional allies of the English Crown, against the French in the French and Indian Wars, and against the Americans during the Revolutionary War, and this warrior wears, suspended by a green neck ribbon, a large portrait peace medal of the type often given as tokens of appreciation and reward by the British to the Iroquois. The warrior stands in a wooded landscape, with mountains in the distance.
A colorful portrait of a powerful Iroquois warrior, whose people formed the only truly successful union of North American Indian tribes, and whose fighting abilities were genuinely feared and respected for more than two hundred years by the colonial powers.
#19215 $42,500.00  
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