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Peter Stephenson (American, 1823-1861)
The Wounded Indian, modeled 1848/49, carved 1850
Marble, 35-1/2 x 59 x 30-1/4 inches
Gift of James H. Ricau and Museum Purchase

A precocious talent, self-taught except for brief study in Rome (1845-46), Peter Stephenson first achieved prominence in Boston in the late 1840s. He exhibited classically inspired sculpture at the Boston Atheneum on his return from Italy and created three Indian subjects in addition to The Wounded Indian, his signature piece and first major work. The figure was displayed in the sculpture gallery of the Atheneum from 1852 to 1856 and remained in Boston until it entered the collection of James H. Ricau in the 1960s (see p. 17). Stephenson's career was brief, ending with his madness and death at age thirty-seven; surviving works are very rare.

The Wounded Indian may be the most beautiful and affecting work in the Chrysler's Ricau collection of American neoclassical sculpture. Apart from its historical significance, which is formidable, this life-size figure of a dying warrior embodies grace and dignity, and evokes empathy and a sense of loss.

Of unmatched importance as an icon of American culture, the Native American's representation has been both rich and contradictory. From the 1820s to 1840s Thomas Cole used Indians as romantic, poetic symbols of a lost past, while artist-explorers George Catlin and Karl Bodmer stressed ethnographic accuracy. Charles Bird King's famous portraits of Native Americans are considered the most complete expression of the idea of the Noble Savage in American art: King's contemporaries compared his sitters to ancient Romans, citing their nobility, intelligence, and character (see object 58.85.1).

Concurrent with Western expansion, what some historians call "the myth of the vanishing Indian" developed as a corollary to Manifest Destiny. This racially based theory held that once Native Americans were exposed to European culture their extinction was inevitable; as a primitive people they were doomed whether white men bore arms against them or not. This myth was easily assimilated into ­nineteenth-century art and literature. In Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's 1855 poem The Song of Hiawatha, the Indians, weakened and quarreling, are scattered westward, and after blessing the arrival of the white men, Hiawatha paddles peacefully into the hereafter.

As Brian Dippe has explained, the Indian's "vanishing" was cause for both celebration and sorrow: proponents of expansion applauded progress but lamented the loss of an unspoiled America. By the mid-1850s, two visual expressions of these sentiments had become established. In landscape painting, the Indian appeared on a promontory overlooking a cultivated, urbanizing landscape (see object 71.729). In sculpture, a chieftain or warrior, based loosely on the classical Dying Gaul, stoically met death. The German sculptor Ferdinand Pettrich modeled his Dying Tecumseh in the late 1830s (Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.). Thomas Crawford (see object 86.463) carved his Dying Chief Contemplating the Progress of Civilization as both freestanding sculpture (1856, New York Historical Society) and as an element in Progress of Civilization, the pedimental sculpture at the entrance to the United States Capitol (1854-63).

Stephenson's The Wounded Indian was begun about six years before Crawford designed Progress of Civilization. To considerable acclaim, it was exhibited at the Crystal Palace Exposition in London in 1851, along with the sensational Greek Slave by Hiram Powers. Tellingly, an American critic claimed that the figure's refinement identified it as an Eastern Woodlands Indian (long absent from the East) and not one of the "coarser" Plains Indians (still bitterly resisting displacement). Another observer noted that "the figure was represented wounded and fallen, thereby typifying the race." The fact that the Indian's mortal wound came from an arrow and not a bullet is consistent with the belief that his ultimate fate was determined by his own nature.

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