Indian Portrait

Richard Lorenz "painted his first Indians at the Crow Reservation, Montana about 1898, the same year he attended the Indian Conference which was part of the Trans-Mississippi Exposition in Omaha, Nebraska. Five hundred leaders of 35 tribes attended the conference, an ambitious ethnological exhibit planned by the Bureau of Indian Affairs...Frederick [sic] Remington was there, too, in the flood of artists and correspondents, and the paths of the German Milwaukeean [Lorenz] and the famous Easterner must have crossed. Lorenz knew Remington's prodigious visual reporting, for he owned a portfolio of Remington's drawings published in 1897." (M. Fish, An Exhibition in Tribute to Richard Lorenz, exhibition catalogue, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 1966, p. 12) Similar to Remington, Joseph Henry Sharp, Eanger Irving Couse, and other artists of the early twentieth century whose work served as accurate portrayals and a catalogue of Native American life and portraiture, Lorenz's Portrait of an Indian is an example of the reverence the artist felt for his subject, composed with an understated elegance and ease of painterly expression.