Abstract Collection of over 1200 red and brown conté crayon on paper portraits of assorted American Indian subjects drawn during E. A. Burbank’s extensive travel to American Indian communities throughout the American Southwest, West, and Northwest. Commissioned to paint a portrait of Chief Geronimo by his maternal uncle, Edward E. Ayer, the Newberry benefactor and president of the Field Columbian Museum, Burbank embarked in 1897 on what would turn out to be a decades-long, quixotic quest to “paint...

Abstract

Collection of twenty-five oil paintings on canvas and panel executed by E. A. Burbank during the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. Predominately composed of intimately-scaled portraits of American Indian men and women, this collection offers invaluable insight into the pictorial depiction of the American Indian during the turn of the twentieth century as well as the cultural cache attached to the depiction of native subjects.

Abstract

Collection of photogravures, colortype lithographs, and other offset color prints of drawings and oil paintings by E. A. Burbank. Consisting primarily of prints of oil paintings included in Burbank’s extensive series of American Indian portraits, this collection of mass-produced, predominately twentieth century prints offers insight into cultural appeal of the American Indian and the wide dissemination of the work of E. A. Burbank during the last century.

Abstract

About 350 letters written mainly from the Oklahoma Territory, the Southwest, and the Dakotas by Elbridge Ayer Burbank to his uncle Edward E. Ayer, together with two scrapbooks containing incoming correspondence and miscellaneous clippings. Burbank, a painter and illustrator who studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, was commissioned by Edward E. Ayer in 1897 to produce a series of portraits of prominent Indian Chiefs.

Abstract

Personal papers of journalist, professor of journalism, and western / frontier historian Elmo Scott Watson, consisting mainly of topical files on western subjects and journalism. Also included are Watson's manuscripts and published writings, and his correspondence and teaching-related files.