The Joseph Brant Miniature

Abstract

93 Documents and Interpretations The Joseph Brant Miniature Christian Feest, Independent Scholar The many portraits made of Joseph Brant (Thayendanegea), the loyalist Mohawk leader at the time of the American Revolution, have earned him the reputation as “The Most Painted Indian.”1 They are a reflection of Euro-American perceptions of his importance and notoriety and, at the same time, through innumerable copies and derivatives published since 1776, have contributed to his fame. Despite the fact that he had not been born into a Mohawk chiefly lineage , Brant rose to political prominence among his people as a staunch ally of the British Crown. His career was partly due to the active encouragement he received from Sir William Johnson, the Superintendent of Indian Affairs for the Northern Colonies. Johnson was the father of eight children with Brant’s sister Molly and a powerful figure on the eighteenthcentury New York frontier. Brant also gained access to the political favors of the hereditary chiefs through his third marriage to a clan mother of the Mohawk. As a student in Eleazar Wheelock’s Indian Charity School from 1761 to 1763, Brant was introduced to the basics of European culture and acquired the skills necessary for his translation into Mohawk of the Gospel according to St. Mark, jointly undertaken with the Anglican missionary John Stuart in 1772–1774. After the League of the Iroquois abandoned , under his influence, its intended neutrality in the struggle between England and the thirteen colonies, the majority of the Iroquois ended up fighting on the side of the British. Supported by Sir William’s nephew and successor as Superintendent of Indian Affairs of the Northern Colonies, Sir Guy Johnson, Brant went 1. Milton W. Hamilton, “Joseph Brant—‘The Most Painted Indian,’” New York History 39, no. 2 (1958): 119–132. 94 ■ NEW YORK HISTORY to London in 1775–1776 to represent the Mohawk in land claims. He was lionized by the upper class and had his portrait painted by famous painter George Romney and a less spectacular likeness drawn by an anonymous draftsman working for James Boswell, the writer. During the American Revolution, he gained the epithet “Monster” Brant because of surprise attacks on border settlements from New York to Ohio by a body of Mohawk and Loyalist settlers known as “Brant’s Volunteers.” In 1785– 1786, he returned to England. In London he was painted twice by Gilbert Stuart (one portrait was for Hugh Percy, the Duke of Northumberland, and another for Lord Rawdon). During this period, American politicians also courted him, seeing Brant as the most important Iroquois leader of his time. Spurning them, he moved with his supporters to what is now the Six Nations Reserve on the Grand River in Ontario. Brant spent the last years of his life in a magnificent mansion on his private off-reservation estate at Lake Ontario’s Burlington Bay.2 The portraits of Brant painted in England as well as those produced later by Charles Willson Peale in Philadelphia in 1797, William Berczy in Ontario between 1794 and 1807, and Ezra Ames in Albany in 1806 have long been recognized and discussed extensively in the historical and art historical literature.3 In 1958, the State of New York acquired another portrait 2. For the life of Brant, see especially the monumental biography by Isabel Thompson Kelsay, Joseph Brant, 1743–1807: Man of Two Worlds (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1984) and the pioneer work by William L. Stone, Life of Joseph Brant-Thayendanegea, 2 vols., (New York: Alexander V. Blake, 1838), who transformed the “Monster Brant” into a statesman of the “Noble Savage” type. Christian Feest, “Thayendanegea [Joseph Brant] and Mary Jemison [Degiwe’nis],” in Sylvia S. Kasprycki, ed., On the Trails of the Iroquois, exhibition catalog, Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Bonn (Berlin: Nicolai, 2013), 156–159 places Brant in the spectrum of contradictory experiences of what it meant to be Iroquois in his time. Contemporary Iroquois intellectuals take an ambivalent view of Brant. See, for example, Tom Hill, “Brant: A Six Nations Perspective,” in Portraits of Thayendanegea, Joseph Brant (Burlington, ON: Burlington Cultural Centre, 1993). 3. In addition to Hamilton, “Joseph Brant,” see, e.g., J. R...