Seth Eastman

The foremost pictorial historian of the American Indian in the nineteenth century, Seth Eastman was a career army officer and talented artist widely appreciated today for his ethnographic detail. Assigned to frontier duty, including a seven-year stint at Fort Snelling in the 1840s, Eastman set out to preserve a visual record of Indian life which was then undergoing rapid change. Enabled by his long-term military residency among the Indians to become familiar not only with their colorful external trappings but with the whole complex fabric of Indian culture, Eastman painted all of the…