INDIAN PORTRAIT PAINTER

The Stupendous Work in Which
E. A. Burbank is Engaged

E.A. Burbank a Chicago artist who for some time had been stopping at the Agua Callente hot springs arrived in the city yesterday morning accompanying Ed Rupert who spent a couple of weeks at the springs.

Mr. Burbank is engaged exclusively in the business of painting Indian portraits and has been so engaged for the last nine years. He has spent the greater part of the last year in this territory and he said yesterday that his work would keep him here not less than two years longer. He spent ten months among the Moquis. He is now middle aged man but when his work is finished he will be an old man for he intends, when his collection is complete it will contain several types of every tribe of North American Indians.

The completed work he says would not perhaps be of great value now, but the time will come when it will be eagerly sought after. In speaking of his work, Mr. Burbank referred to that 00 George Catlin, who in 1841 completed his Illustrations of the Manners, Customs and Conditions of the North American Indians. It includes more than 500 portraits of Indians from life, a unique and valuable collection now in the United States National Museum at Washington. The government paid a princely sum for it.

Catlin's work was naturally far from complete since he visited comparatively few of even the northern tribes and none of the southern tribes. The artistic work is not of a very high grade for Catlin was more of a writer than artist. The faces of some of his Sioux warriors are quite different from any that could be found in a branch of the Sioux of today, sixty years later.

Mr. Burbank says that his occupation is a very fascinating one but that many hardships are involved. The Indian bill of fare frequently palls upon him but there is nothing else to eat. It is his custom to remain with a tribe until he has finished his pictures.

He is now taking a vacation of about eight weeks. It will be a vacation in the sense that for that time he will not live steadily among the Indians though he will make short visits to tribes in the southern part of the territory. In a day or two he will visit Fort McDowell to see the faces of the Yuma Apaches who are there.

Mr. Burbank has little difficulty in getting the Indians to sit for portraits notwithstanding their superstitious dread of the camera. That is something they do not understand. The process of copying the features on a piece of paper is much more simple to them for from the earliest time the Indians have made crude pictures of themselves and objects and animals about them.

1905-06-15
Arizona Republican

Image used with permission from NewspaperARCHIVE.com