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American Indians In British Art, 1700-1840
American Indians In British Art 17001840 Author:Stephanie Pratt Ask anyone the world over to identify a figure in buckskins with a feather bonnet, and the answer will be "Indian." Many works of art produced by non-Native artists have reflected such a limited viewpoint. In American Indians in British Art, 1700-1840, Stephanie Pratt explores for the first time an artistic tradition that avoided simplifi... more »cation and that instead portrayed Native peoples in a surprisingly complex light. Pratt places artistic works in historical context and traces a movement away from abstraction, where Indians were symbols rather than actual people, to representational art, which portrayed Indians as actors on the colonial stage. But Pratt also argues that to view these images as mere illustrations of historical events or individuals would be reductive. As works of art they contain formal characteristics and ideological content that diminish their documentary value. American Indians in British Art, 1700-1840, is richly illustrated with both color and black-and-white illustrations, some of them published here for the first time.« less