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The Trial of Red Jacket
John Mix Stanley (born Canandaigua, NY 1814-died Detroit, MI 1872)
1869
- Medium
- oil on canvas
- Classification
- Paintings
- Dimensions
- 23 1/2 x 36 1/8 in. (59.7 x 91.7 cm.)
- Culture
- Seneca Indians
- Museum
- Smithsonian Institution, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Painting and Sculpture
- Credit line
- Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of George M. Stanley (grandson of the artist) and family and museum purchase
- Rights
- CC0 (Smithsonian Open Access), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Teens profiles and older: its subject is for older viewers (war, death, the Passion, drink or the like). How works are placed
View at the Smithsonian Institution
About this work
Red Jacket (1758-1830) was a famous leader of the Seneca tribe of the Iroquois Nation. In this ambitious painting, John Mix Stanley showed the chief defending himself against a charge of witchcraft. Under his white robe is the red jacket given to him by a British officer for his help as a messenger during the American Revolution. Stanley trained as a portrait painter, and all of the figures in this work are portraits of identifiable individuals. The Trial of Red Jacket was almost destroyed in the Smithsonian Institution's fire of 1865. (Antiques, November 1990; Javiga da Costa Nunes, "Red Jacket: The Man and his Portraits," The American Art Journal, Summer 1980)
