Collection: McKenney & Hall

McKenney and Hall's Indian Tribes of North America
The McKenney and Hall portfolio, Indian Tribes of North America, is widely known for its spectacular portraits of Native Americans. The limited edition, hand-colored lithographs were originally bound in three volumes and published between 1836 and 1842. The portfolio was a commission at the request of Thomas Lorraine McKenney, who was the Director of the United States Bureau of Indian Affairs between 1816 and 1830.

The project began in 1821 with the visitation of large numbers of delegates from the Miami, Fox, Pawnee, Sauk, Menominee, Chippewa and Sioux tribes traveled to Washington, D.C. to meet with President Monroe. Over the next few years, McKenney would commission artists including Charles Bird King, George Cooke and James Otto Lewis to preserve the likeness of various tribal leaders.

Following his service to the Bureau, McKenney traveled extensively researching American Indian Tribes and met James Hall, a lawyer who had written extensively about the American West. He recruited Hall to write the text that would accompany the portfolio of American Indian portraits he had compiled. The resulting folios provide a rare representation of American Indians prior to the Civil War and advent of photography. It is extremely fortunate that the hand-colored lithographs were produced as a fire in 1865 destroyed most of the original paintings which were on display in the Smithsonian.