imageofempire:

The Widow of an Indian Chief watching the Arms of her Deceased Husband
Joseph Wright (1734-97)
Oil on canvas, 1785
127 x 101.6 cm
Derby Museum and Art Gallery, Derby, UK

This painting was one of twenty-five works that Wright produced for his one-man show of 1785; an exhibition that sought to assert the artist’s independence and public reputation following his recent break with the Royal Academy. Wright included an explanation of the picture in the catalogue to his exhibition: ‘This picture is founded on a custom…where the widow of an eminent warrior is used to sit the whole day, during the first moon after his death, under a rude kind of trophy, formed by a tree lopped and painted; on which the weapons of the dead are suspended. She remains in this situation without shelter, and perseveres in her mournful duty at the hazard of her own life from the inclemencies of the weather.’

Wright never traveled to America. Instead, he obtained this information from James Adair’s History of the American Indians (1775), perhaps through his friend William Hayley, the Sussex poet. Like many of the pictures in Wright’s exhibition, this painting focuses on a solitary female figure, reflecting upon her grief with stoic resolve. Her still figure and melancholy pose offer a stark contrast to the violence of the surrounding elements, emphasising her dignity and courage in the face of the ordeal she endures.

The companion to this painting, The Lady in Milton’s Comus, which is now in the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, features another female in distress, her hopes momentarily lifted by the emergence of the moon from clouds. In both these paintings Wright depicted an ocean, reflecting, perhaps, on a broader public sense of loss following Britain’s recent and controversial split with America after the bitter War of Independence of 1776-1783.