EDWIN WILLARD DEMING

Left: Cover of catalog for Deming exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, December 10, 1922-January 10, 1923. Edwin Willard Deming papers. Right: Advertisement for a lecture by Deming, 1915. Mary Fanton Roberts papers. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Edwin Deming followed the path of artists before him—he studied at the Art Students League in New York and spent part of his life living and working in Paris. However, his early encounters among American Indians prompted a life-long interest in their culture, as explained in a biographical sketch, probably written by his son, Alden, found among his papers at the Archives of American Art:

Dad was born August 26^th, 1860 on the homestead to which his Grandfather, as a boy, had traveled with his parents in an overland wagon from Sandersfield, Mass. in 1615. It was, at the time his Grandparents settled there, part of Connecticut but when Dad was born it was Ashland, Ohio. When he was 6 months old, he, too, became a pioneer for he was taken to Illinois where his Father and Grandfather had entered a tract of land on what had been the Fox and Sauk reservation, so from early boyhood he played with the little Winnebego Indian children and learned to love them as brothers.

Deming traveled throughout the West, befriending and photographing American Indians and making illustrations and paintings of the people and landscapes he encountered.

Photographs from Deming's papers, identified only as "Crow or Sioux". Each 15 x 10 cm.

Watercolor sketches by Deming from the Mary Fanton Roberts papers, each 8 x 13. 5 cm.