Elbridge Ayer Burbank

The Harvard-educated Burbank studied at the Chicago Academy of Design and spent a brief period in Europe before returning to Chicago to open his own studio. His first commission was forNorthwest Magazine,for which he painted views of the Northern Pacific Railway. But in the late 1890s, his career took a different path when his uncle, Edward Everett Ayer, president of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, commissioned him to paint portraits of prominent Native Americans, among them Chief Geronimo. Burbank went on to paint more than 1,200 likenesses of native peoples, representing more than one hundred tribes.Amy PastanThe Lure of the West: Treasures of the Smithsonian American Art Museum(New York and Washington, D.C.: Watson-Guptill Publications, in cooperation with the Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2000)