Thayendanegea (Joseph Brant)

Thayendanegea (Joseph Brant) from 1776 depicts the Mohawk leader and British military ally who visited London in that year to negotiate on behalf of the Iroquois Confederacy during the American Revolutionary crisis. Romney's portrait is one of the most significant European images of a Indigenous American leader, capturing Brant's dignity and commanding presence without condescension. Romney's oil handling was distinguished by fluid, rapidly applied strokes and an instinctive sense of elegant silhouette, producing portraits of apparent effortlessness that concealed careful preparatory drawing. The portrait represents an exceptional moment in the history of European art when the conventional apparatus of Georgian portraiture — the three-quarter pose, the atmospheric background, the dignified bearing — was applied to a subject from outside the usual social world of the London studio, with results that speak to Romney's capacity for sympathetic observation. Now at the National Gallery of Canada, the portrait has found an appropriate home in the country whose indigenous peoples Brant sought to protect through his diplomatic mission.

The Mohawk leader is rendered with the same sympathetic dignity Romney brought to his aristocratic sitters, the distinctive costume and features observed with careful naturalism.