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1797–1814 · A LOSS WITH A KNOWN CAUSE
Every picture of Little Turtle descends from a painting that no longer exists. On his visit to President Washington at Philadelphia in 1797, Little Turtle sat, at Washington's arrangement, to Gilbert Stuart, the painter of Washington's own portraits. The original hung in the government's keeping at Washington, and when the British burned the public buildings in August 1814, it burned with them — so the biographical tradition states, in Otho Winger's 1942 life of the chief and in Harvey Lewis Carter's scholarly biography of 1987, which the lithograph that now serves as his face is "reputedly based upon." The image the city uses — on markers, in books, at the head of this record's own Story — is that lithograph: a copy, at one or more removes, of a lost original.
What is known: the sitting, the painter, and the documented destruction of the government's Indian portraits in 1814. What is not known: how faithfully the surviving image copies Stuart's canvas. One early account suggests Stuart may have painted two portraits, one in Indian dress and one in the dress of peace; no original of either survives to check the copies against, and the word the reference works themselves use for the connection is "reputedly." This is the rarest kind of entry in this section — a mystery whose event is fully explained and whose residue is permanent. The man is the best-documented figure of the Miami world; his face rests on a copy of a burned painting.
Sources:
- Otho Winger, Little Turtle: The Great Chief of Eel River (1942) — the Stuart sitting at Washington's request and the destruction of the original in 1814.
- Harvey Lewis Carter, The Life and Times of Little Turtle: First Sagamore of the Wabash (University of Illinois Press, 1987), pp. 62–63 — the source cited for the lithograph's descent from the lost portrait.
- North Manchester Center for History, newsletter account of Little Turtle (2002) — the two-portrait suggestion, carried as a suggestion.