Charles Bird King (1785 - 1862). Charles Bird King was an American portrait artist, best known for his portrayals of significant Native American leaders and tribesmen. Charles Bird King was born in Newport, Rhode Island, the only child of Deborah and Zebulon King, an American Revolutionary veteran and captain. The family traveled west after the war, but when King was four years old, his father was killed and scalped by Native Americans near Marietta, Ohio. Because of this, Deborah King took her young son and moved back to her parents' home in Newport. When King was fifteen, he went to New York to study under the portrait painter Edward Savage. At age twenty he moved to London to study under Benjamin West at the Royal Academy. After a seven-year stay in London, King returned to the U.S. due to the War of 1812. He lived and worked in the major cities of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Baltimore, Maryland; and Richmond, Virginia. He eventually settled in Washington, DC, due to the economic appeal of the burgeoning capital city. Here King developed a solid reputation as a portraitist among politicians, and earned enough to maintain his own studio and gallery. King's economic success in the art world, particularly in the field of portraiture, was in part dependent on his ability to socialize with the wealthy celebrities, and relate to the well-educated politicians of the time: His industry and simple habits enabled him to acquire a handsome competence, and his amiable and exemplary character won him many friends. These patrons included such prominent leaders as John Quincy Adams, John C. Calhoun, Henry Clay, James Monroe, and Daniel Webster. King's popularity and steady stream of work left him with little reason or need to leave Washington. In 1827 he was elected to the National Academy of Design as an Honorary Academician. King never married. He lived in Washington until his death on March 18, 1862. He bequeathed his collection of paintings, books, and prints to the Redwood Library and Athenaeum. Though King's legacy lies in his portraiture, throughout his career he also demonstrated a great technical skill in still life, genre, and literary paintings. Scholars have thought he would have preferred to focus on these styles throughout his career, but he needed to earn a living. Painting portraits was the only way for artists to make enough money to live on in the early part of the 19th century. King's inclination towards genre and still life paintings is thought to have been influenced to his seven-year stay in London. The 16th and 17th-century style attributed to masters in Northern Europe, especially that of the Dutch and Flemish, was quite popular in the upper echelons of the art culture. While attending the Royal Academy, King was swayed towards the Dutch styles by the demand such works commanded. He also was able to study the works and learn from them. It is likely that through his schooling, he was able to study the British royal collection, as Prince of Wales, and Regent, George IV collected Dutch art voraciously and the prints were the favored style at the time by other members of European royalty. King took more than stylistic cues from these examples, as he also employed some of the techniques which he saw. As Nicholas Clark wrote in 1982, King sometimes relied upon Dutch prints for formal solutions. The prints were sources of valued composition. Many of King's paintings include features that show the influence of Dutch art. As noted above, King incorporated the techniques of Dutch painting into his portraits, though he recognized that the United States was not yet as familiar with references to the style as it would be in the sphere of post-Civil War materialism. King is known to have been especially committed to staying within the confines of the traditional style of painting which he learned in his youth: it is apparent that the artist would adapt, time and again, traditional European mannerisms to his new and native subject matter. While King completed a number of paintings that invoked Dutch painting technique, he is better known as an important figure for his numerous portraits of Native Americans, commissioned by the federal government. He was also commissioned by the government for portraits of celebrated war heroes, and privately by the political elite. Painting was used to portray important men before the time of photography. Despite his popularity at the time, King is often overlooked in the broad scope of art history. His relative obscurity may be due in part to his lack of innovation in his work. It is also surely due to the loss of most of his numerous Indian portraits to a fire in the Smithsonian. With his most unique work destroyed, he was overlooked by succeeding generations.