De Cost Smith (New York, 1864-1939), "To Advise", oil on canvas, signed lower left

sight: 16 x 21 in., frame: 20 x 24 in.

Provenance: Property from a home in Prairie Village, Kansas

De Cost Smith was a formally trained artist who studied in New York City and at the Académie Julian in Paris, where his earliest paintings of Native Americans were exhibited at the Salon. His artistic direction was strongly influenced by his firsthand experiences with Native peoples and by the work of George de Forest Brush, whose paintings encouraged Smith to establish his own distinctive place among artists depicting Indigenous life. Having grown up near the Onondaga Reservation and been initiated into the tribe, Smith developed an unusually intimate understanding of Native cultures, traveling extensively among tribes in the Dakota Territory and elsewhere, learning several Indigenous dialects, and carefully documenting their lives, customs, and traditions. His realistic, ethnographically informed paintings became the defining focus of his career, complemented by illustrated articles on Native and Western life for publications including Outing Magazine, often produced in collaboration with fellow Native American painter Edwin Willard Deming. Smith was a member of the American Ethnological Society and Salmagundi Club, and his work is held in the collections of the American Museum of Natural History and the Museum of the American Indian in New York City.