Frederick Weygold: Artist and Ethnographer of North American Indians

by Christian F. Feest (Editor), C. Ronald Corum (Editor)

Frederick Weygold (1870–1941), American artist and self-trained ethnographer, is today almost unknown outside German-speaking Europe. This book, based upon the voluminous body of his paintings, drawings, and papers held by the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky, and upon research in American and European museums and archives, offers for the first time a comprehensive account of Weygold’s life and achievements as an artist, collector, educator, and social activist.

Born in St. Charles, Missouri, Weygold studied languages and art in Germany and Philadelphia before settling in Louisville in 1908. In Europe, Weygold became fascinated with American Indians, taught himself the Lakota language, and began his lifelong study of Native American art by drawing early objects from the Plains in German museum collections. In Philadelphia he did “fieldwork” with Lakotas working for Wild West shows and collected Lakota texts and drawings.

In 1909 he went to the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, acquiring Native artifacts for the Museum of Ethnology in Hamburg and documenting in photographs Lakota life and culture, including the first photographic record of the Plains Indian sign language. He later used his ethnographic expertise in a series of oil paintings and to illustrate books by the Dakota author Charles Eastman and by the western writers James Willard Schultz and Stanley Vestal.

Weygold also gained local recognition for his painting of the iconic “Old Kentucky Home” and was involved in the movement to save Cumberland Falls from being developed into a source of hydroelectric power. Over time, Weygold built a personal collection of Native American artifacts he later donated to the Speed Museum, which now forms the core of the museum’s holdings.

This book features selected examples from his work as a painter, illustrator, photographer, and collector of American Indian art and artifacts.

272 pages, Hardcover

Published January 17, 2017

Reviews

[David Radavich · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an amazing book, biography of a remarkable artist and ethnographer. Frederick Weygold was born near Saint Louis of German heritage and went on to visit numerous Indian tribes during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He collected many items now in major collections both in Europe and the United States. He spoke a number of European languages and taught himself both Lakota and Lakota sign language. And he was a remarkable artist who painted and photographed many Native American artifacts. Much of his collection is now in the Speed Museum in Louisville, where he once curated the Native American collection. The illustrations in this book are breath-taking. And though the text by the two German-born editors sometimes lack idiomatic precision, this work takes readers across much of the Great Plains, as far south as Oklahoma and as far west as Montana during a pivotal period in our nation's history. This book offers a true adventure in cross-cultural understanding.