A shadowy figure at best, the artist Antonio Zeno Shindler worked at the Smithsonian Institution from after the Civil War until the turn of the 20th century, specializing in ethnographic subjects.

The visual documentation of Native American cultures became a focus of the Smithsonian Institution from within a few years of its founding in 1846. The original core of the collections consisted of a number of portraits of Indian delegates who visited Washington during the 1850s done by Charles Bird King and John Mix Stanley's paintings of Indian life. However when a fire gutted its west wing in January 1865, the Smithsonian was forced to start anew.

The Director of the Smithsonian Joseph Henry found particular support for his plans to develop a photographic gallery of Indians from two key individuals, Ferdinand V. Hayden, head of the U.S. Geological Survey, and William Henry Blackmore, an English philanthropist and founder of the Blackmore Museum in Salisbury. Blackmore loaned his personal collection of photographs to Henry in 1867, hiring Shindler to make copies of them and to help prepare the catalogue for an exhibition that was mounted in 1869, the Smithsonian's first photographic exhibit.

Born as Antonio Zeno in either Bulgaria or Romania, depending on which source for the story one prefers, Shindler was said to have left his homeland after the extermination of his family in a vendetta. Making his way to Geneva, he fell in with a Frenchman named Shindler who took him under his wing, and the two lived together in Paris, where Zeno studied art, taking the last name of his patron. Precisely when Zeno Shindler came to the United States is unknown, but by 1852, he is recorded as working as a drawing instructor at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, where he exhibited regularly in ensuing years. Other stories suggest that Shindler moved first to Chicago, where he lost everything in the great fire, however the chronology is surely wrong and hard evidence to support the contention that he lived there is weak.

In Philadelphia, Shindler married a young French woman, Justina Fontaine in 1852, with whom he had a daughter, Isabella, in January of the following year. The couple moved to Washington, D.C., in 1867, where Shindler took control of the prominent Robert W. Addis Photographic Gallery, successor to James Earle McClees, acquiring McClees' daguerreotypes and photographic negatives he had taken of visiting Indian delegations in the 1850s.

Shindler was slow in making copies from Blackmore's images, but his prints were instrumental in helping to mount the exhibition, Photographic Portraits of North American Indians in the Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution. He was hired by Blackmore as well to make oil paintings of some of the images.

After the exhibition, Shindler continued to work with the Smithsonian as a contract employee until he was hired full time in 1876. He remained on staff for another 23 years, doing watercolors, tinting photographs, and performing other work as a painter and artist. He died on August 9, 1899, from injuries sustained from a fall from a streetcar.

The 95 studio portraits in the Shindler Collection were part of a suite of 301 images that comprised the first photographic exhibition at the Smithsonian, and that are documented in the catalogue Photographic Portraits of North American Indians in the Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution (1867). The individuals depicted were members of delegations sent to Washington during the years 1852, 1857-1858, and 1867-1869 from the following nations: Cherokee, Cheyenne, Chippewa, Choctaw, Dakota Sioux (Brule, Miniconjou, Sans Arc, Santee, Sisseton, Two-Kettle, Yankton), Osage, Pawnee, Ponca, Potawatomi, Sac and Fox, Seminole, and Ute. Shindler printed the earlier photographs (mostly taken by the McClees Gallery) and was photographer for the later delegations.

The photographs, presumably printed ca.1869, are albumen prints trimmed into ovals and mounted on Addis Gallery stock. Each photograph is identified by a reference number corresponding to the printed Smithsonian catalogue, and the titles and identifications are drawn from a manuscript list included with the Shindler Collection at the APS (usually, but not always identical to the entries in the printed catalogue). The collection contains photographs no. 1-104, with the exception of nos. 48, 54, 60, 67, 75, 76, 83, 88, and 95. The dates of these photographs were taken from Paula Richardson Fleming's Native American Photography at the Smithsonian: The Shindler Catalogue (2003), and names and other information were checked against her work. Biographical information on Shindler was also partially derived from Fleming's catalogue.

All of the photographs in this collection have been digitized. Links to the digital versions are included in the inventory. You may also view a gallery of all images here.

Provenance

Acquired from the Smithsonian Institution, ca.1869.

Preferred citation

Cite as: A. Zeno Shindler American Indian Photograph Collection, American Philosophical Society.

Processing information

Recatalogued by rsc, 2003.

Related material

The APS has several rich photographic collections documenting Native Americans, including the Frank Speck Photographic Collection and the papers of William N. Fenton and A. I. Hallowell.

A more complete collection of the Shindler Photographs is available at the Smithsonian Institution.

Bibliography

• Smithsonian Institution

• Albumen prints
• Photographs

• Cherokee Indians -- Photographs
• Cheyenne Indians -- Photographs
• Chippewa Indians -- Photographs
• Choctaw Indians -- Photographs
• Dakota Indians -- Photographs
• Indians of North America -- Photographs
• Osage Indians -- Photographs
• Pawnee Indians -- Photographs
• Plains Indians
• Ponca Indians -- Photographs
• Potawatomi Indians -- Photographs
• Sac and Fox Indians -- Photographs
• Seminole Indians -- Photographs
• Ute Indians -- Photographs