Curiosities.

Early in the spring of 1804, as Meriwether Lewis and William Clark were exploring the newly acquired Louisiana Territory, a party of Osage chiefs traveled from St. Louis to Washington, D.C. They were welcomed by President Thomas Jefferson, and as they toured Eastern American cities they became objects of great curiosity. In Washington at least five of the Osage Chiefs sat for portraits by Charles Balthazer Julien Fevret de Saint-Memin, a successful painter who had fled to America to escape the French Revolution. Saint-Memin's works, drafted with the aid of the mechanical "physiognotrace," a wooden-framed drawing aid, are the earliest known portraits of Plains Indians. Another delegation of Plains Indians came East in 1805. While in Philadelphia they visited Charles Wilson Peak's natural history museum; Peale, also using the physiognotrace, cut silhouettes of a group of the Indians and later sent them...