THE MARQUETTE BUILDING. Hermon Atkins MacNeil. Opposites

The Marquette Building was completed in 1895. Twenty years had passed since the Battle of Little Bighorn. And the passing of the the American Indian had, by then, become on object of confused Romanticism. The Fort Dearborn Massacre was still a story Chicago grandparents told their grandchildren. (Bad Indians!) But the country now stretched from Ocean to Ocean. And the time of Jacques Marquette and Louis Joliet hiking a bucolic Chicago River --helped along by Native Americans -- was, surely, regretfully, gone forever.

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Hermon Atkins MacNeil met Black Pipe, of the Lakota Sioux on the Midway in 1893. This Indian, who had seen the last of the open prairies, performed at Wild Bill Cody's Wild West Show at the Chicago World's Fair and stayed in Chicago after the Fair to work and model for MacNeil. His rough features, often repeated in MacNeil's work, are contrasted here with the delicate images of two children. Both gain from the proximity.