Histories

Henry H. Cross was born in Flemingville, Tioga County, New York in 1837 and died in Chicago, Illinois in 1918. Cross was a painter of Indian portraits, genre, and racehorses.

Henry twice ran away from home to join the circus before he was the age of fifteen. He studied animal painting with Rosa Bonheur in Paris when he was sixteen. On his return to the United States, he again traveled with a circus headed west, painting animals on the wagon sides.

In 1860, he opened his studio in Chicago, but in 1862 he left for southwestern Minnesota during the Sioux uprising there. He painted all of the Sioux sentenced to death by President Lincoln because of their massacre of white settlers. Afterward he traveled with P. T. Barnum's circus again as a wagon and sign painter. He also made trips into the Indian country on his own, sketching and painting Indian and animal life as well as cavalrymen and scouts.

After 1900, he returned to Chicago, executing commissioned paintings, particularly Indian portraits. His noted sitters included King Edward VII, President Grant and King Kalakana of Hawaii. A plump, bespectacled man with a walrus mustache, he spoke Sioux fluently and painted his Indians "in a stern faced pose with their backs to a stormy sky."

Buffalo Bill Cody called Cross the "greatest painter of Indian portraiture of all times." Cross's portrait of the Sioux chief Red Cloud was one of his best known works.His painting, "Camp of Sitting Bull in the Big Horn Mountains 1873" was the cover illustration for the Vestal biography of Sitting Bull.