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Game of Checkers
Checkers Artist Seth Eastman
Seth Eastman
1808-1875
Brunswick, Maine
 Self-portrait 
Captain Seth Eastman
Chippewa Indians Playing Checkers
1848
- American painter and draughtsman.
- Eastman was the oldest of 13 children and rather than attending Bowdoin College, as his father had hoped, he had dreams of a military career and so entered West Point Military Academy in 1824 at the age of 16.
- He completed his studies in 1829 and was stationed at Fort Crawford, Wisconsin and Fort Snelling, Minnesota, on topographical duty until 1831.
- In 1833 Seth returned to West Point to teach drawing until 1840; with the assistance of Robert Walter Weir, Eastman published the ‘Treatise on Topographical Drawing’ at West Point in 1837.
- In 1835, Seth Eastman married author Mary Henderson, born in Warrenton, Virginia.
- General Eastman was elected a member of the National Academy of Design in 1838.
- Seth was then stationed at Ft Snelling from 1841 to 1848, where he began painting scenes of the local Natives involved in everyday activities.
- One such painting was Chippewa Indians Playing Checkers in 1848, which represented a historical genre painting depicting a small group of Chippewa deeply involved in a leisurely activity of a friendly checkers game.
- His painting reflected a simple snapshot in time focusing on the relaxing activity around the checkerboard outside the wigwam.
- Throughout his military placements, Eastman was amassing an incredible portfolio of paintings and illustrations of Native American life as he had an unquenchable passion to preserve the posterity of the customs of a race he believe to be dying.
- Eastman was assembling a pictorial history of the Dakota that would become a great legacy from the "soldier artist of the frontier" for generations to come by the simple depiction of the checkers activity stating that the Dakota people were not a lot different from the rest of society as they enjoyed every day pleasures as well.
- Eastman’s collection truly represented his devotion to the study of Native character and portrayed in oil on canvass their manners and customs and the more important fragments of their history.
- Seth Eastman was extremely successful as a painter of Native cultures as he possessed a developed, natural talent in delineation and observation that he was able to record in his pictorial representations throughout his time on the frontier.
- Living among the Native people’s, he developed a deep respect for their complex culture and became fluent in their language, so much so that in short order his realistic renderings of their every day lives took on a life of its own.
- His depictions truly illustrated the essence of the people by design, color and motif within his compositions where the Native people were playing a game of checkers.
- At the same time as his Native paintings first began to draw the nation’s attention, he became aware of an opportunity to use his unique ability as illustrator for the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the national work on the "History, Condition and Future Prospects of the Indian Tribes of the United States" from 1850-55, published in 1857.
- Following his illustrative commission, Eastman then returned to the frontier and later, in 1863, he retired with the rank of Lieutenant Colonel due to a disability received from exposure in the line of duty; on August 9, 1866, Seth Eastman was breveted Brigadier General.
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