The Indian Widow Joseph Wright 1785

The writer William Hayley suggested the subject of this painting to Wright. It shows the widow of a Native American chief carrying out the prescribed mourning rites for her dead husband. For a month she was required to mourn beneath a peeled tree adorned with his weapons of war.
Due to their accuracy it is assumed that Wright had access to a collection of Indian clothes and weapons. He also relied on a description of the mourning ritual in The History of the American Indians by James Adair (1775).
The volcano pictured is located not so much in North American, as in Wright’s memory of Mount Vesuvius. The inner turbulence of the outwardly stoical widow is expressed through the cathartic landscape.

Andromache Weeping over the Ashes of Hector, and America from Four Quarters of the Globe William Duesbury & Co c1780 and c.1765

The figure of Andromache was based on a painting by Angelica Kauffmann. In mythology Achilles had killed in combat Andromache’s husband, Hector, and only after a ransom equivalent to the body’s weight in gold was paid, was it released to allow the funeral rites to take place.
The emblematic figure of an indigenous American girl wearing a feather skirt and headdress, standing above an alligator, represents the continent of America in the Four Quarters.

Augmentation

The notion of the Noble Savage was given impetus by the Earl of Shaftesbury who in his Inquiry Concerning Virtue (1699), argued that man is born with the potential for goodness, and it is civilization that has corrupted humankind.
Debates around the virtues of ‘primitivism’ often exampled American Indians, of whose culture little was in fact known. Artists tended to draw on the rhetoric of classicism when constructing images of The Noble Savage - so it is not surprising that the Indian Widow’s pose echoes that of Andromache.