Henry Farny was a French immigrant to the US who became fascinated with Native American culture after witnessing their struggles firsthand on trips out West in the late 1800s. His painting The Unwelcome Guests depicts tensions between Native Americans and white settlers at a time when US expansion and policies like the Dawes Act were destroying Native communities. Farny's experiences with immigration and observing the poverty of Native peoples influenced how he sympathetically portrayed their plight in his work.

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“The Artist Behind the Work: A closer look at the life that
led to Henry Farny’s, The Unwelcome Guests (1887)”
Becca Blumer
Approaches to Art History
Theresa Leninger-Miller
November 21, 2013

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Henry François Farny (1847-1916), was born in France, and quickly became an exile and an
immigrant to the United States.1
Through his career Farny traveled many places, including
Europe for artistic studies. His most important travels however, were those into the still fresh
western portion of our country. Through his travels, Farny became aware of the original peoples
of the land he now called home as well, the Indians, and witnessed first hand the plight these
people faced. It is Farny’s first hand experience with not only the ostracized feeling of
immigration and the feeling of difference, but his witnessing of the life of the Indian that helped
him to create his famous works, including the work The Unwelcome Guests (1887), a tense scene
shared between two opposing parties, the Indian and the white man. These experiences are also
what lead to the specific way in which Farny portrays the Indians in his works, and The
Unwelcome Guests is an example of this.
Immigration of any sort can heavily influence how a person lives their lives, and of
course helps to dictate what an artist may portray in their pieces. It is Farny’s immigration
experience to the United States that, as historian Dr. Julie Schimmel says, “is crucial to an
understanding of his paintings… it is a dramatic upheaval that designates a person as a foreigner
or an ‘outsider’.”2
She also says that Farny was himself, “subject to the forces of globalization
and modernization that he depicted in his illustrations, gouches, and paintings.”3
Farny did not
travel further into the country, to the West, until he was in his thirties, but he had been aware of
1
Aaron Betsky, “Henry Farny’s Vision,” in Henry Farny Paints the Far West, ed. Susan Meyn
(Cincinnati, OH: Cincinnati Art Museum, 2007), 7.
2
Julie Schimmel, “Images of the Dispossessed,” in Henry Farny Paints the Far West, ed. Susan
Meyn (Cincinnati, OH: Cincinnati Art Museum, 2007), 16.
3
Betsky, 7.

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the struggles of the Indian tribes and the effect of the reservation life even before he made the
journey’s that would help to define his career.4
As a child, Farny had his most prominent encounter with Indian life when he met an
elderly Indian named Old Jacob, a member of a Seneca tribe living near Farny’s childhood
home.5
The man was starving and had come to beg for food amongst the white men.6
Farny and
Jacob later became friends, Jacob even taking the young Farny to his tribe’s camp.7
We do not
know if Farny and his family were aware of the issues that led to not only the poverty in which
old Jacob lived, but also which led to the decline of the Seneca people. However, according to
Schimmel, the history of this particular group of Indians “provides a classic example of the
degradation Indian tribes suffered.”8
Thus by being aware of this tribe, it is clear that Farny was
aware of far more than possibly most white people either cared to know or cared to
acknowledge.
Schimmel tells us that Farny’s awareness of the issues surrounding the lives of all Indian
people became apparent to the public view through his artwork and his writings starting in 1881
after his trip to Fort Yates.9
On this trip he visited a place called Standing Rock, which was
nearby government agency, which was put on the reservation Farny visited to “distribute food
and goods to the Indian groups in exchange for their agreement to remain on the land designated
for their use.”10
She then mentions that “it was not uncommon for Indians to receive inadequate,
4
Schimmel, 18.
5
Ibid.
6
Ibid.
7
Schimmel, 19.
8
Ibid.
9
Ibid.
10
Ibid.

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bad, or unneeded goods,”11
at these ration days in the facilities. After Farny’s visit there he
created Crossing the Continent (1881)12
, a painting in which he gives a look at the day during
which rations were handed out at Standing Rock. The piece particularly shows the unrest of the
entire situation.
In 1884, Farny took another trip to the West and went with a journalist by the name of
Eugene V. Smalley as part of a commission by The Century Magazine to illustrate and write on
their trip down the Missouri River.13
During this excursion the pair visited Fort Benton,
witnessed first hand the living conditions of the Piegans Indians there.14
The article by Smalley
tells the reader that the group of Indians had come there purely “for the sake of such subsistence
as they could get from the garbage barrels of the citizens.”15
Farny even commented personally
on what he witnessed in the Cincinnati Enquirer, describing the government’s policies regarding
the Indians as those that were not helping them but merely hurting them and extinguishing the
race.16
When Farny created The Unwelcome Guests (Figure 1), America was changing rapidly. It
was a time of big business, and monopoly. The railroads were being built and with them there
was a huge push to move westward, as well as the rise of an overall industrial expansion. The
lands were new, and to the white American, they were thought of as ready to be seized. But these
so called “new lands” were the existing homes and hunting grounds of the Indian people. The
history of America thus coincides with the near extinction of the Indian culture, and as we
11
Ibid.
12
Unfortunately a reproduction image could not be found to include.
13
Ibid.
14
Ibid.
15
Eugene V. Smalley, “The Upper Missouri and the Great Falls,” The Century Magazine 35, no.
3 (January 1888): 417.
16
Schimmel, 19.

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destroyed and condemned we kept our curious nature about he people deemed as savages,
expressing a desire for representations of these dwindling cultures through art. This curiosity
gave Farny the opportunity to not only just have a career, but to make a put his own feelings
towards immigration, dislocation, and the Indian people themselves into the work. It allowed him
to, as Betsky puts it, “create the image of a coherent community with its own values and its own
place. It became a counter example to the confused, rapidly changing world of which he was
part,”17
since his immigration to America as a child.
Farny worked and lived in Cincinnati, Ohio during the time he painted The Unwelcome
Guests, as well as many of his other works, including The Captive (1885) (Figure 2), another
tense scene between the Indian and the white man. Before this he had studied abroad during the
years of 1866 through 1870, in Europe.18
After doing some odd jobs, such as illustrations for
circus posters and schoolbooks,19
Farny went on those westward journeys and returned with
grown sympathies for the Indian, focusing his work on the portrayal of their way of life, both
past and present. He spent a great deal of time among Indian people of all types, even becoming
a member of three different tribes, the Sioux, Zuni, and Blackfoot Indians, whom each gave him
a tribal name.20
This time was a huge time in history for Cincinnati and the Indian people. NO city was
growing faster than Cincinnati at the time21
, and no culture being ravished as much as that of the
Indian. In the 1880s the President was Grover Cleveland (1885-1889). On February 8, 1887,
17
Betsky, 7.
18
Ed Flynn, “Something About the Career of the Eminent Cincinnati Artists,” Cincinnati
Commercial Gazette, (March 14, 1893): 5.
19
Ibid.
20
Flynn, 5.
21
John Clubbe, “Cincinnati and the Great West: The Case of Henry Farny,” ANQ: A Quarterly
Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews 9, no. 4 (1996), 6.

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President Cleveland signed the Dawes Act into a law. This action was devastating to the Indian
way of life.22
While they had already been restricted to reservations, this new law took things one
step further downhill, taking those plots of land and dividing them between the individual
families within the tribes inhabiting them.23
These divisions, along with the implementation of
federally funded boarding schools, helped to break family and cultural ties between very
traditional people.24
The writer of the law, Senator Henry Dawes of Massachusetts (1816-1903),
once said that “to be civilized one must ‘wear civilized clothes, cultivate the ground, live in
houses, ride in Studebaker wagons, send children to school, drink whiskey [and] own
property.’”25
The American people did not see the Indians as being their equals and there were
many theories of how to exterminate them, more so than there were ideas of how to coexist in
peace. Horace Greely for instance, the owner of the New York Tribune, used his own newspaper
to express his ideas about the westward expansion and the Indians inhabiting the area, saying
“these people must die out—there is no help for them. God has given this to those who will
subdue to cultivate it; and it is vain to struggle against his Righteous decree.”26
Clearly tensions were high, and there was a dislike in white American culture for that of
the Indian, all while Farny was growing infatuated with that very culture. Schimmel mentions
that unlike his contemporaries, “who treated Indians with dead seriousness, Farny exercised his
sense of irony and whit when speaking of Native Americans, as when he comments on an Indian
22
“Today in History,” History.com, February 8, 2013, http://www.history.com/this-day-in-
history/cleveland-signs-devastating-dawes-act-into-law. October 16, 2013.
23
Ibid.
24
Ibid.
25
Gale Courey Toensing, “The Dawes Act Started U.S. Land Grab of Native Territory,”
IndianCountryTodayMediaNetwork.com, February 8, 2012
http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/article/the-dawes-act-started-the-u.s.-land-grab-of-
native-territory-96582. October 16, 2013.
26
Schimmel, 22.

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sitter, ‘He sat and eyed me with all the legitimate suspicion which would naturally arise in the
mind of a man to whom a paper bag of prunes had been offered for the mere pleasure of
sketching him.’”27
Artists such as Fredrick Remmington (1861-1909) and Charles M. Russel
(1860-1909), were both known for their depictions of a “larger-than-life Wild West—a realm of
breathtaking scenery and national heroics, of fantasy and humor, a realm caricatured by Buffalo
Bill and memorialized by John Ford…”28
Farny, on the other hand, portrayed the Great West,
and while his pieces still depict the nostalgia that was popular for the audience, they focused
more on reality and evidence from known history.29
Farny himself described his images as
“edited versions of reality,” but they still capture the essence of the Indian’s struggle in their
changing world.30
The people did not want to see the poverty and hopelessness of these people,
but instead they wanted dramatic images. We also know that Farny’s scenes were just that,
“scenes with actors and backdrop,” and did not try to portray an exact type of Indian but rather
Indians as a general body. In fact, according to anthropologist Susan Meyn, in The Unwelcome
Guests, the standing white man is Edwin Flynn, Farny’s friend and literary editor of the
Commercial Gazette.31
Farny had collected many photographs, did many sketches, and collected
many items of Indian culture during his times spent with Indian tribes. Schimmel says in addition
to this “a significant portion of Farny’s work evokes a sense of isolation and stasis, qualities that
27
Schimmel, 12.
28
Clubbe, 6.
29
Ibid.
30
Clubbe, 11.
31
Susan Labry Meyn, “The Artists as Indian Storyteller,” in Henry Farny Paints the Far West,
ed. Susan Meyn (Cincinnati, OH: Cincinnati Art Museum, 2007), 59.

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indirectly suggest, but do not literally portray, the dislocation of Plains Indians to the lands they
had not chosen for themselves.”32
The painting, The Unwelcome Guests, is not only a dramatic scene, but is one that is, of
course, a set up scene, made from aspects of known history and culture alike. In the scene given
to us we see a tense meeting between two parties on a winter evening: a native American Man in
the foreground center approaching a group of four white male hunters in the middle ground,
grouped around a fire with a recent kill of two deer to their left. The Indian man’s right hand is
raised in a greeting. The white men do not see three other Indian men on horseback in the
background. They are seemingly waiting to see what happens in the exchange between their
kinsman and the white men. There are also two horses and a wagon in the center left as well as
some large rock formation in the background, mostly in the upper left. There is also a rocky
hollow behind the white men, which seems to be their shelter from the wind. The men are
slightly strained and on edge, as the Indian slowly approaches in a tentative manner, shown by
the implied motion of his body position. The white men, not advancing in any way, stay around
their fire. The man who sits on an animal hide in the snow, holds a rifle on his lap, as does the
man who sits on the hillside. In the middle is a man standing in a long blue-grey coat and
wearing a monocle, with hands firmly in pockets, further showing the uncertainty of both parties.
The fourth man, seated on logs, seems completely disinterested as he cooks a bit of food in the
fire in front of him. All of the white men’s faces are stern and quite expressionless, which adds
even more tenseness to the scene.
There is a clever use of iconographic elements in Farny’s piece to add to the feelings a
viewer may receive upon viewing the work. One of these is color, and can be mentioned in a few
32
Schimmel, 11.

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key areas of the piece. The colors worn by the Native American, who is also the brightest figure
in the painting, are some of the most powerful colors of the piece. Juan Eduardo Cirlot states
that, red is “the colour of the pulsing blood and fire for the surging and tearing emotions.”33
He
further states that the color “is associated with blood, wounds, death-throes, and sublimation,”34
which considering the many deaths and bloodshed in the Indian culture at the time of, and prior
to, the creation of this painting, is very symbolic. Stephen J. Sidelinger gives his readers words to
associate with the color red, such as “strength, brutal, imposing, tension, sinners, and war,”35
which can all be associated with the unrest the white people inhabiting the area felt toward the
Indians.
Cirlot also defines what the viewer of the painting is actually seeing. The term stranger is
defined by Cirlot as one who, “in myths, legends, folktales, and in literature as a whole… is
frequently ‘the one destined to replace the reigning power in a county or locality. He stands for
the possibility of unseen change, for the future made present, or the mutation in general.”36
Yet
another thing mentioned by Cirlot is the time of day, or twilight (or half-light), of either the
morning or the evening. In this particular scene it appears to be the light of the evening. Cirlot
defines it as “a symbol of dichotomy, representing the dividing-line, which at once joins and
separates a pair of opposites.”37
One can consider this more in regards to the subject matter as a
whole, especially when considering the two very opposite cultures and groups of people, among
the other visual opposites. These cultures were joined by the white invasion and attempts to
33
Juan Eduardo Cirlot, A Dictionary of Symbols, 2nd
ed. trans. Jack Sage (New York, NY:
Philosophical Library, 1971), 50.
34
Cirlot, 51.
35
Stephen J. Sidelinger, Color Manual (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc, 1985), 74.
36
Cirlot, 301.
37
Cirlot, 335.

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make it a place where they could coexist, but also separated by war and famine and hatred.
Cirlot goes on to mention that “evening-light is associated with the West, symbolizing the
location of death,”38
which is a wonderful element considering what we know about the downfall
of the Indian culture today, to an almost non-existent, and highly disregarded culture today.
The element of opposites is also very apparent in the piece. The most notable one is that
of light and dark, with the Indian man as the image of light in this piece. This can be indicative
of Farny’s sympathies to the Indian man, showing him as figure of good, while the white men
are in shadow and darkness. Also there is an element of life and death right in the piece, which is
indicative of the life and death struggles taking place between the two cultures. The two dead
deer by the white men are paired with two alive and standing horses by the Indian, which once
again could show favor toward the Indian in this piece. There is also an element of
corresponding figures, as there are both four white men and, while separated, four Indians.
This work was also the second production of the image. The original was a print which
appeared in the February 5, 1887 issue of Harper’s Weekly, was the first time the image was
seen. It was also, according to Meyn, paired with an article discussing the change, which had
come to the West with the introduction of the white man as well as invention and industrial
revolution innovations such as the trains.39
What is most important though is the difference in
title of the print compared to the painting. The print is titled Suspicious Guests (1887) (Figure 3),
giving a whole different feeling to the exchange. While the feeling of suspicion can make
someone not only feel unwelcome, but be deemed unwelcome, we can take this difference in
titles and apply it to the characters in the scene. Who does Farny want us to indentify with and
38
Ibid.
39
Meyn, 59.

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sympathize with? With the word “unwelcome” the white men could be, and probably are,
intruding on the Indian’s land. However, it could now be out of the Indian’s control and
possession, and thus belong to the white man now, making the Indian the one who is unwelcome.
With the word “suspicion” we can see the effects of that word on both parties, as each tensely
reacts to one another. This word has less of a negative connotation behind it, and is possibly why
it was chosen for the title of the print version, which would have met a greater public audience,
who did not all appreciate the sympathies toward the downfall of the Indian.
We know that Farny, through his experiences before his creation of The Unwelcome
Guests, gained much insight to the life of the Indian. He understood what it felt like to be
removed from your home, and deemed an outsider, being an immigrant himself and then
traveling as he did. He learned about the tribes individual cultures and plights, and used the
wealth of knowledge he gained to help him create scenes that created a general Indian being. He
mostly did not specify by tribe with certain clothing, and he represented them in scenes of their
own nature. He did not show only the dramatic, but also portrayed the complacent images of the
Indian life, often showing them in their day-to-day life, many incorporating the struggle they
faced. But there are still Images by Farny, such as The Captive, which evoke the feeling of ill
will and harsh feelings towards a dangerous Indian culture. It is clear that Farny felt much
sympathy to the situation the Indians faced. However in this piece, different audiences can read it
differently. Those who sympathize with the Indian man will read it as a pro-Indian culture piece,
while the white public could have read it as an image of Indian trickery as the companions of the
Indian man in the foreground approach from behind the white men. So the question is truly who
did Farny mean for us to sympathize with, and if the times had been different and more
acceptable of his feelings, would he have painted a different scene altogether? I believe that the

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times surrounding the painting controlled much of what Farny created, and popular desire
dictated some of what he created, and it is my theory that he may have created different elements
in the scene had the opportunity been available.

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Image 1: Henry Farny, The Unwelcome Guests, 1887, oil on canvas, 38 1/16 in. x 14 3/16
in., Cincinnati Art Museum, 1943.14,
Image 2: Henry Farny, The Captive, 1885, gouache and watercolor, 22 5/16 in. x 40 in.,
Cincinnati Art Museum, 1927.38, Gift of Mrs. Benjamin E. Tate and Julius Fleischmann
in memory of their father, Julius Fleischmann.

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Image 3: Henry Farny, Suspicious Guests, 1887, double page wood engraving, Harper’s Weekly,
February 5, 1887, 96-97. Mary R. Schiff Library, Cincinnati Art Museum.

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Bibliography:
Betsky, Aaron. “Henry Farny’s Vision,” in Henry Farny Paints the Far West, edited by Susan
Meyn, 7. Cincinnati, OH: Cincinnati Art Museum, 2007.
Cirlot, Juan Eduardo, A Dictionary of Symbols, 2nd
ed. trans. Jack Sage (New York, NY:
Philosophical Library, 1971), 50.
Clubbe, John, “Cincinnati and the Great West: The case of Henry Farny,” ANQ: A Quarterly
Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews, 9, no. 4 (1996).
Flynn, Ed, “Something About the Career of the Eminent Cincinnati Artists,” Cincinnati
Commercial Gazette (Cincinnati, OH), March 14, 1893.
Meyn, Susan Labry, “The Artists as Indian Storyteller,” in Henry Farny Paints the Far West,
edited by Susan Meyn, 36-71. Cincinnati, OH: Cincinnati Art Museum, 2007.
Schimmel, Julie, “Images of the Dispossessed,” in Henry Farny Paints the Far West, edited by
Susan Meyn, 11-35. Cincinnati, OH: Cincinnati Art Museum, 2007.
Sidelinger, Stephen J., Color Manual (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc, 1985), 74.
Smalley, Eugene V., “The Upper Missouri and the Great Falls,” The Century Magazine 35, no. 3
(January 1888): 417.
“Today in History,” History.com, February 8, 2013, http://www.history.com/this-day-in-
history/cleveland-signs-devastating-dawes-act-into-law. November 19, 2013.
Toensing, Gale Courey, “The Dawes Act Started U.S. Land Grab of Native Territory,”
IndianCountryTodayMediaNetwork.com, February 8, 2012,
http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/article/the-dawes-act-started-the-u.s.-land-
grab-of-native-territory-96582.
Unknown Author, “Suspicious Guests,” Harper’s Weekly, February 1887, 94-97.