Born in Alsace Lorraine, France, Henry Farny became a well-known American illustrator and painter, especially for quiet aspects of Indian life such as campfire scenes. Farny, working in a highly realistic, detailed style, had a deep regard for Indians as individuals, and often depicted them in an harmonious environment. Only a few of his paintings show Indians in dramatic action. He particularly painted the Sioux Indians and, given the Indian name for “Long Boots”, was adopted into their tribe.
His work reflected the late 19th and early turn-of-the century romanticizing of the American Indian in the West, but differed from the approach of Charles Russell and Frederic Remington who showed conflict between Indians and Whites. Farny’s primary theme was Indians living in peace amongst themselves during a period when their culture was dying out. “He neither glorified nor denigrated it. . . .Because of his patient observation of the Indian way of life, much has been preserved which might otherwise have been lost.” (Zellman 418)
His most prolific period was between 1890 and 1906, and most of his paintings were small in size, and finely finished. His primary medium was gouache, although he also worked in watercolor, oil, and ink and did an occasional bronze sculpture. In addition to his artwork of western subjects, he was the illustrator of McGuffey readers, the school textbooks that were standard in the public schools in the late 19th century.
As an adult in the prime of his career, he was a large man physically, over six feet tall, “broad shouldered, bulky in the waistline, an inveterate storyteller, renowned as an after-dinner speaker, a man with innumerable friends, alive with interest in life.” (Taft 217). Among his close friends were General Ulysses S. Grant, President Theodore Roosevelt and General Nelson Miles, and abroad he was recognized in 1889 with a medal at the Paris exhibition of 1889 for one of his Indian subjects.
Farny was the son of a political activist from France who, as a Republican, fled when Napoleon came to power. At age 5, he settled with his family in the pine forests of western Pennsylvania at the headwaters of the Allegheny River, and lived closely and on friendly terms with the Seneca Indians. In 1859, he and his family, traveling by raft down the river, moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, where Farny studied and did lithography including Civil War views that could be sold. By the time he was eighteen, a two-page spread of Cincinnati by him was published in Harper’s Weekly.