Sheheke's Wife, Yellow Corn

Sheheke's Wife, Yellow Corn (1807)¹
by Charles Balthazar Julien Fevret de Saint Memin
Pencil and charcoal on paper; 21-1/4 by 15-1/4 inches.

According to an observer at a New Year's Day celebration at Washington City in 1807, Yellow Corn had "pretty features, a pale yellowish hue, bunches of ear-rings, and her hair divided in the middle, a red line running right across from the back part of the forehead."²

--Joseph Mussulman

1. The artist himself erroneously labeled the portrait, at the left edge, jeune indienne des iowas du missoury--"Indian girl of the Iowas of the Missouri." Ellen G. Miles, Saint-Memin and the Neoclassical Profile Portrait in America (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994), 434–35.

2. Ibid., p. 146.