Wooden Indian c. 1937

William Kerby made this watercolour drawing of a wooden Indian at some point in the 20th century. The orange and green and grey colour palette gives it a slightly cartoonish quality, as if it’s a character in a play. I wonder, did Kerby find this wooden Indian somewhere and then try to capture its likeness? I love the way he's tried to render the texture of the feathers, with these soft brown strokes, and you can imagine the actual object must have been really striking. The rendering is quite flat and yet it manages to convey three-dimensionality. It’s interesting to think about the wooden Indian as an art object in itself. These figures were often used to advertise tobacco shops, so in a way this painting is an image *of* an image. Thinking about this, I wonder if the wooden Indian that Kerby saw was brightly coloured like this, or whether the artist added in a few of his own creative flourishes! Artists are always in conversation with each other, so it’s fun to think about how the artistic choices of one can inspire another, again and again.