Kathryn Leighton

American Kathryn Leighton was a celebrated Indian portrait and landscape painter. She attended Kimball Union Academy and graduated in 1900 from the Massachusetts Normal Art School. The same year she married attorney Edward Leighton (1876-1941), and then studied in Paris and Wien (Vienna). The couple moved to Los Angeles in 1910, where Kathryn opened a studio. Doing floral still lifes and landscapes, she repeatedly depicted her favorite subject, which was the desert in bloom. She especially painted big-screen scenes of glaciers, which resulted from trips to Glacier National Park beginning in 1923.

In 1918, Leighton started to paint American Indian portraits, many of them signed by the sitter, and this endeavor brought her international recognition. In 1926, she was introduced to the Blackfeet Indians, who adopted her into their tribe under her Indian name Anna-Tar-Kee, after she had spent several summers with them, painting portraits of the old chiefs and other prominent members of the tribe. She also painted the Sioux and Cherokee in Oklahoma and did other Indian portraits from her studio in Los Angeles. These portraits, totaling about 700, remained a valuable, lasting historical record of their customs, clothing and lore. Some of the portraits were commissioned by the Great Northern Railway for tourism advertising. Her brother Frederick Woodman (1871-1949) exhibited many of her paintings in his office as mayor of Los Angeles.

Images of Leighton’s paintings entered in the art competitions, probably oil paintings, could not be found. But there is a description of one painting in a contemporary newspaper: “Of striking interest is the portrait of The Cherokee Athlete, a distinguished Indian runner, by Kathryn W. Leighton, of Los Angeles. … This particular runner is a full-blooded Indian of magnificent physique, a graduate of the University of Oklahoma, and a leader among his people—one who is endeavoring to keep alive typical Indian costumes, and encouraging the development along racial lines of Indian Art.”