Artful Insights: Charles Deas

Monday, February 10, 2025, 3:00 p.m.

Charles Deas is known as a painter of dramatic and romanticized Western scenes, but his career was cut short by his struggles with mental illness. Because of this, paintings by Deas are rare. In 1840, at the age of 22, he traveled West, having been inspired by an exhibition of the paintings of the Mandan people by George Catlin (also in the Anschutz Collection). On this trip he was attached to an Army expedition and regularly engaged with Pawnee people, who along with trappers and mountain men, became the subject matter of much of his work. In 1848, he was committed to the Bloomingdale Asylum for the Insane. He continued to occasionally paint and exhibit his work at the National Academy of Design and the American Art-Union during the confinement. But even before Deas died in 1867, his art had effectively disappeared. Although there are at least 100 known works by Deas, only about half of them can be located. Learn about the fascinating life, troubled mind, and extraordinary art of Charles Deas at this Artful Insight.

Image credit: Charles Deas, Long Jakes, “the Rocky Mountain Man”, 1844