The Mary Lone Bear portraits are painted after two photographic portraits taken of her by Gertrude Kasebier in the 1890’s. The photography of this era represents the emergence of the medium as an art form. It is the new image-making technique of the modern industrial age. In this historical moment of so much upheaval and dissonance, the dichotomy between the old world and the new mechanical one is captured, in minute details, by the early practitioners of photography.  

Kasebier is one such entrepreneur — one of the first female photographers, making a body of work dealing with specifically feminine themes. The portraits are among a larger group of images taken of the first Americans, as seen through the eyes (and lens) of a subsequent, inevitably dominant, immigrant population identifying themselves as American also. 

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Mary Lone Bear was part of a group of Sioux performers traveling with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. As motherhood and children were among her favorite subjects, Kasebier pursued photographing Sioux children in the encampment. Because of local Sioux legend maintaining that to make a portrait of a child would ensure their imminent death, she found it difficult to secure sittings. However, because of her long-standing relationship with the Sioux traveling with the Buffalo Bill troupe and the Lone Bear family, she was ultimately able to take several portraits of Mary Lone Bear. The girl died suddenly six weeks later. In ‘society,’ Kasebier remarked how after that, the Sioux mothers would “fairly go off running with their children when the photographers would enter the encampment….” 

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