Joseph Wright of Derby (1734-1797) (after )The Widow of an Indian Chief Watching the Arms of Her Deceased Husband. 1789. Black Manner by J. R. Smith. 558 x 455. Printed in brown bistré. Beautiful and rare laid proof. Light freckles, dusting and small halos of dampness. The board cut fractured along the right edge. Tiny missing at the bottom of the sheet. A few tiny white dots on the surface. All margins. Frame. The original painting, dated 1783-1785, is kept at the Derby Museum and Art Gallery (United Kingdom). The black engraver John Raphael Smith (1752-1812) was like the painter from this town. Our engraving dates from the same year as the birth of the writer James Fenimore Cooper, author of The Last of the Mohicans (published in 1826). The painting helped to forge a certain Rousseauist representation of the "good savage" which contaminated literature and the arts. Thus in Chateaubriand, who at the age of twenty-three spent eight months in America, a work of fiction, Les Natchez (1796-1797), was produced, which was the subject of a painting by Delacroix in 1835.