Charles Bird King

King was born September 26, 1785, in Newport, Rhode Island, to Deborah (Bird) and Zebulon King, a sea captain. He began his training under the Newport artist Samuel King before moving to New York at about age fifteen to apprentice with the portraitist Edward Savage, working in Savage's studio and gallery from roughly 1800 to 1805. In 1806 King traveled to London, where he studied at the Royal Academy of Arts under its president, Benjamin West, remaining in England until 1812. No degree or diploma from this period is documented; his training followed the apprenticeship and academy model standard for artists of the era.

After returning to the United States, King worked in Baltimore and Philadelphia before settling permanently in Washington, D.C., around 1818 to 1819. He opened his own gallery of paintings there in 1824 and built a portrait practice among the capital's political class, painting figures including John Quincy Adams, John C. Calhoun, Henry Clay, and Daniel Webster. His best known body of work is the series of Native American delegation portraits he painted for federal officials, including Thomas L. McKenney, which later formed the basis of the lithographed McKenney and Hall publication History of the Indian Tribes of North America. He also painted still lifes and occasional genre scenes in addition to his portrait work.

King died March 18, 1862, in Washington, D.C., at age seventy six. He bequeathed part of his estate, including his personal library and a number of paintings, to the Redwood Library and Athenaeum in Newport; some of these works were later dispersed into private and institutional hands.

Institutional recognition of King has centered on his historical role rather than on any documented major prize; no major awards are confirmed for him, and his standing rests instead on federal commissions, museum exhibition history, and later scholarly attention. Modern scholarship treats his Native American portraits as a document of early nineteenth century US Indian policy and Indigenous leadership as much as a body of paintings, a status reinforced by the 1977 National Collection of Fine Arts exhibition catalogue The Paintings of Charles Bird King, 1785 to 1862 and by the Smithsonian's long custodianship of the McKenney and Hall lithographs made from his originals. No verbatim, attributable critical quotation from a named critic in a major outlet could be confirmed for this profile.

King's market activity is real but modest and thinly documented. Artprice records roughly 105 public auction appearances for the artist, concentrated in the United States and the United Kingdom, though its detailed price rankings sit behind a paid subscription. Appraisily's aggregated data, updated in April 2026, put King's realized prices mostly in a range of about USD 75 to 1,200, with a median near USD 488 to 650. Invaluable and LiveAuctioneers list further lots, including a portrait of President Monroe offered through Davis Brothers Auction, but realized prices for these are not publicly visible. No source consulted for this profile establishes a clear, well documented all-time auction record for King, so no single figure is presented here as his record price.

There is no catalogue raisonne for Charles Bird King, and the destruction of many original Native American portraits in an 1865 fire means that surviving works, period copies, and derivative lithographs coexist in the market, so provenance and curatorial review matter more than usual. No gallery or estate currently represents him; his paintings surface through museums, historical societies, and secondary-market dealers and auction houses rather than a managed primary market. Documented sale prices found for this profile are modest, and the absence of a verified, high-confidence all-time record means collectors should treat any single sale result, high or low, as a data point rather than a benchmark.