Reviewed by Basil S. Yamey
The London School of Economics and Political Science
At the right, an Indian warrior has arrived. He has dis-mounted from his horse and has a pistol in his hand. At the left, he is seen attacking a person lying on a bed.
What has this to do with accounting or accounting history? The only link, and a tenuous one it is, is that what I have described is the subject matter of a painting made on a page of an account book, the ruled lines in this example helping to unify the two successive scenes. The painting was the production of a Southern Cheyenne artist called Howling Wolf, and was made around the middle or the nineteenth century. It is shown as one of 32 color plates in Professor Szabo’s delightfully illustrated book, which also contains 77 black-and-white reproductions.
Professor Szabo explains how it came about that in the nineteenth century artistically inclined Plains Indians began to paint or draw on the pages of account books. They also used other available sheets of paper, such as those of ruled exercise books. Works of art of this kind have come to be known as “ledger art.” She traces the history of ledger art in detail, and concentrates in the second half on the work of Howling Wolf, perhaps the most remarkable of the artists. The author shows how ledger art, in terms of style and subject-matter, developed from traditional artistic work executed mainly on hides. She shows also how themes and treatment came to be modified partly because of the nature of the material used but mainly because of changes in the social and economic milieu in which artists and their fellow tribesmen lived and worked. She also stresses the artistic personalities of the leading practitioners of ledger art.
I enjoyed the book and its illustrations, and strongly recommend it.
Howling Wolf and the other ledger artists were not the first to produce works of art on account book pages. For example, Rembrandt and Guercino, working in the Old World some two hundred years earlier, also used account book pages for some of their drawings. It is interesting that their use of such material should have been followed unwittingly by artists working in a quite different artistic tradition in the New World.
