The Song of Hiawatha 1950). American landscape painters referred to the poem to add an epic dimension to their patriotic celebration of the wonders of the national landscape. Albert Bierstadt presented his sunset piece, "The Departure of Hiawatha," to Longfellow in 1868 when the poet was in England to receive an honorary degree at the University of Cambridge. Other examples include Thomas Moran's "Fiercely the Red Sun Descending, Burned His Way along the Heavens" (1875), held by the North Carolina Museum of Art, and the panoramic waterfalls of "Hiawatha and Minnehaha on their Honeymoon" (1885) by Jerome Thompson (1814 – 1886). Thomas Eakins made
The Song of Hiawatha an artistic production, Longfellow ... omitted all that aspect of the Manabozho saga which considers the culture hero as a trickster," this despite the fact that Schoolcraft had already diligently avoided what he himself called "vulgarisms." In his book on the development of the image of the Indian in American thought and literature, Pearce wrote about "The Song of Hiawatha": Apparently no connection, apart from name, exists between Longfellow's hero and the sixteenth-century Iroquois chief Hiawatha who co-founded the Iroquois League. Longfellow took the name from works by Schoolcraft, whom he acknowledged as his main source. In his notes to