George Winter (June 10, 1809 – February 1, 1876) was an English-born landscape and portrait artist who immigrated to the United States in 1830 and became an American citizen in northern Indiana's Wabash River valley.

Winter is especially noted for his sketches, watercolors, and oil portraits that provide a visual record of the Potawatomi and Miami people in northern Indiana from 1837 to the 1840s, as well as other figures drawn from his firsthand observations on the American frontier.

"[3] His early education took place in the local schools, but he also received private instruction and planned to continue art studies in London.

In 1826 Winter moved to London, where he lived with his brother, John, and spent the next four years painting reproductions of art exhibited in the city's museum and galleries.

In addition to documenting his sketches and paintings, Winter kept a journal and made notes about the subjects of his work, as well as other details of his encounters with Native Americans and others.

Instead of continuing his observations of Native Americans after their removal to the western United States, Winter remained at Logansport to paint portraits of local residents.

[20][21] Winter hoped to make a financial profit from exhibiting and selling six large canvases he had painted from the battleground sketches he had made.

"[citation needed] The large size of the paintings suggests that they were intended for public display, but Winter's efforts to make a profit from them ultimately failed.

[22][23] Although Winter exhibited two paintings at the Cincinnati Academy in 1841, and joined the city's Western Art Union, organized in 1847, he made few sales and struggled to make a living as a painter in Logansport.

After some of Winter's possessions were seized to cover a portion of his debts, the family temporarily resided with Mary's father, Timothy Squier, who had retired to New Carlisle, Ohio.

[24] To earn additional income in the early 1850s, Winter presented a traveling "mixed media" show called "Elydoric Paintings and Dissolving Views."

[11][25] During the period 1852–58, Winter earned money to support his family by raffling off his paintings, usually at $2 per ticket, at various locations in Indiana, Iowa, and Ohio.

Winter also visited Wisconsin in 1856, and opened a studio at Burlington, Iowa, but Lafayette, Indiana, remained the main location for the distribution of his work.

[33] The collection has important historic value due to its detailed descriptions of Winter's firsthand accounts of the Potawatomi and Miami tribes in northern Indiana during the mid-nineteenth century.

[14][15][34] Winter's sketches and the subsequent portraits he painted remain the best visual record of the Potawatomi and Miami tribes in northern Indiana during the 1830s and 1840s.

Other noted artists such as George Catlin and Paul Kane depicted these tribes in other regions of the country or at a later date, following their removal west of the Mississippi River.

[35] Winter's oil paintings and watercolors depicted the likenesses of Francis Godfroy, the last war chief of the Miamis, Native American interpreter Joseph Barron, and Frances Slocum, among many others.

[14][15] It is for these reasons, rather than his artistic skill, that Winter's work remains "an important primary source for the still largely unwritten historical ethnography of the Potawatomis and Miamis.

[37] Critics also consider Winter as a minor figure on the national art scene, with a technical ability in the middle range of his contemporaries who did similar work.

[36] Some critics have also pointed out that Winter's art lacked the romantic interpretation of Native Americans who retained their own culture, which was a more popular style that appeared in the work of other artists.

[40] Slocum had feared that she would be removed from her Miami family if her origins became known, but decided to relate her story to Colonel George W. Ewing, a local trader who had come to Deaf Man's village in 1839.