Alfred L. Bush

Bush discovered the lost 1800 portrait of Jefferson by Rembrandt Peale, which was announced in his 1962 monograph.

This image of the president has since eclipsed all others and is the painting most familiar to the public; it now hangs in the White House and is featured on the Jefferson nickel.

Alfred Lavern Bush (born January 5, 1933) was an American curator, writer, and editor.

He was Curator of Western Americana at the Princeton University Library.

Born in Denver, Colorado, into a fifth-generation Mormon family, Bush graduated from Brigham Young University in 1957, where he continued graduate studies in archaeology before joining the Fifth University Archaeological Society excavations at the Maya site of Aguacatal in western Campeche, Mexico, in the winter of 1958.

The following summer he was a student at the Institute for Archival and Historical Management at Radcliffe College.

A mountain climber in his youth, Bush climbed in the Colorado Rockies, the Tetons, and the Swiss Alps.

He subsequently served as curator of the American Alpine Club’s museum in New York City.

Bush served in the Medical Service Corps of the US Army in the Panama Canal Zone during the Korean War.

Bush's legally adopted son, Paul Tioux, is an enrolled member of Tesuque Pueblo.

Tioux's three daughters have given birth to nine children, Bush's great-grandchildren.

From 1958 through 1962 Bush was an editor of the Papers of Thomas Jefferson.

Bush was an editor of the Papers of Thomas Jefferson, where his study of Jefferson images produced The Life Portraits of Thomas Jefferson (1962).

He was the author of numerous books and scholarly articles, many of which pertain to Native Americans.

His publication The Life Portraits of Thomas Jefferson (1962) has subsequently gone through several editions, including two published by the National Gallery of Art, in The Eye of Thomas Jefferson and Jefferson and the Arts, both edited by William Howard Adams.

Bush served for three decades on the editorial board of the Princeton University Library Chronicle, and was its editor from 1962 to 1977.

In the 1970s he aided Princeton's recruitment of American Indian students and acted as their undergraduate advisor.

Bush proposed and in 1971 created an exhibition at the Grolier Club in New York of ancient Maya hieroglyphic texts, mostly on pottery.

The catalog by Michael D. Coe revolutionized the study of texts on Maya ceramics and accelerated the eventual decipherment of the ancient American writing system.

The show also brought to light for the first time what purported to be the fourth surviving Maya codex.

In 1971 he taught Art of the American Indian at Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut.

He was awarded a fellowship to spend a sabbatical year at the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

He is also the founding editor of Princeton History, first issued in 1971.

In retirement Bush advised institutions facing issues of repatriation of American Indian remains and artifacts.

He also served on the visiting committee of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

Bush taught courses at Princeton University on Native American subjects in the departments of English, Art, and Archaeology, and in 1981 a course on Mayan Literature in the department of Anthropology.

After the 1990 enactment of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act he also served as Princeton University's Curator for Repatriation.

Referred to as the Grolier Codex, it is now recognized as the earliest surviving book from ancient America, dating to the 11th century.

During Bush's forty years as Curator of Western Americana at Princeton University Library, he enlarged the size of the collection tenfold and added a collection of photographs of American Indians and an archival component of papers on twentieth-century American Indian Affairs.

Highly controversial, this book went through extensive tests over the next half century and only in September 2018 was it declared genuine by the Mexican authorities.