Five Points by George Catlin, 1827.

2011-03-24T11:56:00.000-07:00

GEORGE CATLIN

2011-03-18T12:30:00.001-07:00

The West exerted a strong pull on the imagination of nineteenth-century Americans. The life of the Indians, the bitter conflict between Indians and settlers, daily life in the new raw communities provided subject matter of great novelty. Many artists went west to paint Indian life. The first important painter of Indians was George Catlin (1796—1872). The works that Indian painters produced before him have only historic or ethnographic interest. George Catlin was brave enough to venture into Indian encamp¬ments and spent eight years among the Indians of the Great Plains. He was obsessed with the desire to record pictorially the still living culture of the American Indian, to "snatch from hasty oblivion... a truly lofty and noble race". With great sympathy he recorded the customs and habits of the various tribes and produced many portraits of Indian chiefs and other individuals who impressed him. He developed a swift, direct field style that enabled him to depict as many as half a dozen subjects a day.
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In general the American attitude toward the Indian before the nineteenth century had been unequivocal — the only good one was a dead one. By 1830 the Indians had either been brutally exterminated or driven beyond the Mississippi, and in the vastness of the western plains they no longer posed an immediate obstacle or threat. In their remoteness they could even be thought of in Romantic terms, as examples of natural man, even as heroic and tragically doomed. Their exoticism in appearance and mode of existence added to the Romantic interest, and there was some anthropological and ethnographic interest in their customs. Travel in Indian country was not especially dangerous, since the tribes tended to honor their treaty commitments, and travelers did not find it difficult to live among them, as the literary and visual evidence seems to indicate. Not until the white man began to move westward again did the period of Indian Wars end the short interlude of peace. After the annexation of California and the discovery of gold in 1848, the inevitable urge toward unification of the continent led to a national policy of extermination. Meanwhile those who were interested could collect their data. (...)
George Catlin became and has remained identified in the public mind as the Indian painter through his long years of devoted study, the authenticity of his observation, the great body of his production, and most of all his publications and the impassioned espousal of the Indian cause in his traveling exhibition and show. Made up of paintings, Indian costumes, and artifacts, and, at times, troupes of live Indians, the whole managed with great showmanship, the show toured the United States and Europe for fifteen years.
Born in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., George Catlin practiced law in the surrounding area before turning to miniature and portrait painting in 1821, after which he plied that trade in Philadelphia, Albany, Richmond, and Washington for almost a decade. He had been captivated by the sight of a group of Indians in full regalia in the streets of Philadelphia and, years later, wrote: "The history and customs of such a people, preserved by pictorial illustrations, are themes worthy of the lifetime of one man, and nothing short of the loss of my life shall prevent me from visiting their country, and of becoming their historian." By 1830 he was in St. Louis doing portraits of Indians, and two years later he started out with an American Fur Company party taking the first steamboat up the Missouri 2.000 miles to Fort Union. Catlin spent almost eight years among the Indians, was the first artist to penetrate the Far West, and amassed close to six hundred paintings, which * he assembled as his traveling Indian Gallery. His Letters and Notes of the Manners, Customs, and Condition of the North American Indians (1841) went through many editions and, aside from its ethnographic value, became a source book for artists who had never seen a live Indian. Conscious of the red man's doom, Catlin had made good his vow that through his art, phoenix-like, they "may rise from the 'stain of a painter's palette* ". His lack of training may actually have been a boon, for a sophisticated artist might have found the conditions under which he had to work too difficult, and those who came later and were trained could not help seeing in set formal patterns. Still, Catlin's paintings lack the intrinsic interest to match the fascination of the subject as Audubon's did. This is not to say that he lacked talent; despite his shortcomings he had an artist's eye for the dramatic sight or moment, for composition, pattern, and linear movement. His scenes of Indian life, though often not much more than short hand notations, are full of vivacity. (...) Perhaps the most effective of his works are his portraits, in which he often captured in the simplest terms the native pride and common humanity of his Indian subjects underneath their exotic trappings.
(Milton W. Brown. American Art to 1900)

2011-03-18T12:27:00.001-07:00

The Buffalo Hunt, c.1832

John Vanderlyn's "Ariadne Asleep on the Island of Naxos"

2011-01-07T12:36:00.000-08:00

Landing of Columbus, Vanderlyn

2011-01-07T12:27:00.000-08:00

Hmncenter

Five Points by George Catlin, 1827.

GEORGE CATLIN

John Vanderlyn's "Ariadne Asleep on the Island of Naxos"

Landing of Columbus, Vanderlyn