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Mah-to-toh-pe by George
Catlin 1833
George Catlin painting a chief, at the base of the Rocky Mountains,
1841
The White Cloud, Head Chief of the Iowas
George Catlin (July 26, 1796
– December 23, 1872) was an American painter,
author and traveler who specialized in portraits of
Native Americans in the Old
West.
Biography
Catlin was born in Wilkes-Barre,
Pennsylvania. As a child growing up in Pennsylvania, Catlin spent many
hours hunting, fishing, and looking for American Indian artifacts. His
fascination with Native Americans was kindled by his mother, who told him
stories of the Western Frontier and how she was captured by a tribe when she
was a young girl. Years later, a group of Native Americans came through Philadelphia dressed
in their colorful comstumes and made quite an impression on Catlin. Following
a brief career as a lawyer, he produced two major collections of paintings of
American Indians and published a series of books chronicling his travels among
the native peoples of North, Central and South America. Claiming his interest
in America’s 'vanishing race' was sparked by a visiting American Indian
delegation in Philadelphia, he set out to record the appearance and customs of
America’s native people.
Catlin began his journey in 1830 when he accompanied General William
Clark on a diplomatic mission
up the Mississippi
River into Native
American territory. St.
Louis became Catlin’s base of operations for five trips he took between 1830 and 1836,
eventually visiting fifty tribes.
Two years later he ascended the Missouri
River over 3000 km to Fort
Union, where he spent several weeks among indigenous people still
relatively untouched by
European civilization.
He visited eighteen tribes, including the Pawnee, Omaha,
and
Ponca in the south and the Mandan, Hidatsa,Cheyenne, Crow, Assiniboine,
and [Blackfeet] to the north. There, at the edge of the frontier, he produced
the most vivid and penetrating portraits of his career. Later trips along the
Arkansas, Red and Mississippi rivers
as well as visits to Florida and
the Great
Lakes resulted in over 500 paintings and a substantial collection of
artifacts.
When Catlin returned east in 1838, he assembled these paintings and numerous
artifacts into his Indian
Gallery and began delivering
public lectures which drew on his personal recollections of life among the
American Indians. Catlin traveled with his Indian Gallery to major cities such
as
Pittsburgh, Cincinnati,
and New
York. He hung his paintings “salon style”—side by side and one above
another—to great effect. Visitors identified each painting by the number on
the frame as listed in Catlin’s catalogue. Soon afterwards he began a lifelong
effort to sell his collection to the U.S. government. The touring Indian
Gallery did not attract the paying public Catlin needed to stay financially
sound, and [Congress] rejected his initial petition to purchase the works, so
in 1839 Catlin took his collection across the Atlantic for
a tour of European capitals.
Catlin the showman and entrepreneur initially
attracted crowds to his Indian Gallery in
London, Brussels,
and Paris.
The French criticCharles
Baudelaire remarked on Catlin’s
paintings, “M. Catlin has captured the proud, free character and noble
expression of these splendid fellows in a masterly way.”
Catlin’s dream was to sell his Indian Gallery to the U.S. government so that
his life’s work would be preserved intact. His continued attempts to persuade
various officials inWashington,
D.C. failed. He was forced to
sell the original Indian Gallery, now 607 paintings, due to personal debts in
1852. Industrialist Joseph Harrison took possession of the paintings and
artifacts, which he stored in a factory in Philadelphia, as security. Catlin
spent the last 20 years of his life trying to re-create his collection. This
second collection of paintings is known as the "Cartoon Collection" since the
works are based on the outlines he drew of the works from the 1830s.
In 1841 Catlin published Manners,
Customs, and Condition of the North American Indians, in two volumes, with
about 300 engravings. Three years later he published 25 plates, entitled
Catlin’s North American Indian Portfolio, and, in 1848, Eight
Years’ Travels and Residence in Europe. From 1852 to 1857 he traveled
through South and Central America and later returned for further exploration
in the Far West. The record of these later years is contained in Last
Rambles amongst the Indians of the Rocky Mountains and the Andes(1868) and My
Life among the Indians (ed. by
N. G. Humphreys, 1909). In 1872, Catlin traveled to Washington, D.C. at the
invitation of Joseph
Henry, the first secretary of the
Smithsonian. Until his death later that year in Jersey
City, New Jersey, Catlin worked in a studio in the Smithsonian “Castle.”
Harrison’s widow donated the original Indian Gallery—more than 500 works—to
the Smithsonian in 1879.
The nearly complete surviving set of Catlin’s first Indian Gallery painted in
the 1830s is now part of the Smithsonian American Art Museum's collection.
Some 700 sketches are in the American Museum of Natural History, New York
City.
The accuracy of some of Catlin's observations has been questioned. He claimed
to be the first white man to see the Minnesota pipestone quarries, and
pipestone was named catlinite. Catlin exaggerated various features of the
site, and his boastful account of his visit aroused his critics, who disputed
his claim of being the first white man to investigate the quarry.[1] Previous
recorded white visitors include the Groselliers and Radisson,
Father
Louis Hennepin, Baron LaHonton and others. Lewis
and Clark noted the pipestone
quarry in their journals in 1805. Fur trader Philander
Prescott had written another
account of the area in 1831. [2]
Family
Many historians and descendants believe George Catlin had two families; his
acknowledged family on the east coast of the United
States, but also a family farther west, started with a Native American
woman.
Two other artists of the Old West related to George Catlin by family
bloodlines are
Frederic Remington and Earl
W. Bascom.
Fiction
Larry McMurtry includes Catlin
as a character in his The
Berrybender Narratives series
of novels. In the historical novel The
Children of First Man, James
Alexander Thom recreates the
time Catlin spent with the Mandan people.