Did Americans Mixed European Art Into Theirs in 1830
One day in 1805, a nine-twelvemonth-one-time boy exploring the woods forth the Susquehanna River in southcentral New York came face-to-face with an Oneida Indian. The boy froze, terrified. Towering over him, the Indian lifted a hand in friendship. The male child never forgot the encounter or the man's kindness. The experience may well have shaped George Catlin's lifework.
Today Indians from nearly l tribes are gathered in the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington. There are Sioux, Crow, Kickapoo, Comanche, and many more, resplendent in full tribal apparel. The faces of famous chiefs mix with those of young women and medicine men. A huge tepee sits in the middle of the gathering, and the audio of stampeding buffalo wafts through the galleries. Hundreds of paintings adorn the walls, accompanied by displays of artifacts—a buffalo headdress, arrows, beaded garments. At the centre of it all is a alone white man—part showman, office artist—who devoted his life to preserving, in his words, "the looks and community of the vanishing races of native man in America."
In "George Catlin and His Indian Gallery" (through January 19, 2003), hundreds of stark, elementary portraits stare impassively at visitors. The evidence, which besides includes Catlin's renderings of Indian rituals and landscapes of the prairie he traveled by steamboat, horseback and canoe in the 1830s, marks the first time in more a century that Catlin's paintings and the items he nerveless have been exhibited together in the manner he displayed them (1837-1850) in salons along the Eastern Seaboard and in London, Paris and Brussels. The artist, who was both heralded and criticized while he was alive, died in 1872 wondering what would happen to his gallery. "In his time, Catlin was considered a B painter, simply he was a complex and fascinating figure," says the showroom's cocurator George Gurney. "His collection is the largest of pre-photographic material of Native Americans. Information technology'south an incredible tape."
Though not the first creative person to pigment American Indians, Catlin was the first to picture them so extensively in their ain territories and i of the few to portray them as boyfriend human beings rather than savages. His more realistic approach grew out of his appreciation for a people who, he wrote, "had been invaded, their morals corrupted, their lands wrested from them, their customs changed, and therefore lost to the world." Such empathy was uncommon in 1830, the year the federal Indian Removal Act forced Southeastern tribes to motility to what is now Oklahoma forth the disastrous "Trail of Tears."
Catlin had little or no formal grooming as an creative person, but he grew up hearing tales of Indians from settlers and from his ain mother, who at age vii had been abducted, along with her mother, by Iroquois during a raid along the Susquehanna in 1778. They were soon released unharmed, and Polly Catlin ofttimes told her son about the experience.
Despite a talent for cartoon, Catlin (the 5th of 14 children) followed the importunings of his father, Putnam Catlin, and studied police. In 1820, he prepare a practice almost Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, where he had been born in 1796 (though the family moved to a farm 40 miles away in New York when he was an infant). But he found himself sketching judges, juries and "culprits" in court, and after a few years he sold his police books and moved to Philadelphia to try his hand as an artist.
He earned commissions to pigment the leading figures of the day, including Sam Houston and Dolley Madison, merely struggled to notice a larger purpose to his work. "My mind was continually reaching for some co-operative or enterprise of the art, on which to devote a whole lifetime of enthusiasm," he wrote in his memoirs. He plant it circa 1828, when a delegation of Indians stopped in Philadelphia en road to Washington, D.C. Absorbed by "their classic beauty," Catlin then began searching for Indian subjects. He felt that "civilization"—particularly whiskey and smallpox—was wiping them out, and he vowed that "nothing curt of the loss of my life, shall prevent me from visiting their country, and of becoming their historian." Although recently married to Clara Gregory, the daughter of a prominent Albany, New York, family, Catlin packed upward his paints in 1830, left his new wife and headed due west. (The Catlins, by all accounts, adored each other, and Catlin was constantly torn betwixt devotion to his family, which in time would include 4 children, and his creative ambitions.)
St. Louis was and so the edge of the Western frontier, and Catlin wasn't there long earlier he wrangled a meeting with the city's well-nigh illustrious denizen, Gen. William Clark. Having already explored the Louisiana Purchase with Meriwether Lewis, Clark was and then the government's Superintendent of Indian Diplomacy for Western tribes. Catlin presented his early portraits to the general and asked for Clark'southward aid in making contact with Indians in the West. Clark was skeptical at get-go, just Catlin convinced him of the sincerity of his quest. That summer, Clark took Catlin some 400 miles up the Mississippi River to FortCrawford, where several tribes—the Sauk, Fox and Sioux among them—were having a quango. Surrounded by gruff soldiers and somber Indians, whose customs were largely a mystery, Catlin took out his brushes and went to work. He would stay in the Westward vi years, though he returned almost winters to his family.
During those years, he painted 300 portraits and nearly 175 landscapes and ritual scenes. Back in New York Metropolis in 1837, he displayed them salon-style, stacked floor to ceiling, ane above the other—row later row of faces identified by name and number—an system to which the Renwick has been largely faithful. More than than a century and a half later, there remains something startling and immediate about the faces. At first glance, they seem condemning, as if daring united states of america to look at them without guilt. Merely after contemplating them awhile, they appear less forbidding. Catlin called his gallery a "collection of Nature'south dignitaries," and dignity indeed makes certain individuals stand up out. A stately Chief Kee-o-kuk of the Sauk and Play a trick on proudly holds tomahawk, blanket and staff. La-dóo-ke-a (Buffalo Bull), a Pawnee warrior, poses commandingly in full ceremonial paint. Catlin's landscapes are as evocative, depicting virgin rivers and rolling hills equally if from the air.
Throughout Catlin's career, journalists tended to praise his work fifty-fifty equally some fine art critics dismissed him as an "American primitive," calling his artistry "scarce in drawing, perspective and finish." More than controversial was his attitude toward people most Americans then regarded as savages. Catlin denounced the term, calling it "an abuse of the give-and-take, and the people to whom it is applied." He praised Indians as "honest, hospitable, faithful . . . " and criticized the authorities and fur traders alike for their treatment of natives. Indian society, he wrote, "has become degraded and impoverished, and their character changed past civilized teaching, and their worst passions inflamed . . . by the abuses practiced amidst them."
If Catlin alive stirred controversy for his championing of Native Americans, today he is as likely to be seen as an exploiter of them. "A native person is challenged, I remember, non to feel on some level a profound resentment toward Catlin," says W. Richard West, manager of the Smithsonian'south National Museum of the American Indian and himself a member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes. "His obsession with depicting Indians has an extremely invasive undertone to it." As for Catlin's relentless promotion of his gallery, West adds, "There's no question . . . he was exploiting Indians and the West as a article. On the other mitt, he was far ahead of his time in his empathy for Indians. Catlin swam confronting the tide to bring to light information about the Indians that depicts them accurately every bit worthy human being beings and worthy cultures."
And what did the men and women who posed for Catlin remember of their portraits? Reactions to Catlin's work varied from tribe to tribe. Sioux medicine men predicted dire consequences for those whose souls he captured on canvas, yet Blackfoot medicine men readily immune themselves to be painted. The Mandan, awed by Catlin's ability to render likenesses, chosen him Medicine White Man. Sometimes his portraits stirred upwards problem. In one case among the Hunkpapa Sioux on the Missouri River, he painted Chief Piffling Conduct in profile. When the portrait was nearly finished, a rival saw it and taunted, "[The artist] knows yous are but half a man, for he has painted simply half of your confront!" The master ignored the barb, and when the portrait was done, he presented Catlin with a buckskin shirt decorated with porcupine quills. But the insult led to an intertribal war that claimed many lives. Some Sioux blamed Catlin and condemned him to decease, but by then he had moved farther upriver.
In his six years on the prairie, Catlin survived debilitating fevers that killed his military escorts. (He later on touted his travels in long-winded accounts published every bit travelogues.) Though nearly of his early on work was undertaken within a few hundred miles of St. Louis, i journey took him to a place few white men had gone before. In the spring of 1832, he secured a booth on the steamboat Yellowstone, well-nigh to embark from St. Louis on a journey 2,000 miles up the Missouri River. Steaming into each Indian settlement, the Yellowstone fired its cannon, terrifying natives, who barbarous to the ground or sacrificed animals to appease their gods. Catlin was mesmerized past the "soulmelting scenery." He watched not bad herds of buffalo, antelope and elk roaming "a vast country of light-green fields, where the men are all red." In 3 months on the Upper Missouri, working with great speed, Catlin executed no fewer than 135 paintings, sketching figures and faces, leaving details to be finished after. In July, near what is now Bismarck, North Dakota, he became i of the few white men ever to detect the torturous fertility ritual of the Mandan tribe known equally O-kee-pa, which required young men to exist suspended from the top of the medicine lodge by ropes anchored to barbs skewered in their chests. When displayed five years after, Catlin's paintings of the ceremony drew skepticism. "The scenes described by Catlin existed well-nigh entirely in the fertile imagination of that gentleman," a scholarly periodical observed. Though Catlin was unable to approve his observations—smallpox had all but wiped out the Mandan non long after his visit—subsequent research confirmed his stark renderings.
In 1836, despite the violent protests of Sioux elders, Catlin insisted on visiting a sacred, red-stone quarry in southwestern Minnesota that provided the Sioux with the bowls for their ceremonial pipes. No Indian would escort him, and fur traders, angry most his letters in newspapers condemning them for corrupting the Indians, as well refused. So Catlin and a companion traveled 360 miles round-trip on horseback. The unique red pipestone he found there today bears the name catlinite. "Man feels hither the thrilling sensation, the forcefulness of illimitable freedom," Catlin wrote, "there is poetry in the very air of this place."
Except for his run-in over the quarry, Catlin maintained splendid relations with his various hosts. They escorted him through hostile areas and invited him to feasts of dog meat, beaver tail and buffalo natural language. "No Indian ever betrayed me, struck me with a blow, or stole from me a shilling'due south worth of my property. . . ," he after wrote. Past 1836, his last year in the West, Catlin had visited 48 tribes. He would spend the rest of his life trying to market his piece of work, leading him to the brink of ruin.
On September 23, 1837, the New YorkCommercial Advertiser announced the opening of an exhibit featuring lectures by Catlin, Indian portraits, "likewise as Splendid Costumes—Paintings of their villages—Dances—Buffalo Hunts—Religious Ceremonies, etc." Access at Clinton Hall in New York Metropolis was 50 cents, and crowds of people lined up to pay information technology. When the show closed afterward three months, the creative person took it to cities along the Eastward Coast. But afterward a year, omnipresence began to dwindle, and Catlin cruel on difficult times. In 1837, he tried to sell his gallery to the federal government, but Congress dawdled. And then in November 1839, with Clara expecting their second child and promising to bring together him the following year, Catlin packed his gallery, including a buffalo-hide tepee and two alive bears, and sailed for England.
In London, Brussels, and at the Louvre in Paris, he packed houses with his "Wild W" testify. He hired local actors to whoop in feathers and war paint and pose in tableaux vivants. In time he was joined by several groups of Indians (21 Ojibwe and 14 Iowa) who were touring Europe with promoters. Such luminaries as George Sand, Victor Hugo and Charles Baudelaire admired Catlin's artistry. Just general audiences preferred the alive Indians, especially after Catlin convinced the Ojibwe and the Iowa to reenact hunts, dances, even scalpings. In 1843, Catlin was presented to Queen Victoria in London, and ii years later, to King Louis-Philippe in France. But renting halls, transporting eight tons of paintings and artifacts, and providing for his Indian entourage—as well as his family, which by 1844 included 3 daughters and a son—kept the painter perpetually in debt. In 1845, in Paris, Clara, his devoted married woman of 17 years, contracted pneumonia and died. And then the Ojibwe got smallpox. Two died; the remainder went back to the plains. The next year his 3-year-old son, George, succumbed to typhoid.
In 1848, Catlin and his daughters returned to London, where he tried to drum up interest in installing his gallery on a ship—a floating "Museum of Mankind"—that would visit seaports effectually the world. But his dream came to nothing. He lectured on California's gold rush and sold copies of his paintings, using the originals as collateral for loans. In 1852, his funds exhausted, the 56-year-old Catlin was thrown into a London debtor's prison. His brother-in-law came to take Catlin's immature daughters back to America. The dejected artist later would write that he had "no other means on earth than my hands and my brush, and less than one-half a life, at best, before me." He once again offered to sell his gallery (which Senator Daniel Webster had called "more important to united states of america than the ascertaining of the South Pole, or anything that tin can be discovered in the Dead Sea . . . ") to the U.S. government. But Congress idea the price too steep, fifty-fifty when Catlin lowered it from $65,000 to $25,000. Finally, tardily that summertime, Joseph Harrison, a wealthy Pennsylvania railroad tycoon for whom Catlin had secured a painting past the American historical artist Benjamin Due west, paid Catlin'southward debts, acquired his gallery for $20,000 and shipped it from London to Philadelphia. It sat there in Harrison's boiler manufacturing plant, while Catlin—who had repaired to Paris with a scattering of watercolors and a few copies of his originals that he had hidden from his creditors—set out to rebuild his life, and his gallery. From 1852 to 1860, he bounced betwixt Europe, the Pacific Northwest and South and Fundamental America painting Indians from the Amazon to Patagonia. Or did he? Some scholars, dubious because of the wildness of the accounts and the lack of documentation, doubt that he left Europe at all. Inany example, by 1870 the dogged artist had completed 300 paintings of South American Indians and had re-created from sketches some 300 copies of his original Indian Gallery portraits. "Now I am George Catlin again," he wrote his blood brother merely before returning to America in 1870. He exhibited his "Cartoon Gallery," as he called the copies and his South American and other later works, in 1871 in New York City, simply it did not draw crowds. The evidence, even so, earned Catlin a powerful ally when it moved to the Smithsonian Institution after that year.
Although Smithsonian Secretary Joseph Henry thought Catlin'southward paintings had "fiddling value as works of art," he needed them: a burn had simply destroyed nearly of the Smithsonian'southward collection of Indian paintings (works by John Mix Stanley and Charles Bird King). Henry offered Catlin both back up and a home. For nine months, the artist, in his mid-70s, white-bearded and walking with a cane, lived in the SmithsonianCastle. In November 1872, Catlin left Washington to exist with his daughters in New Bailiwick of jersey. He died there two months later on at age 76. Among his final words were, "What volition happen to my gallery?" Seven years afterward his death, Harrison's widow gave the works caused past her husband (some 450 of Catlin's original paintings and enough buckskin and fur, war clubs, pipes, and more, to fill a third of a freight car) to the Smithsonian. The gallery was displayed there for 7 years starting in 1883—the final comprehensive public show of both artifacts and paintings until this autumn. Most of the works nowat the Renwick are originals, but there are also some copies from his Cartoon Collection, which was somewhen returned to his daughters and after purchased past collector Paul Mellon, who gave almost of it to the National Gallery of Fine art.
Catlin'due south reputation remains as mixed today as always. "He may end upwards being regarded as a B painter," says cocurator Gurney, "but his best portraits comprise a vitality and directnessthat equal almost anyone's." His greater contribution, undoubtedly, was his betoken part in helping to modify the perception of Native Americans. "Art may mourn when these people are swept from the globe," he wrote, "and the artists of future ages may look in vain for another race so picturesque in their costumes, their weapons, their colours, their manly games, and their hunt."
Source: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/george-catlins-obsession-72840046/
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