George Catlin

1796 - 1872

Biography(b Wilkes-Barre, PA, 26 July 1796; d Jersey City, NJ, 23 Dec 1872).
American painter and writer. Following a brief career as a lawyer, Catlin 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. He began his journey in 1830 when he accompanied Gen. William Clark on a diplomatic mission up the Mississippi River into Native American territory. Two years later he ascended the Missouri River over 3000 km to Ft Union, where he spent several weeks among indigenous people still relatively untouched by European civilization. There, at the edge of the frontier, he produced the most vivid and penetrating portraits of his career (e.g. Buffalo Bull’s Back Fat, Head Chief, Blood Tribe, 1832). 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 artefacts (see figs 1 and 2). In 1837 he mounted the first serious exhibition of his ‘Indian Gallery’, published his first catalogue and began delivering public lectures, which drew on his personal recollections of life among the American Indians. Soon afterwards he began a lifelong effort to sell his American Indian collection to the US government. When Congress rejected his initial petition, he took the Indian Gallery abroad and in 1840 began a European tour in London.

In 1841 Catlin published Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs, and Condition of the North American Indians, his major literary work, but only the first in a series of books documenting his travels and observations among the indigenous peoples of North and South America. When interest in the Indian Gallery waned in England, he took his collection to Paris, where it was praised by many, including Baudelaire, who found Catlin’s colours ‘intoxicating’. Confident that Congress would eventually purchase his Indian Gallery, Catlin borrowed heavily against it and in 1852 he suffered financial collapse. Dispersal of the Indian Gallery was avoided only when Joseph Harrison, an American manufacturer, reimbursed the artist’s creditors and shipped the entire collection to Philadelphia, where it was stored until donated to the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, six years after Catlin’s death.

Following his bankruptcy, Catlin lived hand to mouth for two years before he secured funds to travel to South America. There he produced paintings of indigenous South Americans that, together with new paintings of American Indians obtained on a trip up the Pacific Coast and copies of works from his original Indian Gallery, made up a second collection of over 500 pictures, which he called the ‘Cartoon Collection’. The cartoons were first shown in Brussels in 1870 and in New York the following year, but the accolades of earlier years were not repeated. Discouraged and in ill health, he accepted an invitation to install his cartoons at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, while waiting for Congress to act on his latest petition. At his death Congress had failed to act and the Cartoon Collection passed to his family. In 1965, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, acquired 351 cartoons. Taken together, the Indian Gallery, the Cartoon Collection and Catlin’s supporting publications constitute the most comprehensive record of the life of indigenous people in North and South America during the period 1830–60. Catlin’s paintings, long acknowledged as a key ethnographic resource, have only recently been discussed as compelling works of art. Often completed in haste and under adverse conditions, his finest works combine a refreshing immediacy of execution with a pervasive sympathy for the dignity of America’s native people.
[Nancy Anderson. "Catlin, George." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed September 4, 2014, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T014900.]

Person TypeIndividual

Terms