Age of Revolution
George Catlin (1796–1872)
Expeditionary Art of the American West painter.
George Catlin was the American painter who gave up a law practice and a career as a society portraitist to devote himself to documenting the Native nations of North America. Largely self-taught as an artist, he was galvanized in the late 1820s by the sight of a delegation of Western Indians passing through Philadelphia, and resolved to record their appearance, dress, and customs before they were, as he feared, transformed by the advance of white settlement.
Between 1830 and 1836 he used St. Louis as his base, aided by William Clark, the Superintendent of Indian Affairs, who opened Indian country to him. In 1832 he ascended the Missouri River aboard the steamboat Yellow Stone as far as Fort Union, living among the Mandan and dozens of other Plains peoples. Over these years he visited more than forty nations and produced several hundred portraits and scenes — the body of work he called his "Indian Gallery."
Catlin toured the Gallery through eastern cities and then Europe from 1839, lecturing and publishing his two-volume Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs, and Condition of the North American Indians (1841). The core of the Indian Gallery is now held by the Smithsonian American Art Museum, while his Mandan and Plains subjects anchor the Western American collections of the Denver Art Museum's Petrie Institute and the American Museum of Western Art (Anschutz Collection). Modern scholarship values his work as the fullest surviving visual record of Plains life in the 1830s, even as it reads his romantic framing critically.
The words the record keeps using: documentary, observant, urgent, romantic, ethnographic, dignifying.
At a glance
- Lived 1796–1872
- Origin American
- Worked in New York, St. Louis, Missouri
- Era Age of Revolution
- Movements Expeditionary Art of the American West
- Mediums Oil on canvas, Watercolor
- Techniques Alla prima (wet-in-wet), Oil sketch (modello)
Works in the archive
- The Cutting Scene, Mandan O-kee-pa Ceremony, 1832 (Smithsonian American Art Museum)
Inside the Mandan medicine lodge, young men undergo the culminating ordeal of the O-kee-pa: wooden skewers driven through the flesh of chest and back, by which they are hoisted clear of the ground. Catlin was among the… - Bull Dance, Mandan O-kee-pa Ceremony, 1832 (Smithsonian American Art Museum)
In the plaza before the Mandan medicine lodge, dancers wearing whole buffalo hides and heads circle the sacred cedar 'ark' during the four-day O-kee-pa. Catlin recorded the ceremony in a sequence of canvases meant to… - Buffalo Chase, a Surround by the Hidatsa, 1832 (Smithsonian American Art Museum)
Mounted Hidatsa hunters encircle a herd of buffalo on the open plain in a 'surround,' driving the animals inward as they close for the kill. It is one of Catlin's many studies of the hunt on which Plains life depended,… - Wi-jún-jon, Pigeon's Egg Head (The Light) Going To and Returning From Washington, 1837 (Smithsonian American Art Museum)
A single canvas splits into two full-length figures of the Assiniboine man Wi-jún-jon (Pigeon's Egg Head): at left he strides toward Washington in native dress; at right he returns 'civilised,' in a military-style…
What was said
Catlin declared that the history and customs of a vanishing people, preserved in pictures, were a subject worthy of a man's whole life, and resolved to visit the tribes of the West and become their historian — recording their looks, dress, and manners before contact could change them.
Catlin wrote that he wished to rescue from oblivion the appearance and dignity of the Native nations, whom he believed the advance of civilisation was rapidly destroying, so that a truthful record of them would survive for posterity.
Against skeptics who doubted his account, Catlin insisted that his paintings and description of the Mandan O-kee-pa were an exact eyewitness record of a ceremony he alone among white men had been permitted to see, and published a dedicated volume to defend its accuracy.
Lineage
Passed on to Frederic Remington, Charles M. Russell
What would George make of your idea?
The Artiquity Studio makes a new picture in this hand's manner from a few words or a photograph — grounded in the technique, palette and subjects recorded above, and always credited "after George Catlin", never passed off as a found work. Open the Studio with George · Keep a life moment the way George would · Pictures made after George