Chronicler of a Dying Race

By A. T. Baker

With honest craft, George Catlin painted Indians as they were

Malevolent but pathetic, dying but dangerous, the buffalo looms from the canvas in all his massive black bulk, with the mythic menace of a dying Minotaur. Two linked tents frame a ceremony in a design as elegant as that on a Japanese screen. An Indian family flees from an approaching prairie fire whose stylized billows Charles Burchfield might have envied, across a field of endless prairie grass that Andrew Wyeth might have emulated. A Blackfoot chief stares at the viewer with the arrogance of long command--and the despair of one who knows his nation is doomed.

These and others of the paintings of George Catlin (1796-1872) have been specially selected and hung in the National Museum of American Art in Washington this summer by Curator William H. Truettner, with the intent of demonstrating that Catlin was not just a prime chronicler and champion of the beleaguered American Indian--which he was--but also a considerable artist in his own right.

It is a judgment that critics and public alike have withheld ever since Catlin exhibited his Indian studies in 1837 in New York City, in a hall that he rather grandiosely labeled the Indian Gallery. In his own day nobody of any consequence thought of him as a major painter--least of all Catlin himself. Even though he had established himself by the 1820s as a workaday miniaturist-portraitist in Philadelphia, he freely conceded that others were better at what he called "the limited and slavish branch of the arts in which I am wasting my life and substance for a bare living."

The turning point of Catlin's career (as he describes it with a memory notorious for its adjustments of facts to drama) came when a delegation of Indian chiefs passed through Philadelphia in 1826 on the way to Washington. Catlin was fascinated by their exotic dress, their fierce bearing and, above all, their dignity. He resolved to become their historian. As he wrote: "I have flown to their rescue--not of their lives or of their race (for they are 'doomed' and must perish), but to the rescue of their looks and their modes, at which the acquisitive world may hurl poison and every besom of destruction, and trample them down and crush them to death; yet, phoenix-like, they may rise ... and live again upon canvas."

It was an ambitious resolve, but unlike those of many another 33-year-old, it was carried out. Leaving his new, young wife behind, Catlin set out for the territory beyond the Mississippi. For six years he traveled the farthest reaches of the frontier, where a white man had about equal chances of being offered a peace pipe or getting an arrow through his throat.

His first sponsor was the redoubtable General William Clark (of Lewis and Clark fame), who took him along on a primitive steamship that pushed its way up the Missouri for 2,000 miles. Catlin returned by canoe with only two companions, clambering bluffs to sketch vistas, parlaying with chiefs to paint their portraits, draping wolf skins over his shoulders to stalk grazing buffalo on his hands and knees.

After six years of wandering, he had produced a galaxy of portraits and vignettes that dramatically changed the image of Indians held by the sophisticates of the East Coast. Catlin painted the Indians as they were--not as the noble warriors of James Fenimore Cooper's imagination nor as the skulking, treacherous killers of the settlers' fears. But even then, he staked his reputation on his faithfulness as a reporter rather than on his skill as an artist. As he wrote in a catalogue of his paintings, "Since every painting has been made from nature by my own hand--and that too when I have been paddling my canoe or leading my pack horse over and through trackless wilds, at the hazard of my life--the world will surely be kind and indulgent enough to forgive me from their present unfinished and unstudied condition as works of art."

The public took him at his word and flocked to his Indian Gallery. In a time before photography, he provided the first real glimpse of the Indian in his native habitat. The art critics, who tended to take their standards from Europe, were at best condescending--the lowly Indian and his customs were not after all fit subjects for the historical-mythological aesthetic of the times, nor did Catlin's style accord with a taste that was bemused by the misty-moist romanticism of the Hudson River school. Moreover, Catlin probably did his artistic reputation no good by organizing his "Indian Exhibition" into a traveling show, featuring himself as chief lecturer and including wigwams, authentic headdresses, costumes and even a few scalps he had brought back as souvenirs of his travels.

The cause of the vanishing Indian became an obsession that dominated the rest of Catlin's life. He pestered Congress to buy his collection, and when it declined, took the whole shebang to England. There he happily found himself feted as a celebrity and a conversationalist (trimly stocky and handsome, he had great social presence). His Indian dancers performed for Queen Victoria and later for France's King Louis Philippe. He lived grandly and, despite his success, always just beyond his means. He published two volumes of his adventures, illustrated with his own drawings and displaying an exuberant narrative style. He described the Blackfoot-Crow country as a land "where the buffaloes range with the elk and the fleet-bounding antelope; where wolves are white and bears grizzly; where the rivers are yellow ... the dogs are all wolves, women are slaves, men all lords." All this was imbued with a sympathy for the Indians shared by few of his countrymen, full as they were of their vision of manifest destiny. As an account of Indian life, his notebooks deserve comparison to Francis Parkman's more conscientious but less lively Oregon Trail.

Catlin's last years are a story of disappointed hopes, bad investments and increasingly pressing debts. In 1852 he was briefly jailed as a debtor in London. He was rescued by an American named Joseph Harrison, a manufacturer of locomotives, who paid off Catlin's creditors in exchange for his Indian paintings and artifacts. Harrison shipped the collection back to Philadelphia, where it was stowed in the basement of his boiler factory for 27 years. Catlin spent ten of those years in a small apartment in Brussels, living as a recluse and trying to recoup his fortunes with new trips to South America and to the Indian country west of the Rockies.

To reconstitute his collection, he did many rough drawings and paintings from memory, without much success: "In my whole life I was never so near starving to death as now," he wrote a friend from Brussels.

His social life was sharply impaired by increasing deafness. At 74, he brought his renewed collection of some 600 items to the U.S., where it got small attention. But the Smithsonian invited him to display them and, as a bonus, allowed him to live in a small tower room. Within a year, Catlin fell seriously ill and, at 76, died. Congress had still refused to buy his collection; not until six years after his death was Harrison's heir persuaded to donate it to the Smithsonian.

Catlin was no colorist. His drawing did not approach the swirling dynamism of a Remington; his technique could not compass the majestic grandeur that Bierstadt gave to the Rockies. Many of his figures were cursorily laid in, and many of his landscapes were studded with stylized hills that suggest haste rather than observation. But his candid style has an impact on the modern viewer that Remington's hyped-up romanticism no longer does. His so-called ineptness of drawing has been re-evaluated in the wake of the incisive simplicities of a Douanier Rousseau or even a John Kane. He relied on a plain clarity of eye in an age in which this virtue ranked rather low.

Catlin's Indians were men of dignity, and Catlin met them and painted them with honesty. He neither flinched from it nor fudged it. And by the mere fact of painting only the essential--either because of an absence of "taste' or through an innate instinct for the essential--he achieved a kind of authenticity that in retrospect none of his more celebrated colleagues could rival.

It may be that Catlin is a painter whose past has come. At any rate, as the Washington exhibition clearly demonstrates, he wrought better than he knew. --By A. T. Baker

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.