Catlin's Indian gallery - Current and Coming

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 2002 by Allison Eckardt Ledes

In 1827 George Catlin, a lawyer by training, was living in New York City and pursuing a career as a portrait painter. Visiting Philadelphia the following year he saw a delegation of American Indians from the western United States and in them he saw a subject that would grant him, as he put it, "a whole life-lime of enthusiasm." He spent the rest of his life painting many tribes of American Indians in order to form what he called an Indian Gallery This fascinating story and the survival of most of the hundreds of portraits that formed Catlin's first Indian Gallery are on view in a traveling exhibition, George Catlin and His Indian Gallery, organized by the Smithsonian American Art Museum and displayed at the Renwick Gallery in Washington, D. C., until January 19, 2003. The exhibition is comprised of more than four hundred objects--mostly paintings--but also American Indian objects once owned by the artist.

Catlin moved to Saint Louis in 1830 and traveled up the Mississippi River to Fort Crawford with General William Clark, who taught him much about the territory and its inhabitants. Two years later Catlin embarked on an eighteen-hundred-mile journey up the Missouri River into the Great Plains and in three months completed more than one hundred paintings: portraits of eighteen tribes including Pawnee, Omaha, Ponca, Cheyenne, Teton Sioux, Assiniboine, Blackfeet, Crow, and river tribes such as the Mandan; thirty-six scenes of Indians engaged in everyday pursuits; twenty-five landscapes depicting what he called "soul-melting scenery"; and eight hunting scenes. In 1834 he made a second trip, this time to the Arkansas Territory in the southwestern plains, where he painted Comanche, Cherokee, Creek, Osage, Kiowa, and Wichita, but his output was less than forty works. The next year he took his wife Clam along and so traveled by steamboat up the Mississippi River terminating in Fort Snelling, where he found Sioux and Ch ippewa to paint At Fort Snelling he turned out three portraits a day.

Catlin felt that the best way to promote his Indian Gallery was to take it on tour. He visited Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Louisville, and New York City, among other cities, where the gallery received favorable reviews but only broke even financially. Catlin had witnessed and painted portions of a Mandan ceremony called O-kee-pa, which involved torture and mutilation. His credibility was severely compromised when his story and his paintings of the ritual could not be corroborated because the Mandan population had been wiped out by smallpox in 1837. Other unsubstantiated claims and the artist's often outrageous showmanship tarnished his reputation considerably and became a stumbling block to selling his Indian Gallery.

In 1839 he sailed for London, where he exhibited the Indian Gallery along with staged re-creations of ceremonies and rituals performed by Indians. He added to his meager income by selling copies of his work in oil, watercolor, or pencil. In 1852 the Philadelphia engineer Joseph P. Harrison received the Indian Gallery when he paid off Catlin's considerable debts. He shipped the paintings to Philadelphia, and at his death they were inherited by his wife. She in turn bequeathed the entire collection of more than five hundred works to the Smithsonian Institution in 1879.

The catalogue of the exhibition, with contributions by Brian W. Dippie, Therese Thau Heyman, Christopher Mulvey, and Joan Carpenter Troccoli, is edited by George Gurney and Ms. Heyman. It is available by telephoning 800-288-2129.