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Grand Detour, Upper Missouri Showing the High Table Land in the Distance,
ca. 1865 - 1870, George Catlin
© Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond
George Catlin
George Catlin devoted his life to recording the lives of Native Americans in their homelands and to providing the broader world with glimpses of the history and customs of these tribal nations. Born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, in 1796, Catlin was educated as a lawyer and later became a portrait painter in New York and Philadelphia. In 1828 he saw a delegation of the Winnebago tribe that was touring the East Coast and subsequently painted their portraits. Enthralled with this "truly lofty and noble race," he developed a plan for documenting Native Americans in their own habitat. Two years later he initiated a series of journeys across the American West to observe and document their lives and customs through "pictorial illustrations."
Between 1830 and 1836, Catlin visited 48 Native American nations in hopes "of reaching ultimately, every tribe of Indians on the Continent of North America, and of bringing home faithful portraits of their principal personages, ... views of their villages, games, and full notes on their character and history." His travels to the homelands of Native Americans coincided with their movement to reservations, as mandated by the Indian Removal Act of 1830, making his works among the final documentation of many tribes in their native lands.
To heighten public awareness of these endangered cultures and to help underwrite his expenses, he created Catlin's Indian Gallery, which contained the paintings along with artifacts collected during his travels. The Gallery opened in New York in 1838, toured Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Boston for a year, and then moved to Europe for an extended tour. Catlin also became a noted author and lecturer on Native Americans.
In 1853 Catlin began another series of journeys, this time to South America and along the West Coast of the United States. He followed these travels, which took place over approximately seven years, with a decade of painting in his studio. During this period, he created the Cartoon Collection, which was comprised of scenes from his South American and West Coast travels, as well as duplicates of works from the Indian Gallery. From 1871 until his death the following year, Catlin exhibited this collection in New York and at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.
George Catlin's Paintings
The paintings in this exhibition include works from Catlin's Cartoon Collection, which summed up his lifetime of travel across the North and South American continents to document Native American life. They are referred to as "cartoons" because Catlin reconstructed many of them from sketches that he made of his original paintings. During the 1840s, when he toured his Indian Gallery in Europe, Catlin executed a series of outline copies of the works included in the Gallery as a precaution against loss of the collection. In 1852, he forfeited his Indian Gallery in exchange for bad debts, but maintained the cartoons. During the 1860s, Catlin, with some assistance from his brother Francis, began to reproduce the original paintings, basing them on the cartoons. This second series of paintings also contained works chronicling his later journeys to the American west coast and to South America.
The paintings in this exhibition are part of a complete set of the Cartoons, 389 in number, acquired by Paul Mellon from the American Museum of Natural History in 1985. Mr. Mellon distributed the collection among the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., the Buffalo Bill Museum, Cody, Wyoming, and the Virginia
Museum of Fine Arts.
George Catlin's Lithographs
These lithographs are from Catlin's North American Indian Portfolio, which was published in 1845, four years after publication of his book Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs, and Conditions of the North American Indians. The North American Indian Portfolio was intended to expose Catlin's art to a larger audience and encourage sales of the Portfolio, thereby strengthening his financial situation and building a demand for him as a lecturer. The lithographs were produced in London by the firm of Day & Hague.
The selections from the North American Indian Portfolio in this exhibition are on loan to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts from Dr. Herbert A. Claiborne, Jr.
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