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George Catlin And His Indian Gallery

George Catlin (1796-1872) journeyed west five times in the 1830s to paint the Plains Indians and their way of life. Convinced that westward expansion spelled certain disaster for native peoples, he viewed his Indian Gallery as a way "to rescue from oblivion their primitive looks and customs."

Catlin was the first artist to record the Plains Indians in their own territories. He admired them as the embodiment of the Enlightenment ideal of "natural man," living in harmony with nature. But the more than 500 paintings in the Indian Gallery also reveal the fateful encounter of two different cultures in a frontier region undergoing dramatic transformation.

When Catlin first traveled west in 1830, the United States Congress had just passed the Indian Removal Act, requiring Indians in the Southeast to resettle west of the Mississippi River. This vast forced migration—as well as smallpox epidemics and continuing incursions from trappers, miners, explorers, and settlers—created pressures on Indian cultures to adapt or perish. Seeing the devastation of many tribes, Catlin came to regard the frontier as a region of corruption. He portrayed the nobility of these still-sovereign peoples, but he was aware that he painted in sovereignty's twilight.

By the late 1830s and 1840s, Catlin began displaying the Indian Gallery in eastern capitals and in Europe, an advocate for the Indian way of life. Yet the challenge of keeping his collection together and making ends meet led him to questionable strategies. He courted audiences by presenting real Indians enacting war dances. In effect, Catlin created the first Wild West show, with all its compromising sensationalism and exploitation.

Catlin lobbied the U.S. government for patronage throughout his career, hoping Congress would purchase the Indian Gallery as a legacy for future generations. Disappointed in this goal, Catlin went bankrupt in 1852. A Philadelphia industrialist paid Catlin's debts and acquired the Indian Gallery, and soon after Catlin's death, the paintings were donated to the Smithsonian. Today Catlin's Indian Gallery is recognized as a great cultural treasure, offering rare insight into native cultures and a crucial chapter in American history.

George Catlin's Indian Empire

Millions of Americans will recognize this vision.

There is a golden corner in our shared imagination — no, more than a mere corner, a vast unbounded prairie — where Tonto and John Wayne and Buffalo Bill Cody still forever ride. Their weaponry is lethal, their bravery immense.

George Catlin, the painter whose canvases now fill the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, is rightly of that company.

Catlin (1796-1872) was a Pennsylvania lawyer who taught himself to paint and took himself out West and made himself anew. He ought to be imagined galloping the plains. There are fringes on his buckskins, and brushes in his saddlebags. His faithful horse is Charley. Catlin helped invent our image of the immemorial West.

Its Indians were his subject. First he admired them, then he catalogued them. Walt Whitman in his poetry keeps providing lists of city sights and trades; Herman Melville in "Moby-Dick" compiles bits of whaling lore assiduously. In Catlin's "Indian Gallery," now grandly re-created on Pennsylvania Avenue, the spirit is much the same. Catlin made himself the Audubon of the Indians. He was one of those persistent 19th-century Americans who didn't see a conflict between listmaking and art.

Catlin, let's face it, wasn't much of a painter. But he was an exceptional mythmaker. His anatomy was shaky, his use of cadmium red poundingly excessive, but the man could catch a likeness and he persevered. There are hundreds of life portraits in Catlin's Indian Gallery, and dozens of green landscapes, and no sooner had he finished one than he would start another. Catlin sometimes painted three portraits a day, and it's just that sense of excess that makes his project work.

This isn't just American art, and it isn't just American ethnography. It's also American showbiz. The traveling Wild West show was partly his invention. His touring Indian Gallery — which he took across Europe, and showed to Queen Victoria, and to the king of France — was meant to be a spectacle, a thrilling and surrounding you-are-there experience that no one could forget. When he took his art to England in 1839 he brought along live grizzly bears, tomahawks and peace pipes. Later on he paid real living Indians to whoop and dance their dances in front of his canvases as if they'd just stepped out of the pictures on the walls.

He didn't get rich. On the contrary. To get out of a British debtor's prison he had to sell his Gallery, which eventually was given to the Smithsonian Institution, whose American Art Museum organized this show.

Catlin kept on trying. Having lost his life's work he tried to re-create it. (Three hundred fifty-one of his later works on paper were purchased by Paul Mellon and are now in the collection of the National Gallery of Art.) Coarse they may well be, but his images have lasted. They have soaked into the culture. For long before Zane Grey began to write his western novels, and long before John Ford began to make his movies, and before Edward S. Curtis began photographing tepees, George Catlin had established an image of the Indian that all Americans still know.

The Indian is stern. He is Roman in his dignity and almost always armed. His necklaces are numerous. His face is boldly painted and his silence is commanding. He doesn't smile. He is usually a he.

And he isn't a woodland Indian (as were Uncas and Chingatchgook, the last of the Mohicans), or a pueblo-dweller either. He's a nomad of the prairies, a bison-hunting horseman, an Indian of the Plains.

Catlin, in his later years, tried to make his project appear more extensive. He painted Indian faces in New York and Wisconsin and Florida as well. Menominee and Seneca, Kickapoo and Mandan, Pawnee, Choctaw, Chippewa, Comanche — he eventually portrayed selected individuals from nearly 50 tribes. Yet the Indians he first visited were those he most admired. They rule his Indian Gallery, and dominate the stereotype that still appears to rise from the mosaic of his show.

That, of course, is the Indian as symbol. Think how often you have seen him. His face paint speaks of battle, his expression is expressionless, his nose sharp as a hatchet. The eagle feathers that he wears are white ones tipped with black. The hood ornament on the Pontiac and the Indian on the nickel, and the creature seen in profile on the football helmets of the Washington Redskins and the one whose head appears on the motorcycle gas tank are all in the end the same Indian, and somehow he's descended from the portraits in this show.

Catlin went looking for him. In Philadelphia in the 1820s the painter had glimpsed an Indian delegation "arrayed," he wrote, "in all their classic beauty," and that's what set him off. Here, he saw, was a theme deserving "a whole life-time of enthusiasm." And so, in 1830, he set out for the West.

For St. Louis, to be precise. Catlin was helped initially by the aging William Clark, of the 1804 Lewis and Clark expedition, and later by the traders of John Jacob Astor's American Fur Company, and though he may have been a soft-handed Easterner he wasn't a softy long. In 1832, he boarded the steamer Yellowstone for a 2,200-mile journey up the Missouri River. He soon dispensed with guides. Catlin was quite willing to saddle up ol' Charley and ride 500 miles through the roadless West alone.

The Indian he was seeking, the Indian of his paintings, is, in part, a fantasy. He's a hero of the olden days who still hunts with bow and arrow, whose manners are a gentleman's, who has not yet been degraded by the vices and diseases, the smallpox and the booze, of the encroaching white man's world.

So what if he takes scalps? So what if he's suspended in initiation ceremonies by rawhide cords attached to skewers through his flesh? All of this just adds, as do the weapons and the face paint seen in many of these portraits, to his raw, half-scary splendor. The Indian Catlin valued most lived, the painter wrote, "in a state of pure and original nature, beyond the reach of civilized contamination." That uncorrupted creature is in some ways a cartoon. His pedigree's familiar. He is, of course, a figure of the French Enlightenment, the heroic "noble savage" of Jean-Jacques Rousseau rediscovered by George Catlin in America's New World.

Elizabeth Broun, director of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, regards the Indian Gallery as one of her institution's "greatest historic and artistic treasures." But she does not entirely approve of it. Catlin's "spectacle," she writes, "is read as a 'prequel' to yet more ignominious chapters in American history," including "the Japanese-American internment and the dropping of the atomic bomb."

W. Richard West, a member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes of Oklahoma, and director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian, whose huge facility on the Mall is under construction, is made similarly uncomfortable by the paintings on display. "Native people," he writes, "have grown weary of being interpreted, analyzed, removed, rescued, patronized, and depicted, to say nothing of being nearly annihilated by non-natives. . . . A native person is challenged, I think, not to feel on some level a profound resentment toward Catlin; his obsession with depicting Indians has an extremely invasive undertone to it. . . . Catlin can be seen today as a cultural P.T. Barnum, a crass huckster trading on other people's lives and lifeways."

None of this, of course, has prevented these Smithsonian officials from offering the rest of us this "crass," exciting show.

The Indians Catlin painted do not look offended. No one forced them to don their finery and face paint. The experience of posing may have been strange, but they participated willingly. "They soon construed it into a compliment," wrote Catlin. One sees that in these portraits. They seem to glow with pride.

Are they authentic relics of Native American culture?

Of course not.

Formal bust-length portraits, they are not so very different from those that show us popes, aristocrats and merchants. They partake of a tradition that goes back to ancient Rome.

Catlin was not the only 19th-century painter to peddle thrilling records of the exotic far-away. Think of Eugene Delacroix in North Africa, of Sir Edwin Landseer in the mists of the rugged Scottish Highlands, of Paul Gauguin in Tahiti. "George Catlin and his Indian Gallery" isn't only about Indians. The tribe it tells us most about is, of course, the painter's own.

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