THE ARTIST George Catlin (1796-1872) American Explorer and Painter
THE TIMES
Native Americans did not have a tradition of painting or making permanent objects for display. Their art was for sacred purposes, largely unseen, and mobile because most tribes moved frequently. Portrait painting was a European tradition and a few frontiersmen, working independently, were brave enough to meet new tribes, live with them, and paint what they saw. What George Catlin, Seth Eastman, and other explorers brought into Native American culture was unique. They created the first permanent records of Native American life. You may have heard about a large area of land purchased by the United States of America in 1803. Thomas Jefferson, the third president, did not purchase it from the Native American tribes who lived there, but from the country of France, who had claimed it. It was called the Louisiana Purchase. The area covered most of the Midwest. Jefferson sent Lewis and Clark with fifty other men to explore the area. Their job was to keep journals with pictures of rivers, plants, animals, and the people groups who lived there. Their journals gave Americans a first view of what and who occupied the land west of them. Much of the painting, The Cheyenne , is taken up by a cloth that lies on the man’s lap. Some lines show the folds of the cloth rather than edges. Find an object that has height. Drape a sheet or plain piece of fabric over the object. Arrange it so that the folds fall in a way that you like. Now draw the outlines of the cloth and the lines that describe the folds within those outlines. The original paintings for Catlin’s Indian Gallery are now housed in the Smithsonian American Art Museum. The National Museum of the American Indian, established in 1989, and built on the National Mall in Washington D.C. shows Catlin’s fine work in one of their displays. His dream of an Indian gallery was accomplished 117 years after his death. Catlin. The White Cloud, Head Chief of the Iowas 1844/1845. Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington.
Catlinbeganhis professional career as a portrait painter just forty years after the United States had become a nation. He decided to paint Native American tribes of the West after seeing a group of them traveling to Washington, D.C. When he was a child, his parents welcomed a Native American into their home. Young George was fascinated by the way that the man dressed and his mannerisms and saw that this man seemed very much like his own family in many ways. From 1830-1836 Catlin traveled thousands of miles, following the trail of Lewis and Clark, and lived among 50 different tribes. He painted portraits and scenes of their customs including war, dances, and buffalo hunts on the plains. Later, Catlin traveled even further into unsettled territories to paint the people living west of the Rocky Mountains. He also traveled to South America. Although he worked hard to promote the idea of an Indian Gallery, so that people could understand their way of life, George Catlin did not see a gallery in his lifetime.
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