George Catlin: American Indian Portraits, at
National Portrait Gallery
An enthralling show of George Catlin’s portraits of endangered American Indians in the 19th-century
By Andrew Graham-Dixon
08 Mar 2013
In 1830, under the rapaciously expansionist presidency of Andrew Jackson, American Congress passed the Indian Removal Act. Native American tribes were forced ever westwards and those who resisted were killed or forcibly removed from their lands.
An enthralling show of George Catlin’s portraits of endangered American Indians in the 19th-century
By Andrew Graham-Dixon
In 1830, under the rapaciously expansionist presidency of Andrew Jackson, American Congress passed the Indian Removal Act. Native American tribes were forced ever westwards and those who resisted were killed or forcibly removed from their lands.
An enterprising painter from Philadelphia
called George Catlin set out to record what he believed to be a noble but
vanishing race. The hundreds of pictures that he painted, at the frontier and
in the wilds, have long been prize possessions of the Smithsonian Institution
in Washington, and a generous selection has been loaned for an enthralling new
exhibition.
George Catlin: American Indian Portraits explores a figure
who was painter, philanthropist and showman rolled into one; and it movingly
reconstructs his most ambitious project.
In 1832 Catlin boarded the steamboat Yellow Stone, bound for
Fort Union Missouri ,
to paint captive chiefs.
Black Hawk, Prominent Sac Chief is one of the most powerful
American portraits: against a cursorily painted sky full of stormclouds, a
highly articulate American Indian leader, dressed in his tribal robes and
jewellery, stares into the distance with an expression of concern on his
gentle, dignified, finely lined face.
He might be thinking the regretful thoughts that punctuate
the autobiography he dictated a year later: “Why did the Great Spirit ever send
the whites to this island to drive us from our homes and introduce among us
poison liquors, disease and death? They should have remained in the land the
Great Spirit allotted them...”
Catlin was no dispassionate observer. His “Indian Gallery”
was both a record and a lament. While John James Audubon, in The Birds of
America, recorded the many colourful species rendered extinct by the “murderous
white man”, Catlin counted the human cost: tribes who have now entirely
disappeared, with their clothes, hairstyles, weapons and plumage.
Prone to romantic ideas about the “Noble Savage”, Catlin
improbably idealised Native American Indians as living reincarnations of the
ancient Greeks: men “whose daily feats with their naked limbs, might vie with
those of the Grecian youths in the Olympian games.” He may have sentimentalised
them, but he also respected them.
At a time when most anthropologists imagined that Native
Americans represented an inferior, primitive form of humanity, Catlin was
unusually enlightened. He painted the many peoples he encountered, on his first
trip and three subsequent journeys, not as grotesque curiosities, but as
dignified and proud human beings with a complicated past and uncertain
future.
He was limited by his training as a painter of miniatures,
which meant that he never mastered anatomical drawing. Hence the boneless arms
and legs of his sitters, and their unconvincing proportions. But those very
weaknesses draw the eye to his greatest strength: a subtle ability to capture
the human face with true fellow feeling.
Catlin toured his work round Europe
with a group of American Indians who danced for Queen Victoria and other
rulers. Two of his finest portraits, Buffalo Bull’s Back Fat, Head Chief, Blood
Tribe and Little Wolf, A Famous Warrior, were shown at the Paris Salon; Charles
Baudelaire thought them “masterly”.
The whole Indian Gallery, all eight tons of it, comprising
myriad paintings and such artefacts as a seven-foot-high teepee, was installed
in London at Bullock’s Egyptian Hall in 1840: “500 portraits, dresses, scalps,
wigwams!” proclaimed the flyers. “Roll up! Roll up! Admission, one
shilling”.
It all went wrong. Not enough people came, and expenses far
outweighed revenues. After a spell in debtor’s prison and years of fruitless
madcappery – such as prospecting for gold in Brazil
– the artist died penniless. But that’s another story. For now, the Catlin show
is back in town. This time, entirely free.
To June 23. Free entry; npg.org.uk
To June 23. Free entry; npg.org.uk
George Catlin: American Indian
Portraits
During the 1830s Pennsylvanian-born artist George Catlin (1796-1872) made five trips to the western United States to document the Native American peoples and their way of life. The resulting portraits have become one of the most extensive, evocative and important records of indigenous peoples ever made.
During the 1830s Pennsylvanian-born artist George Catlin (1796-1872) made five trips to the western United States to document the Native American peoples and their way of life. The resulting portraits have become one of the most extensive, evocative and important records of indigenous peoples ever made.
Catlin was also an entrepreneur and a showman and, inspired
by his encounters, he created an ‘Indian Gallery’ that toured America
and Europe during the next ten years. This exhibition of
over fifty portraits will be the first time that they have been seen together
outside America
since returning there in the 1850s. They will be displayed to suggest the sense
of spectacle created by Catlin and demonstrate how he constructed a particular
image of American Indians in the minds of his audience.
Organised in collaboration with the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington
Organised in collaboration with the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington
7 March - 23 June
2013
Admission Free
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