George Catlin

Early Pioneer artist to the American West. Works of great historic value on the Indian cultures.
(1796-1892)

A self-taught artist, George Catlin is best remembered for his extensive travels across the American West.

Early in his career, Catlin practiced law in Connecticut and Pennsylvania, having passed the bar exam in 1818. He abandoned his practice in 1821 to pursue painting.

Catlin enjoyed modest success painting portraits and miniatures, but found this inadequate to his ambition of becoming a history painter. In 1828, after seeing a delegation of western Indians in the east, he had found a subject, as he later wrote, “on which to devote a whole life-time of enthusiasm.”Along with other artists such as Albert Bierstadt and Karl Bodmer, Catlin traveled into the Western landscapes recording the lives of Native Americans in a collection of images the artist called his Indian Gallery.

George Catlin was truly a pioneer painter. He traveled West along with Governor Clark of St. Louis, then the United States superintendent of Indian affiars.  Governor Clark went for the purpose of arranging treaties with the Winnebagos, Menominees, Shawanos, Foxes, and others, and the opportunities for young Catlin were unusual. A second trip the next season inspired Catlin to still a third, in 1832, when he ascended the Missouri river on a steamer, to the mouth of the Yellowstone.  He returned some two thousand miles in a canoe with a companion, and on the trip sketches were made of the Crows, Blackfeet, Sioux, and Iowas.  Catlin made a serious study of the savage.  

Subsequent trips followed, and in 1836 he accompanied a detachment of the first regiment of Mounted Dragoons to the Comanchies and other tribes.  These visits were at a time when the Indians were in primitive and picturesque conditions, before the changes that would follow in associations with the whites.  The result was an enormous collection of drawings and paintings, along with written accounts and descriptions of cultures.

Catlin ramained supreme for years in a field that no one else of consequense had explored.  In the Centennial Exhibition of 1876, a great showing of Catlin's work was more or less in the nature of a sensation. 

(born Wilkes-Barre, PA 1796 -- died Jersey City, NJ 1872)