4 o 4 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



pencil sketches of judges, juries, and culprits, I very deliberately- 

 resolved to convert my law library into paint pots and brushes, 

 and to pursue painting as my future and apparently more agree- 

 able profession/' He settled in Philadelphia in 1823, and was at 

 once admitted to the fraternity of artists there, which included 

 Thomas Sully, John ISTagle, Charles Wilson, and Rembrandt 

 Peale. In the next year he was admitted as an academician of 

 the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. He was most successful 

 as a miniature painter in water-colors on ivory. Among his more 

 famous paintings were one of Mrs. Madison in a turban ; the Vir- 

 ginia Constitutional Convention of 1839 ; the portrait of De Witt 

 Clinton, which hangs in the Governor's Room of the New York 

 City Hall, and of which the Franklin Institute, of Rochester, has 

 a copy from his hand ; and portraits of members of the Legis- 

 lature and other prominent men of New York. He visited New 

 York, Buffalo, Norfolk, and other cities in the exercise of his art ; 

 and often saw the delegations of Indians that were in the habit of 

 visiting Washington at that period of our history. While in 

 Philadelphia, he writes, his mind was continually reaching for 

 some branch or enterprise of the art " on which to devote a whole 

 lifetime of enthusiasm, ... a delegation of some ten or fifteen 

 noble and dignified looking Indians from the wilds of the far 

 West suddenly arrived in the city, arrayed and equipped in all 

 of their classic beauty, with shield and helmet, with tunic and 

 manteau, tinted and tasseled off exactly for the painter's palette." 

 Having an eye for nature rather than for the conventionalities of 

 civilization, he had long been of the opinion that the wilderness 

 of our country afforded models equal to those from which the 

 Grecian sculptors transferred inimitable grace and beauty to 

 marble ; and a short experience in the woods among Indians con- 

 firmed him in this view. In the midst of his success as a painter, 

 he wrote in 1861, " I again resolved to use my art, and so much of 

 the labors of my future life as might be required, in rescuing 

 from oblivion the looks and customs of the vanishing races of 

 native man in America, to which I plainly saw they were hasten- 

 ing before the approach and certain progress of civilization." If 

 he should live to accomplish his design, he thought, " the result 

 of my labors will doubtless be interesting to future eyes, who will 

 have little else left from which to judge of the original inhabit- 

 ants of this simple race of beings." So he set out alone, unaided, 

 and unadvised, to collect his portraits and illustrations of primi- 

 tive looks and customs, to set them up " in a gallery, unique and 

 imperishable, for the use and benefit of future ages." He was 

 never even comfortably off in money matters, says his biographer, 

 Mrs. Clara Catlin Clarke, "relying for his livelihood upon his 

 brush or his pen. He lived poor and died the same. He re- 



