THE ART OF GEORGE CATLIN. 



By EDWIN SWIFT BALCH. 



{Read April 19, igiS.) 



Within the past decade, a number of American painters have 

 transferred their Lares and Penates from Europe and the eastern 

 United States to Arizona and New Mexico.' They have done this 

 because it has dawned on them that the American Indian of the 

 southwestern states offers a splendid opportunity to put on canvas 

 subjects virgin in form and color. About a dozen pictures of Ari- 

 zona and New Mexico Indians by these painters were in this year's 

 exhibition of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. The aim of 

 these painters is undoubtedly artistic, but their works have an im- 

 portant scientific attribute, namely that they record ethnological 

 subjects and in time will form a grand series of illustrations of the 

 appearance and the customs of a few tribes of the original inhabi- 

 tants of America. About this movement, Mr. Edgar L. Hewett, 

 Director of the School of American Research. Museum of New 

 Mexico, Santa Fe, on the 4th of January last, gave a most interest- 

 ing account to the American Philosophical Society. 



But this movement, important as it is, can do only certain things. 

 The artists of to-day can perpetuate from actual observation only 

 the Indians of to-day. In the United States, they cari record the 

 appearance and the doings of the Indians of the desiccated regions 

 of the southwest, whom one may call generically the Pueblo Indians ; 

 and even those Indians have had their costume affected by that of 

 the White Race. But they cannot record the historical Neolithic 

 Indian. For the Indian of the Allegheny forest, of the Plains, and 

 of the Rocky Mountains, the Indian of the deer, the bison and the 

 grizzly bear horizon, is a thing of the past. In his genuine native 

 trappings, he can never be painted again. 



Fortunately for ethnology and for the history of the natives of 

 America, a handful of painters of by-gone days have left us some 



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