BALCH— THE ART OF GEORGE CATLIN. 149 



dissatisfied Indian with water colors ; but no such sketches in either 

 pencil or water color, as far as I know, have come down to us. All 

 his works are small finished pictures, which Catlin carried as far 

 forward as he knew how. And considering how well understood his 

 pictures are as a whole, it is astonishing how much detail he gets 

 into his figures and their accessories. But while this multiplicity of 

 detail always takes its position in the whole, as a result his pictures 

 do not carry any great distance ; they are best looked at close by. 

 Some of his detail is minute and delicate. Details on the dresses 

 in his portraits are beautifully carried out ; there is the greatest 

 delicacy of touch. And it is of ethnographic significance that all 

 the decorations he depicts on the clothing of the figures or on the 

 teepees are always square or rectangular decorations, such as one 

 sees on the Lewis and Clarke skin robe in the Harvard University 

 Museum. 



Catlin drew well ; not academically but accurately. His portrait 

 heads and full-length portraits may be ranked as fair examples of 

 the style of portraiture in vogue in America in the first half of the 

 nineteenth century. Had he continued painting portraits at home 

 he would doubtless have earned a comfortable competency. And 

 while, of course, Catlin never painted any pictures of architecture 

 requiring linear perspective, his pictures always have the correct 

 artistic perspective which all good landscape painters obtain through 

 intelligent drawing. 



A strong point of Catlin is his splendid sense of proportions. 

 He got the natural proportions of figures. His figures are utterly 

 unacademic. He was not preoccupied with Greek or modern Euro- 

 pean conventional canons of what a human should be. His nudes 

 are nudes, the real thing ; they have much the feeling of the French 

 primitives of the Middle Ages. Catlin merely tried successfully to 

 make humans look like what they are, and one feels that nobody 

 looked over his shoulder and told him he was not right. 



While all of Catlin's models are copper-colored with straight 

 black hair and sometimes are daubed over with red ochre or other 

 colored earth, nevertheless there are two variations in type. One of 

 these, which is most apparent in the portraits, has features very 

 similar to the Americanized European whose ancestors came over 



PROC. AMER. PHIL. SOC, VOL. LVII, K, JUNE 25, I918. 



