BALCH— THE ART OF GEORGE CATLIN. 151 



largely because he is not afraid of covering a canvas with a mass 

 of green, and because that green does imitate closely the color of a 

 mass of green leaves. 



Values Catlin always tried for and usually got very fairly. It is 

 partly because his numerous detail is in value and stays in place that 

 he gives the impression of simplicity and a look of out of doors. 

 He often suggests most successfully distance and atmosphere, as 

 for instance in a picture, now in the American Museum, of some 

 snow mountains, probably the Andes, in which the mountains seem 

 miles away. Some of his skies also, especially at sunrise and sunset, 

 have not only color and light, but most delicate values. To chiaro- 

 scuro, that is to an artistic arrangement of light and shade or 

 values, he paid less heed. He sought values and sometimes ob- 

 tained arrangements of light and shade which are most artistic, but 

 it seems always as if it were the subject which bore them in itself, 

 rather than that he was searching for them. 



While there is little striving after effect in Catlin's work, still 

 sometimes he painted some memory effects most successfully. 

 Among his ccuvre are a certain number of night effects, forerunners 

 of our modern nocturnes but not just a dark blue smudge like some 

 of these. They are painted with a generous use of black. There is 

 lots of detail in them : the more you look into them the more you 

 see. Two of these nocturnes in the American Museum may be 

 instanced. One is a camp fire under pine trees which is excellent 

 in composition and in which the pine trees are really drawn. The 

 other is a South American river with some men standing over a lot 

 of captured turtles and a number of women running up waving 

 torches with the most splendid action and motion. 



Evidently an inborn gift for composition was one of Catlin's 

 artistic attributes, for he received as little outside artistic influence 

 as any painter ever did, yet each of his pictures shows a distinct 

 power of composing every subject. He had the dramatic instinct, 

 he knew how to place on canvas a scene he had observed so as to 

 make it into a picture. In some of his works, he renders the ap- 

 pearance of a crowd, of a multitude of animated beings, whether 

 Indians, or bison, or peccaries, in a way few painters have done. 

 In his pictures of Indian games, one feels as if there were hundreds 



