152 BALCH— THE ART OF GEORGE CATLIN. 



of Indians before one ; in his bison hunts, the bison herds stream 

 over the prairies by the thousand. It is largely Catlin's power of 

 composition and selection which makes these pictures successful; 

 indeed almost invariably his pictures have good composition, and 

 sometimes they have really splendid composition. 



Obviously many of Catlin's pictures are memory paintings of in- 

 cidents freshly observed. His bison hunts, his groups of Indians 

 in games, in fact all his scenes of active wild life, must have been 

 painted on the spot, as soon as seen and in their natural environ- 

 ment, but they could only have been done from memory, as usually 

 they represent many figures or animals, generally in violent mo- 

 tion. Evidently Catlin had a strong artistic memory and it was that 

 quality which enabled him to get so much life in his work. For his 

 humans and animals have both action and motion : they are alive, 

 they stand plumb on their feet, they walk, they run, they jump : 

 they have none of the arrested motion of certain academic work. 

 His groups of figures render the movements of the groups ; you 

 feel the way each group is moving. Except in his portraits, his 

 humans are never posing. There is no rigidity in his work. His 

 one weak spot in regard to motion is that he painted some of his 

 galloping horses and bison with the incorrect open-scissor action 

 which no white race man ever discovered was wrong, until instan- 

 taneous photography obliterated it from art. 



It is the matter and not the manner of Catlin's pictures, however, 

 which is of supreme importance. The paramount value of his pic- 

 tures lies in the subjects and in the fact that the subjects are handled 

 realistically. His pictures are extremely original through their sub- 

 jects and they are absolutely individual because the subjects ap- 

 pealed to Catlin and were motives to him. There is nothing idealis- 

 tic about his pictures ; they are not imaginative ; they are pure 

 realism. His Indians are not the Indians of romance nor of the 

 warped mentality of hostile whites ; his Indians are the real thing. 



Cathn is a great illustrator-painter. He painted endless incidents 

 of the life of the American natives realistically and accurately. He 

 paiiitcd his pictures of the wild Indians while actually living among 

 them, with the scenes which he was painting, the real history of the 

 Indians, actually being enacted before him. And the result is that 



