George Catlin, Painter of Indians 

 and the West 



By John C. Ewers 



Planning Officer for the Museum of History and Technology 

 U. S. National Museum 

 Smithsonian Institution 



[With 20 plates] 



George Catlin holds a unique position in tlie history of American 

 art. No other artist painted as many pictures in the trans-Mississippi 

 West in the days before the development of photogi'aphy as did 

 Catlin. No other painter of the early West is so well represented in 

 museum collections today. Yet during his lifetime and for many 

 decades thereafter Catlin remained a minor figure in American art. 

 As recently as the 1930's his paintings were rarely exhibited in art 

 museums or seriouly studied by historians. 



In recent years, however, there has been a marked revival of mterest 

 in George Catlin 's works. This has been due in part to a widespread 

 and growing popular interest in the history of the romantic and al- 

 ways colorful American West. Historians and museum directors 

 seeking pictorial interpretations of the real wild West before the 

 advance of white settlement into the Great Plains have rediscovered 

 George Catlin. He was never really lost. For generations he has 

 been known to (if not entirely appreciated by) anthropologists, who 

 have had primary responsibility for preserving the larger collections 

 of his paintings in museum study collections. Yet the resurgence of 

 popular interest in Catlin's paintings is a recent thing. Within the 

 past decade the U. S. National Museum has received scores of requests 

 from other museums for the loan of origmal oil paintings from its 

 Catlin collection for temporary exhibition. These paintings have 

 been shown to hundreds of thousands of interested viewers in museums 

 of history, of science, and especially of art in all sections of the United 

 States, in Canada, and in western Europe. Today, a century and a 

 quarter after vigorous, restless George Catlin braved the dangers and 

 discomforts of the Indian country beyond the Mississippi to record on 



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