498 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1965 



hibited both the painting and the shirt in the same gallery for years. 

 Anyone so minded could have made his own comparisons. 



Catlin's renderings of ornaments are spotty. His reproductions of 

 the geometric patterns painted on buffalo robes by Plains Indians are 

 approximations, not exact copies of Indian paintings. This was true 

 even of his drawings of actual specimens of painted robes in his own 

 collection. 



Nevertheless, the details of some of the ornaments of costumes worn 

 by Catlin's sitters are rendered with remarkable accuracy. Dr. Waldo 

 K. Wedel (1955, p. 152) noted that in Catlin's painting of the wife of 

 the Arikara head chief he depicted the exact size, shape, and colors of 

 distinctive "wire- wound" trade beads such as have been found in recent 

 excavations in the cemetery near the village in which that woman lived. 

 The beads may be very nearly contemporary with Catlin's painting. 

 Catlin's portrait tells us how the beads were worn in a necklace in al- 

 ternating colors, blue and white. (See pi. 11, fig. 1, shorter bead 

 strand.) 



Again, in his portrait of the Assiniboin delegate to Washington, 

 painted in St. Louis in the fall of 1831, Catlin clearly depicted the col- 

 ors and forms of small designs in porcupine quills on the shirt-sleeve 

 band (pi. 11, fig. 2) . An elderly Assiniboin craf tworker, in discussing 

 traditionally old quillwork patterns among that tribe, drew for me this 

 "three-row quillwork" design. Later I showed her this picture of Cat- 

 lin's which exactly illustrated the design. 



It would be dangerous to generalize regarding Catlin's rendering of 

 the details of Indian costume. As I have pointed out above, his treat- 

 ment of costume details ranges all the way from omission, through gen- 

 eralization and exaggeration, to very accurate rendering of minute 

 units in their true colors. 



SCENES IN INDIAN LIFE 



When we consider Catlin's scenes in Indian life it is well to remem- 

 ber that Catlin the portraitist preceded Catlin the illustrator. Plis 

 interest in painting Indian activities developed as his first-hand experi- 

 ence among the Indians increased. He may have felt also that a con- 

 siderable number of lively scenes in Indian life would be essential to 

 relieve the monotony of a large series of portraits when he began to 

 exhibit his Indian Gallery to the public. 



Catlin's status among the Indians was that of an enthusiastic and 

 sympathetic observer. His knowledge of Indian customs was limited 

 to what he saw with his own eyes and what better-informed white 

 traders or English-speaking Indian interpreters told him. He was 

 no linguist. The names he recorded for the subjects of some of his 

 portraits are incorrectly rendered or translated. For example, his 



