500 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1956 



WILDLIFE AND HUNTING SCENES 



Catlin made the buffalo hunt a favorite subject for his brush. On 

 his trip up the Missouri in 1832 he experienced the excitement of 

 running buffalo on horseback. More than a score of paintings in his 

 original Indian Gallery interpreted various aspects of hunting those 

 big, shaggy beasts. Catlin continued to be fascinated by this subject 

 after he went to Europe. Indeed, more than a quarter of the 100 

 paintings he created from field sketches or from memory while in 

 Europe dealt with buffalo hunting on the Great Plains from Texas 

 to Canada. The artist painted himself in several of them. 



If Catlin had painted no other scenes than buffalo hunts he might 

 have gained a measure of fame. He was the first artist to picture this 

 American big-game hunting on horseback for the benefit of a host of 

 readers and viewers. It was natural that many easterners and Euro- 

 peans came to visualize buffalo hunting in Catlin's terms. Less ad- 

 venturous illustrators found inspiration in Catlin's pictures. Even 

 F. O. C. Darley, one of America's most competent draughtsmen, pre- 

 pared an engraving entitled "Hunting Buffalo" for Graham's Maga- 

 zine in 1844, which was a thinly disguised copy of one of Catlin's 

 paintings (Baur, 1948, pp. 17-20). 



Visitors to the Great Plains in later years were prepared to view 

 the buffalo as Catlin had revealed that animal to them. Edward 

 Harris, the nature enthusiast who accompanied Audubon to the Upper 

 Missouri in 1843, observed that a buffalo bull wounded in a hunt in 

 which he participated "was brought to a stand in exactly the position 

 represented in Catlin's painting of the wounded bull" (Harris, 1951, 

 p. 139). 



Perhaps it was his enthusiasm for buffalo-hunting scenes that led 

 Catlin to attempt pictures of Indians chasing buffalo on snowshoes 

 in the dead of winter even though he had never seen the Great Plains 

 when there was snow on the ground. The imaginative quality of such 

 scenes reveals itself in his portrayal of winter hunters lightly garbed 

 in summer war dress. Both Kurz (1937, p. 130) and Mathews (1891, 

 p. 602) noted this strange error in Catlin's work. 



Catlin's Indian Gallery also included other wildlife scenes — wild 

 horses at play, Indians hunting horses, antelope, and grizzly bears 

 on the plains, and deer in the woodlands. The paintings which he 

 added to his collection while in Europe included a good many hunting 

 and fishing scenes, some idyllic (possibly imaginary) views of elk 

 and buffalo grazing, and several life-sized "portraits of Grizzly 

 Bears." 



LANDSCAPES 



Catlin's landscapes are historically significant as interpretations of 

 the appearance of the Great Plains and the Upper Mississippi Valley 



