502 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1955 



escorted to Washington to meet their Great White Father as early 

 as the first decade of the nineteenth century. In 1806 the French 

 artist St. Memin employed a mechanical device called a physionotrace 

 to outline exactly the striking profiles of a Mandan chief and several 

 Osage Indian visitors to the Nation's Capital. In 1821 Charles Bird 

 King began to paint for the Government's own collection portraits 

 of Indian leaders brought to Washington from tribes of the Great 

 Lakes, the Southeast, and the central Great Plains. Yet these stay- 

 at-home artists knew their red-skinned sitters only as picturesquely 

 costumed, befuddled strangers in the complex civilization of the alien 

 white man. They had little or no knowledge of the cultural back- 

 grounds of these Indians or the country they called home. 



Other artists had traveled and painted in the Great Plains before 

 Catlin did. Samuel Seymour, official artist of Major Long's Expedi- 

 tions to the Rocky Mountains in 1819-20 and to the Upper Mississippi 

 in 1823, is said to have executed more than 150 landscapes in addition 

 to a number of Indian portraits and some scenes in Indian life. Prince 

 Paul of Wiirtemberg, a skilled draughtsman, traveled up the Missouri 

 as a guest of the American Fur Co. in 1823. Peter Rindisbacher, a 

 young Swiss settler on the Red River in Canada, painted winter and 

 summer buffalo hunts and camp scenes among the Cree and Assiniboin 

 tribes prior to 1826. But by and large these predecessors of Catlin 

 had had little influence on the popular mind. They had written no 

 popular illustrated books, organized no great traveling exhibitions 

 to take their interpretations of the West to the people. Their message 

 was muted or restricted to the few. 



When George Catlin went west in 1830 the average easterner and the 

 interested European had only a vague and confused impression of the 

 country beyond the Mississippi and the people who lived there. In- 

 dians appeared in the popular art of the time as lovely dark-skinned 

 maidens or tall handsome hunters beside some cool forest stream. They 

 were the romantic creations of sentimental landscape painters, as un- 

 real as James Fenimore Cooper's poetic redmen in Leatherstocking 

 Tales. On the other hand, in the widely read horror stories of the 

 period — the Indian captivities — Indians were presented as blood- 

 thirsty savages who enjoyed torturing helpless prisoners. One ex- 

 treme view of the Indian was as false as was the other. 



George Catlin, master showman as well as artist, certainly was the 

 first artist to win a great mass audience for his interpretation of the 

 West. As a pioneer on-the-spot reporter Catlin broke the trail for a 

 number of other artists who came to recognize that if they would truly 

 picture the West and its people they must go there and see them with 

 their own eyes. Among the best known of these artists in the pre- 

 camera, pre-Civil War period were Jolm James Audubon, Albert Bier- 



