GEORGE CATLIN — EWERS 505 



and most comprehensive series of portraits and scenes executed from 

 life in the country of any group of culturally related North Amer- 

 ican Indian tribes in the days before the perfection of photography. 

 Undoubtedly these pictures have been very influential in implanting 

 the stereotype of the Plains Indian as the American Indian par 

 excellence in the minds of millions of Americans and Europeans. 



CATLIN'S PAINTINGS AS ART, HISTORY, AND SCIENCE 



George Catlin has been a controversial figure in American art 

 for generations. His paintings have been enthusiastically praised 

 and disparagingly condemned. Some art critics have tagged him 

 a romantic, others a realist, and still others an American primitive. 

 Catlin certainly was not a member of any traditional school of art. 

 He was self-taught and there were both strong and weak points 

 in that "teaching." Initially and primarily Catlin was a portraitist. 

 At his best, in his "studio" portraits, Catlin deserves to rank among 

 the better portrait painters of his time. There can bo no question 

 of his ability to create a realistic likeness of liis sitter. Catlin's field- 

 sketching style, however, was impressionistic. It was developed to 

 meet the needs of his working conditions — a bold, rapid technique 

 for pictorial reporting. Wliat his field pictures lacked in technical 

 skill they may have gained in fresliness and directness. In his hasto 

 to make his field record as complete as his limited time permitted 

 Catlin could not wait to fully exploit the artistic possibilities of 

 each subject. To speed his work he adopted some shortcutting con- 

 ventions — his own system of pictorial shorthand. Undoubtedly Cat- 

 lin's reputation as an artist would have fared better had he not 

 tried to paint so many pictures and to preserve them all — good, bad, 

 and indifferent. 



Nevertheless, the great number and variety of Catlin's western 

 paintings give his work a comprehensiveness that is important to 

 the historian and ethnologist. Catlin himself expressed the hope 

 that visitors to his exhibitions would "find enough of historical 

 interest excited by faithful resemblance to the physiognomy and 

 customs of these people, to compensate for what may be deficient 

 in them as works of art" (Catlin, 1871). Probably the great majority 

 of men, women, and children who have enjoyed Catlin's pictures have 

 preferred to look at them as historic documents or scientific illus- 

 trations rather than as works of art. 



Catlin painted the largest collection of early pictures of the west- 

 ern wilds and their Indian inhabitants. How reliable are these 

 pictures geographically and ethnologically ? The onl}' proper answer 

 is that each painting must be appraised on its own merits. When 

 we begin to do that we find that the scientific significance of Catlin's 



