ART OF SETH EASTMAN — ^McDERMOTT 593 



There is truth in this contemporary judgment. Charles Deas had 

 been a great favorite in St. Louis during the 1840's and with the 

 Republican, too, but he loved to paint drama and violence — a man on 

 horseback caught with a child m a prairie on fire, a mountain man and 

 an Indian engaged in a struggle that will clearly be deadly for both, 

 a trapper on horeeback poised on the very edge of a cliff. George 

 Catlin, through his exhibitions the most widely known painter of 

 Indian subjects, was not a general favorite in the West, though he had 

 supporters there. Dominated by his plan for an exhibition gallery, 

 a traveling show, he worked quickly and unevenly to accmnulate an 

 array of canvases to take on the road. In his work there is "an 

 effort at effect," as the Republican put it, an awareness of show poten- 

 tialities, an eye to audience response. His portraiture and his studies 

 of Indian customs are often well done, informative, and impressive; 

 his contribution pictorially and ethnographically is important. But 

 the Indian to hun was a figure of romance and a source of art-capital. 

 He had not the leisure or the inclination to be quietly objective as 

 Eastman was. Nor could he paint so well. 



In making any comparison today two other painters of that era 

 must be considered. Alfred J. Miller, in pursuit of wild sports in 

 the Far West in 1837, produced 200 superb watercolors shining with 

 a glamor of romance never achieved by any other artist of the frontier 

 scene. In this medium he was decidedly a more successful painter 

 than Eastman, but, though he recorded accurately what he shared in, 

 it was a white man's world and white men's adventures that he set 

 down on paper and later on canvas. The Indians merely provided 

 color. Charles Bodmer in Eastman's day was known only by the 

 engravings after his paintings published in the atlas accompanying 

 Prince Maximilian's "Travels in North America." He was respected 

 and admired for his able pictorial report on the tribes of the Upper 

 Missouri, but it is only since the showing by the Smithsonian Travel- 

 ing Exhibition in 1954 of his original watercolors and sketches made 

 on that excursion in 1833-34 that we have been able to assess him 

 properly. 



Wlien we look, then, at the paintei*s of the Indian before the Civil 

 War, we put Deas and Catlin and Miller on one side as painters show- 

 ing an enthusiastic response to the romance of wild life. Bodmer and 

 Eastman, on the other hand, were interested in the red man for his 

 own sake. Their careful study and objective handling of his culture 

 had less dash but greater authenticity. As documenters of Indian life 

 they have no superiors ; as painters they excel most of those who under- 

 took the same subjects. 



In this work Eastman had the great advantage of leisure and long 

 study. Where Catlin spent months, Miller a summer season, and 



