338 PIONEERS OF SCIENCE IN AMERICA. 



Sully, John Nagle, Charles Wilson, and Rembrandt Peale. In 

 the next year he was admitted as an academician of the Penn- 

 sylvania Academy of Fine Arts. He was most successful as a 

 miniature painter in water colours on ivory. Among his more 

 famous paintings were one of Mrs. Madison in a turban ; the 

 Virginia Constitutional Convention of 1839 ; the portrait of 

 De Witt Clinton, which hangs in the Governor's Room of the 

 New York City Hall, and of which the Franklin Institute, of 

 Rochester, N. Y., has a copy from his hand ; and portraits of 

 members of the Legislature and other prominent men of New 

 York. While at Albany painting the portraits of Clinton and 

 others, Mr. Catlin met Miss Clara B. Gregory, and was mar- 

 ried to her, May 10, 1828. 



He visited New York, Buffalo, Norfolk, and other cities in 

 the exercise of his art, and often saw the delegations of 

 Indians that were in the habit of visiting Washington at that 

 period of our history. While in Philadelphia, he writes, his 

 mind was continually reaching for some branch or enterprise 

 of the art " on which to devote a whole lifetime of enthu- 

 siasm, ... a delegation of some ten or fifteen noble and 

 dignified looking Indians from the wilds of the far West 

 suddenly arrived in the city, arrayed and equipped in all of 

 their classic beauty, with shield and helmet, with tunic and 

 manteau, tinted and tasselled off exactly for the painter's 

 palette." Having an eye for nature rather than for the con- 

 ventionalities of civilization, he had long been of the opinion 

 that the wilderness of our country afforded models equal to 

 those from which the Grecian sculptors transferred inimitable 

 grace and beauty to marble ; and a short experience in the 

 woods among Indians confirmed him in this view. In the 

 midst of his success as a painter, he wrote in 1861, "I again 

 resolved to use my art, and so much of the labours of my 

 future life as might be required, in rescuing from oblivion the 

 looks and customs of the vanishing races of native man in 

 America, to which I plainly saw they were hastening before 

 the approach and certain progress of civilization." If he 

 should live to accomplish his design, he thought, " the re- 

 sult of my labours will doubtless be interesting to future 

 eyes, who will have little else left from which to judge of 

 the original inhabitants of this simple race of beings." So he 

 set out alone unaided and unadvised, to collect his portraits 



