THE CATLIN COLLECTION OF INDIAN PAINTINGS, 4 



!By Washington Matthews, M. D., LL. D., Major and Surgeon, U. S. Arm;/. 



The majority of my audience have, no doubt, been many times in 

 'this hall, either as attendants on the lectures which are delivered here, 

 tor as visitors to the Museum, and many times they have gazed on the 

 ;array of paintings which cover its walls. To what extent have they 

 ■observe*, these? What lessons have they learned from them ? What 

 .opinions have they formed, what criticisms have they made of them % 

 What do they know of their history or of the history of the wandering 

 .artist whose busy hand painted them ? These are questions to which 

 1 can frame only imperfect answers. I have asked such questions of 

 many \ ho have visited this Museum, and I am led to believe that not 

 imore than one in ten bestows an inquiring glance at this monument to 

 a life of laborious and enthusiastic devotion to a chosen subject; and 

 vastly fewer are those who inquire into the nature and scope of the 

 collection, or stop to discover the name and something of the person- 

 ality of the author. 



Ge< rge Catlin was, to use his own expression, a lion in his day. He 

 •enacted in Europe fifty years ago much the same role that " Buffalo Bill " 

 has played in our time, but in a more scholarly and less lucrative way. 

 He was the genial showman of the American Indian and the wild West. 

 He carried his collection — the very collection we see around us now — 

 to various European capitals. He exhibited live Indians, and he and 

 his proteges were received and entertained at the homes of English 

 nobility. They timed with Louis Phillippe and with the King and 

 Queen of Belgium. The following brief autobiography is taken from 

 his work entitled "Illustrations of the Manners, Customs, and Condi? 

 ;tion of the North American Indians." 



" I was born in Wyoming, in North America, some thirty or forty years since ( i. e. % 

 in 1796), of parents who entered that beautiful and famed valley soon after the close 

 of the revolutionary war, and the disastrous event of the "Indian massacre." 



" The early part of my life was whiled away, apparently somewhat in vain, with 

 hooks reluctantly held in oue hand and a rifle or fishing pole firmly and affection-, 

 ately grasped in the other, 



"At the urgent request of my father, wno was a practicing lawyer, I was prevailed 

 upon to abandon these favorite themes and also my occasional dabblings with the 



* Reprint of a lecture delivered in the lecture hail of the National Museum, Satur- 

 day, April 13, 1889. 



H. Mis. 129, pt. 2 38 593 



