HOLMES ANNIVERSARY VOLUME 



About 1834 he enlisted the services of Judge James Hall of Cincinnati, 

 a literary man of note in his day, and after much labor and many 

 delays, as well as an unsuccessful effort on the part of Hall to interest 

 George Catlin in the enterprise, the first of the three folio volumes of 

 McKenney and Hall's History of the Indian Tribes of North America 

 appeared, with the imprint of Key and Biddle, of Philadelphia, in 1836, 

 a year after the publication of the miserable Aboriginal Port- Folio 

 by Lewis. This elaborate and expensive work (volume 11 of which 

 was published in 1838 and volume III in 1844) has an important bear- 

 ing on the Indian Gallery, as in it are preserved the reproductions of 

 one hundred and twenty paintings, nearly all portraits, and all but 

 very few engraved from copies of the pictures in the Government 

 collection. These copies, in oil, were made by Henry Inman, who 

 commenced the task probably in 1832, having removed from New 

 York to Philadelphia, where he established a studio for the purpose; 

 but how the original paintings were sent from Washington to Phila- 

 delphia we are not informed, nor is there any evidence that Inman 

 lived in Washington for the purpose of making the copies. In 1836, 

 one hundred and three of the engravings, together with the Inman 

 copies of the portraits, were exhibited at the Masonic Hall in Phila- 

 delphia, where they attracted great attention. The Inman copies sub- 

 sequently came into the possession of a Boston family in partial pay- 

 ment of a debt contracted by the publishers of McKenney and Hall's 

 work for printing paper, and subsequently were presented to the Pea- 

 body Museum at Cambridge, where they are now preserved. 



We have seen that the final additions to the Indian Gallery were 

 made in 1837. In 1841 the collection was deposited in the museum 

 of the National Institute in the Patent Office building, where they 

 remained until 1858, when they were transferred to the Smithsonian 

 Institution, four years before the expiration of the National Institute's 

 charter. 



A few years earlier, namely, in 1846, an effort was made to purchase 

 the collection of Indian pictures painted by George Catlin, but this 

 was not done, and in 1852 a part of them passed into the possession 

 of Joseph Harrison, Jr, of Philadelphia, and in 1879 were presented by 

 his widow to the National Museum. 



An important addition to the National collection of Indian pic- 

 tures was made in 1852 by the deposit of one hundred and fifty-one 

 canvases painted by J. M. Stanley among forty-three tribes during 

 the previous ten years. As in the case of the Catlin collection, an 

 effort was made to obtain an appropriation by Congress for the pur- 

 chase of the Stanley paintings, but appeals were in vain. The collec- 



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