A trail of tears leads to George Catlin’s Indian Gallery

Associated media

Clare Finn explores ‘George Catlin: American Indian Portraits’ and finds a painter who was himself an explorer

The work of the 19th-century artist, George Catlin (1796–1872) is little known in Britain. Yet he is the artist who has displayed the most paintings in the Louvre, a record unlikely ever to be broken! The display at the National Portrait Gallery is a real American treasure from Washington’s Smithsonian Institution, but it is also the record of genocide.

In 1830 President Andrew Jackson’s government signed the Indian Removal Act into law. This led to the ‘Trail of Tears’, as that year 4000 out of 13,000 Native Americans died on their way to the lands west of the Mississippi, in present day Oklahoma.  Tribes such as the Choctaw and Cherokee fought removal but by 1837 over 45,000 Indians were removed to make way for white settlers.

An opponent to this white encroachment, in tune with the times, Catlin felt the Native American way of life was dying and urgently wished to record it before it went. Between 1830 and 1838 he made five trips beyond the Mississippi, painting individual chiefs, braves, squaws, and children from more than 30 tribes from the northern plains.

He was the first painter to go west to record the Native Americans in situ: earlier depictions show them largely while on diplomatic missions to Washington. His concern for the Native American was certainly romantic, as by then, like Gauguin’s Tahitians, they were not untouched but had had contact with white trappers and traders for a considerable time.

With a background in law, and called to the bar, Catlin was not trained as an artist. At first he became a self-taught miniature painter before developing his style to larger formats. Aside from individual portraits, he painted landscapes and genre scenes; the Native Americans’ customs, modes of living, rituals and sports. Capturing its vastness, he was the first painter to record in colour the land of the Louisiana Purchase that the explorer William Clark (1770–1838) had surveyed in the early 1800s.

During Catlin’s western expeditions he concentrated on his sitters’ facial features, characteristic attitudes, hair, ear and neck ornaments, buying as much of their clothing as he could to finish the portraits later. This collection grew to hundreds of objects, which together with close to 600 portraits came to constitute his Indian Gallery: a combination of art gallery, early ethnographic museum and cabinet of curiosities.  From 1837 he toured the eastern states with the gallery, hoping to sell it to the government. The sale failed to materialize, not least because some of his sitters were Prisoners of War, and hence his paintings were images of the government’s opponents.

In 1939 Catlin set sail for Europe, displaying the gallery in England, France and Belgium. Seen in London by Queen Victoria, in Paris it was installed in the Louvre at the Emperor Louis-Philippe’s invitation. Catlin exhibited his portraits in the annual Paris Salon, where they were reviewed by the poet and art critic Charles Baudelaire. Gradually, however, Catlin changed from artist to entrepreneur, incorporating Indian ‘shows’ by troupes of Iowa and Ojibbwa into the gallery.

Debt and personal disaster led to Catlin’s bankruptcy and the loss of his Indian Gallery to the industrialist Joseph Harrison. Harrison’s widow would eventually donate it, much depleted, to the Smithsonian, thus fulfilling Catlin’s original wish, although by then he had been dead for seven years. In fact, this late accession meant it missed the 1865 Smithsonian fire in which many early Indian portraits burnt, which makes Catlin’s portraits especially valuable today.

The present exhibition brings less than five per cent of the original gallery back to London, after 170 years. With around 50 portraits, some of which are installed in a 19th-century hang, it gives a small idea of his original Indian Gallery. His style was at first somewhat naive but developed over time. The pictures show a proud, living people.  To be painted by a white man was, for the Native Americans, a mark of respect and Catlin depicts them in all the pomp and beauty of their battlefield regalia. It is important to remember that these are not costumes; they tell of an individual’s accomplishments. Face paint, applied by the sitters themselves, has meaning. Red is symbolic of sunrise and the promise of renewal; a handprint across a face indicates that the wearer had distinguished himself in hand-to-hand combat. But Catlin also observed and depicted the corruption that exposure to Anglo-American society caused to native ways.

Catlin was a prolific author and the exhibits here include books, drawings, and documents, as well as a northern Plains War Shirt. The beautifully illustrated catalogue includes essays and a chronology by Stephanie Pratt and Joan Carpenter Troccoli, telling Catlin’s and his gallery’s story, placing it in an historical and cultural context. The personal history and tribe for each of his sitters is given. The works show an aesthetic that must have terrified the early settlers.

This exhibition and publication reveal an artist that, whether we know of him or not, has influenced the depiction of the Native American in all our psyches.