AMERICAN BUFFALO Palm Springs—George Catlin (1796–1872) was trained as a lawyer but after just a few years gave up his practice and moved to Philadelphia in 1823 to become 64 an artist. He studied under Rembrandt Peale and Thomas Sully, both highly acclaimed portrait painters, and was elected to the prestigious Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art. After witnessing a delegation of Native Americans in Washington, D.C., and the passage of the Indian Removal Act of 1832, Catlin resolved to use his art “in rescuing from oblivion the looks and customs of the vanishing races of native man in America.” He believed that painting Native Americans, portraying their traditions and practices, and recording the wilderness of American were “themes worthy of the lifetime of one man.” Catlin devised an ambitious plan to visit every tribe of the Indians in North America and to record the “Noble Savage,” unspoiled in his native land, with a goal to create faithful portraits of Indians and views of their villages and society. During the 1830s, Catlin made five trips to the “Far West,” becoming the first Western artist to record the Plains Indians in their own territory. His sketches and paintings are the first and most important record of the Indian cultures and lands west of the Mississippi River before Euro-American settlement. Catlin was also a prolific writer and in 1841 published his Letters and Notes, which have provided valuable detailed descriptions about his travels and his paintings. George Catlin’s American Buffalo, at the Palm Springs Art Museum through December 29, 2013, features forty paintings dating from 1832 to 1848. These were among the 420 canvases that once hung in the artist’s original “Indian Gallery,” which traveled from Pittsburgh to New York City; Boston; Philadelphia; Washington, D.C.; and, in 1845, to the Louvre in Paris. The present exhibition includes eleven full-length portraits of Plains Indians and twenty-nine paintings of his observation of buffalo and their integration into all aspects of Native American life, borrowed from the permanent collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Catlin’s full-length figures are remarkably detailed and relatively rare, since he more frequently painted portrait busts. The vast majority of his village and landscape scenes all date from one extended trip to the West in 1832–33. Although Catlin’s paintings had a major influence on artists and developments in American Indian portraiture, yet, during his lifetime he was criticized for his flatness of color and his hasty sketching technique. We see them differently today. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog by guest curator Adam Duncan Harris of the National Museum of Wildlife Art, Jackson Hole, Wyoming. George Catlin (1796–1872), Ee-áh-sá-pa, Black Rock, a Two Kettle Chief, 1832. Oil on canvas. Collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, gift of Mrs. Joseph Harrison, Jr. Photo courtesy of the Palm Springs Art Museum. George Catlin (1796–1872), Bull Dance, Mandan O-keepa Ceremony, 1832. Oil on canvas. Collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, gift of Mrs. Joseph Harrison, Jr. Photo courtesy of the Palm Springs Art Museum. George Catlin (1796–1872), Crow Lodge of Twenty-five Buffalo Skins, 1832-1833. Oil on canvas. Collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, gift of Mrs. Joseph Harrison, Jr. Photo courtesy of the Palm Springs Art Museum. George Catlin (1796–1872), Buffalo Hunt under the Wolf-skin Mask, 1832–1833. Oil on canvas. Collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, gift of Mrs. Joseph Harrison, Jr. Photo courtesy of the Palm Springs Art Museum.
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