"I Set Out Alone" - The Epic Quest of George Catlin
A MONA Moment |
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When he died, he carried on his cheek a scar from a play tomahawk wielded by a childhood friend when he was ten years 0 en deeper, as art historian James Thomas Flexner describes, w an sign on his heart."
Born in 1756, and raised in the Susquehannah river valley in New York, his childhood home was not far from the scene of one of the bloodiest Indian raids of the Revolutionary War era--the Wyoming Valley Massacre of 1778. Indeed, his own mother had been captured during the raid. A childhood regaled with stories an tales of this event fired his imagination, and interestingly, his sympathy. He wrote, "My young imagination closely traced the savage to his deep retreats, and gazed upon him with dreadful horror, till pity pleaded and imagination worked a charm."
At the urging of his father, Catlin studied law in Connecticut. He passed the bar examination and began law practice in Lucerne county, Pennsylvania. However, during this time, he wrote, "fortunately or unfortunately, another and a stronger passion was getting the advantage of me."
This passion was art.
In the first flowering of his strength of character and will. He abandoned his law practice and moved to Philadelphia to, as he later stated, "commence the art of painting." Self taught, with no formal training, he developed a naive but appealing technique, and established a successful business as a portrait artist.
But in 1824, something occurred which transformed his life. A delegation of plains Indians from the far west arrived in Philadelphia. Their visual impact on Catlin was profound. "They strutted about the city," he wrote, "equipped in all their classic beauty with shield and helmet, tunic and manteau--tinted and tasseled exactly for the painter's palette."
Here then, George Catlin's epic quest began: to complete a pictorial record of the plains Indians. He wrote, "I set out alone, unaided and unadvised, resolved, if my life should be spared, b the aid of my brush and my pen, to rescue from oblivion so much of their looks and customs as the industry and ardent enthusiasm of one lifetime could accomplish."
In our next MONA Moment, we will examine some of his extraordinary work in the collection of the Museum of Nebraska Art.
