NOTE: For some reason I can't add posts to jbswest, so these new posts will be found here under jbsmusings.
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| George Catlin: "The Author painting a chief at the base of the Rocky Mountains" frontispiece from Manners, Customs and Condition of the North American Indian (1841) |
As 19th century Euro-Americans set out to conquer America west of the Mississippi, visual artists moved with them and recorded the "wild" that remained (all the Native Americans who were there first were considered part of the wilderness). Among the earliest were Titian Peale and Samuel Seymour, who went with the exploration journeys of Major Stephen Long of 1819-20. Peale and Seymour recorded landscapes, flora and fauna and views of Native American tribes in their environments.
Visual artists who concentrated more on portraits of individual tribal members began their work in the 1830's were George Catlin and Karl Bodmer. Both were on a mission to record tribal notables in their native dress and environments; both were men of their times in their outlooks and opinions. Both believed that native cultures were doomed to be subsumed in the "conquering" of the west by superior European-Americans --a term that would be called "Manifest Destiny" in the next decade. To Europeans it was in part an outgrowth of Romanticism, a fascination with the tragic idea of vanishing "primitive" exotic cultures. An extension of this romantic ideal was the visual recording of the artist himself in the "unspoiled wilderness."
Both the American, Catlin (on his first trips west), and the Swiss Bodmer on his only journey to frontier America accompanying an expedition financed by Prince Maximilian of Wied zu Wied, covered the area of the northern Great Plains at about the same time, Catlin from 1832 through 1836, and Bodmer between 1833 and 1834. They are best remembered now for their portrayals of the Mandan and Hidatsa tribal members and their activities and ceremonies--which took on romantic tragic overtones in 1837, when they were virtually wiped out by smallpox, brought in by white colonizers.
Prince Maximilian, in the manner of his friend and mentor, Alexander von Humboldt, was an explorer and naturalist. In 1815-17, he had already been in Brazil accompanied by two German naturalists, collecting specimens and visiting and chronicling Amazonian tribes. In 1832, he embarked on his two-year expedition to North America. This time he brought along two associates, his valet and hunting companion, David Dreidoppel, and Karl Bodner, to make visual records of what they saw.
For Bodmer, then in his early twenties, this trip proved to be the adventure of his life. He was already a skilled painter and engraver. This New World journey was the only one he made. He returned to Germany, and subsequently, he would emigrate to France and join the Barbizon painters, with considerable success, though he had to resort to commercial illustration to make ends meet.
Catlin, self-taught, made a career of his portrayals of native Americans, subsequently including Central and South American tribes, and taking his artistic product on Barnum-like traveling shows, in both the United States and Europe. In Europe, he took advantage of touring Native American tribal dancers to augment his exhibitions, and when they weren't available, he dressed family members in Native American clothing and gear that he had acquired on his journeys. At a time when an artistic career had become an issue of free enterprise, both men capitalized on their North American paintings and sketches to enhance their reputations and more importantly, to earn themselves a living. For Catlin, it was part of his modus operandi; for the more reluctant Bodmer, eager to resume his painting career as a European landscape and wildlife artist, it was in obligation to his patron.
In an age of developing mass media, 81 of Bodmer's paintings were reproduced as aquatints in Europe in a two-volume account penned by the Prince called Maximilian, Prince of Weid's Travels in the Interior of North America (1841), first in German, and later in French and English. 500 of Catlin's sketches and paintings were gathered in a collection called the Indian Gallery, which he attempted to sell to the American government. When that didn't work, he took the Gallery on tour to London and later the European continent. Unfortunately, much of this collection was confiscated and stored to cover debts, so he recreated 300 works from his field sketches, naming it the Cartoon Collection. Catlin too took his work to the public via the print medium. In the same year that the Maximilian/Bodmer volume came out, his Manners, Customs and Condition of the North American Indian, also in two volumes with 300 of his works reproduced as engravings and the text written by himself was published in England.
Both of these works contain a print that was not among the Native American portraits: they are self-portraits of each artist "in action" on their painting journeys. The frontispiece of Catlin's book, captioned "The Author painting a chief at the base of the Rocky Mountains," shows him in the act of painting Mah-To-Toh-Pah (Four Bears), the second Mandan Chief, dressed in the same ceremonial outfit and in the same pose as the portrait that graced the Indian Gallery (the chief later gifted Catlin that shirt). Four Bears assumes the stance of a baroque European King--the famous Rigaud portrait of Louis XIV comes to mind--which is being echoed in his image on canvas. Surrounding them are tribesmen, with six of them reclining in the foreground, once more in a traditional Baroque manner. Behind them are two tipis, and some tall, cypress-like trees. Catlin, with his deerstalker cap and his pristine buckskin outfit, one foot braced on his equally pristine easel, delicately works on the image.
Art historians have been quick to point out that the Mandans lived in fixed lodges, not tipis, and others have been equally insistent that as a frontispiece for the many Native American tribes contained in the book, this was intentional, and for the average reader, tipis would have been just fine. The title, "The Author painting a Chief at the base of the Rocky Mountains," is equally a stretch: no mountains are shown.
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| George Catlin: "Catlin Painting Ma Toh To Pah," from the Cartoon Collection Courtesy National Gallery of Art Washington, DC; oil on card |
Catlin also produced a sketchier watercolor of the same scene with no tipis, but a generic Plains riverside setting, the easel constructed like a tipi shaped support of three tree branches, and the canvas casually flapping on a ruder support. He is surrounded by a similar crowd of tribespeople, but this time with more women and two small dogs replacing two of the foreground recliners, which echoes a written account by Catlin of making the same picture. The onlookers in this version are almost like cartoon figures, reflecting the same humor brought to many of Catlin's other sketches. This version is generally dated around 1860, when Catlin was reproducing his work for the Cartoon Gallery.
By 1846, the Mandans themselves were gone, virtually eliminated by the smallpox epidemic in 1837. Catlin himself was in London, exhibiting his Indian Gallery and still attempting to get it sold to the American government or the newly established Smithsonian Institution. This self-portrait is really Catlin promoting himself and his lifework, trying to make a living, and showing himself in action at his craft.
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| Karl Bodmer, "The Travelers Meeting With Minatarre Indians," Maximilian, Prince of Weid's Travels In The Interior of North America (1841) |
Bodmer's print shows the artist, but in a somewhat different context. The setting is outside Fort Clark, where the party wintered in 1833-34, and the three members of Maximilian's party are depicted meeting Minatarre (or Hidatsa) tribal members for the first time. To the left is a local guide and interpreter, usually identified as Toussaint Charbonneau, the same man whose late wife, Sacagawea, had been the indigenous interpreter for the Lewis and Clark expedition thirty years previously. Here he gestures towards the Europeans, Maximilian in a green coat and hat in the colored version of the print, with Bodmer beside him, wearing a top hat. Between and behind the two is Dreidoppel, wearing a cap. Art historians have identified one of the Hidatsa as Ahschüpsa Masihichsi, who was also portrayed individually by Bodmer.
Like Catlin's self-portrait, there are no field sketches for this composition, and the print is generally accepted as a representation made after the trip and inserted as an illustration made especially for Maximilian's publication.
Presumably Bodmer made it for the book, a project he would work on for Maximilian for a decade after the expedition's return and too expensive, in the end to offer the Archduke a profit. The three explorers, like Catlin are dressed in their best--more symbolically than likely--they had already been on the road for a year. Bodmer presents himself as one of a group expedition rather than an individual artist, and there's no indication of the role he played as its visual chronicler; rather he bristles with weapons and appears to hold a pipe. The focus is all on his boss, the Prince, the only one in green and immaculate white trousers in the colored version of the print.
Though in the present day, Bodmer is considered the more talented as a portrayer of vanishing tribal chiefs than his American counterpart, his real artistic interest lay in the landscapes and wildlife he depicted rather than his human subjects, a fascination he would retain in his later career.
Neither artist really considered their images as independent creative art in the Romantic sense; both were doing imagery for different purposes--both to document a region of America that would quickly disappear, but in Bodmer's case to chronicle both the land and the people who inhabited it, and Catlin to record the people who vanished within his own lifetime.
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There are numerous studies of both Catlin and Bodmer's images on the internet: here are three of the best:
For Catlin's Frontispiece, see https://humanitiesusa.wordpress.com/2011/11/10/george-catlin-catlin-painting-the-portrait-of-mah-to-toh-pa—mandan-c-1861-1869/
For Catlin's Cartoon Collection: https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.50492.html#overview Overview
For Bodmer, see https://maximilian-bodmer.org/about/maximilian-bodmer-expedition/
There are also two excellent monographs on these artists:
Catlin: George Gurney and Therese That Heyman (eds.) George Catlin and His Indian Gallery, Smithsonian American Art Museum, W.W. Norton & Company, third printing, 2008.
Bodmer: William H. Goetzmann, David C. Hunt, Marsha Gallagher and William J. Orr, Karl Bodmer's America, Joslyn Art Museum & University of Nebraska Press, 1984.
