Catlin’s Indian Gallery
This review was originally written for the, sadly delayed, 'Alternative Art Review' (so the exhibition is, also sadly, now finished).
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One of the criticisms that could be levelled at the National Portrait Gallery is the preponderance of dead white men that fill its walls. It is striking, therefore, to turn towards the NPG’s smaller exhibition space and meet a brightly coloured and strikingly posed portrait of a Native American Indian. This welcomes you to George Catlin: American Indian Portraits, an exhibition which is as poised and colourful as its subjects. Catlin was remarkable for three aspects of his career: his self-education as a painter; his passionate mission to record Native American cultures before their destruction by expanding white settlement in the 1830s-40s; and his establishment in London of the ‘Indian Gallery.’ This exhibition marks the return of Catlin’s collection after 170 years.
The exhibition opens with Catlin’s portrait by William Fisk. Shown in the act of painting, with two of his Blackfoot collaborators, and a receding scene of teepees under a stormy sky, Catlin appears the self-assured explorer and artist. This is set against two portraits by Catlin of the Assiniboine warrior Wi-jún-jon, Pigeon's Egg Head (the curators include both the Native American and anglicised names), painted in 1831 and 1837-9, either side of Wi-jún-jon’s visit to Washington for treaty negotiations. The contrast is stark, showing the returning warrior posed in semi-European costume with a dandified air. He nicely shows Catlin’s tale of cultural degradation.
Every one of the portraits in this display is striking for its character and vibrancy. The curators have used one portrait of La-dóo-ke-a, Buffalo Bull to showcase Catlin’s practice in the field, focusing on the key features that brought out his sitters’ personalities. The head is therefore strongly modelled, the rest of the body roughly-sketched to be finished later. Yet, the portrait exudes a real sense of steely personality. As a whole Catlin’s portraits are striking in their comparative simplicity, posed against a background of sky or earth tones, ruddy or pearlescent by turns. Some are head and shoulders, some full length. All but the Fisk portrait of Catlin are in simple, black wooden frames. The uniformity helps to cohere the paintings as a collection, but I would have liked to know the meaning of the tantalising stencilled white numbers which adorn some of the frames.
In the1830s, Catlin added landscape and genre scenes to his repertoire. The exhibition includes some poignant images of wild landscapes in which tiny Native Americans enact hunts, or simply stand dwarfed by the surrounding vastness. Particularly striking are the paintings done by Catlin on his visit to a Mandan village, where he recorded the community re-enacting their origin story. In one painting of young men preparing for their initiation ordeal, Catlin’s lightly drawn, dark figures become reminiscent of Henry Moores’ air raid shelter sketches, equally monumental and vulnerable.
But the crowning glory of the exhibition, as for Catlin’s career, are the displays from his ‘Gallery of Native American Indians, Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly’ which opened on 29 January 1840, including lectures and live enactments. Entering this largest room in the exhibition, you are met by 26 portraits massed in a close-packed hang, representing a mere 5% of what the nineteenth-century visitor would have seen. I found that one portrait kept drawing me back. Theodore Burr Catlin (shown dressed as a Pawnee) was Catlin’s nephew and collaborator at the Egyptian Hall, who crashed society balls in Native American costume as a publicity stunt. His portrait shows a strong but humorous face above a roughly-sketched torso, a liminal figure, part European part Native American, the epitome both of Catlin’s painting style and of Catlin himself: a man between two worlds.
