George Catlin's Mandan Indians

George Catlin (1796-1872), Mandan Indians, 1871, oil on paper, 18 x 24-1/2 inches. Rockwell Foundation purchase. 78.23

Like many western artists, Catlin, who was among the early explorer artists, returned repeatedly to favorite subjects, recreating them in many media, including lithography, which allowed him to sell his work widely. His artistic output was prodigious, and remains among the most important "records" of early Native America. His "Indian Gallery" of paintings contained more than 600 portraits, landscapes, and genre scenes.

Like other artists, he believed that Native Americans were "rapidly passing away from the face of the earth." He eventually traveled throughout the West, and from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, creating the most comprehensive visual record in existence of a vanishing way of life among Native peoples. He published his research, along with his paintings and sketches, in the two-volume Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs and Conditions of the North American Indians.

Catlin tended to exaggerate features and details of his subjects. He painted landscapes unnatural greens for he considered the American West: "the great and almost boundless garden spot of the earth, over whose green enameled fields . . . Nature's proudest, noblest men have pranced on their wild horses."

• Explorer artists, such as Catlin, covered vast distances and saw many exotic things. Native Americans and their life ways.
• Catlin covered more of the western regions of North and South America than any other artist of his time.
• Catlin's interpretations of the people, places, and customs he encountered provided most Easterners and Europeans with their only views of the West, profoundly shaping ideas about what it was like. The idea of the "Vanishing Indian."

"I set myself down with the bigwhite man Chiefe [Mandan Chief Bigwhite (Sheheke)] and made a number of enquiries into the tradition of his nation...He told me his nation first came out of the ground...and saw Buffalow and every kind of animal also grapes, plumbs, c...and determined to go up and live upon earth, and great numbers...got upon earth, men womin and children."

--William Clark, Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, August 18, 1806