Catlin's Indian gallery. (Current and Coming).

In 1827 George Catlin, a lawyer by training, was living in New York City and pursuing a career as a portrait painter. Visiting Philadelphia the following year he saw a delegation of American Indians from the western United States and in them he saw a subject that would grant him, as he put it, "a whole life-lime of enthusiasm." He spent the rest of his life painting many tribes of American Indians in order to form what he called an Indian Gallery This fascinating story and the survival of most of the hundreds of portraits that formed Catlin's first Indian Gallery are on view in a traveling exhibition, George Catlin and His Indian Gallery, organized by the Smithsonian American Art Museum and displayed at the Renwick Gallery in Washington, D. C., until January 19, 2003. The exhibition is comprised of more than four hundred objects--mostly paintings--but also American Indian objects once owned by the artist.

Catlin moved to Saint Louis in 1830 and traveled up the Mississippi River to Fort Crawford with General William Clark, who taught him much about the territory and its inhabitants. Two years later Catlin embarked on an eighteen-hundred-mile journey up the Missouri River into the Great Plains and in three months completed more than one hundred paintings: portraits of eighteen tribes including Pawnee, Omaha, Ponca, Cheyenne, Teton Sioux, Assiniboine, Blackfeet, Crow, and river tribes such as the Mandan; thirty-six scenes of Indians engaged in everyday pursuits; twenty-five landscapes depicting what he called "soul-melting scenery"; and eight hunting scenes. In 1834 he made a second trip, this time to the Arkansas Territory in the southwestern plains, where he painted Comanche, Cherokee, Creek, Osage, Kiowa, and Wichita, but his output was less than forty works. The next year he ...