George Catlin Biography Quotes 9 Report mistakes

Early Life
George Catlin was born on July 26, 1796, in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, along the Susquehanna River. Raised in a young nation expanding westward, he developed an early fascination with the natural world and with the Indigenous peoples whose homelands lay beyond the Appalachian frontier. He read law and was admitted to the bar, but the routines of legal practice never suited him. By the early 1820s he had abandoned the law for art, moving to Philadelphia to work as a portrait painter and to study from life and from museum collections. In 1828 he married Clara Bartlett Gregory, whose patience and practical support would help sustain his ambitions as his work grew increasingly demanding and peripatetic.

Choosing an Artistic Mission
Catlin's career turned decisively after he encountered delegations of Native American leaders visiting the eastern cities in the 1820s. He later described a resolve to record the looks, dress, rituals, and daily life of Indigenous nations before they were altered by encroaching settlement. He painted members of visiting delegations in Washington, D.C., and other cities, then set his sights on the West itself. His goal was to create a comprehensive "Indian Gallery" that would combine portraits, scenes, and objects into a record of cultures he believed Americans needed to see and remember.

Journeys on the Upper Missouri
In 1830 Catlin made St. Louis his base, where he found a crucial ally in William Clark, the famed explorer who was then Superintendent of Indian Affairs. With Clark's assistance, Catlin traveled up the Missouri River to trading posts and military outposts. During the 1832 season he worked at places such as Fort Union and Fort Clark, painting leaders and families among the Mandan, Hidatsa, Assiniboine, Crow, and Blackfeet, and sketching buffalo hunts, dances, and daily labors. Among the most compelling figures he painted was Mah-to-toh-pa (Four Bears) of the Mandan, portrayed with his honors, weapons, and scars. He also made the paired image of Wi-jun-jon (Pigeon's Egg Head), an Assiniboine man shown once in traditional dress and again after a journey east, a stark commentary on cultural collision. News of the smallpox epidemic that devastated Upper Missouri villages in 1837 reinforced Catlin's sense that his canvases captured a world at risk.

Southern Plains and Other Nations
Catlin's travels broadened in the mid-1830s. He joined official and semi-official expeditions that brought him among the Comanche, Kiowa, Wichita, and other Southern Plains peoples. Along the Mississippi Valley he painted leaders such as Keokuk of the Sauk and Meskwaki and Black Hawk, who had become widely known after the conflict that bore his name. In the Southeast he painted Osceola of the Seminole during the latter's captivity. Catlin's method combined rapid, on-site portraiture with careful annotation; he sought not only likeness but also the story embedded in clothing, ornament, and ceremony.

The Indian Gallery and Publications
By the late 1830s Catlin had assembled hundreds of portraits and scenes, together with clothing, weapons, musical instruments, and other objects. He toured the collection widely as "Catlin's Indian Gallery", hoping both to educate audiences and to secure a permanent public home for the work. Congress declined to purchase the collection despite his lobbying. To reach a broader public, he published Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs, and Condition of the North American Indians in 1841, a two-volume narrative drawn from his field journals. He followed with a folio of hand-colored lithographs, Catlin's North American Indian Portfolio, which helped cement his reputation as both artist and observer.

Exhibitions in London and Paris
Seeking patrons, Catlin took his Indian Gallery to London in 1840. He exhibited for years in venues that drew curious crowds, sometimes accompanied by visiting Ojibwe and Iowa families who performed dances and shared aspects of their traditions. The spectacle brought attention, sympathy, and controversy, as audiences debated the line between ethnography and entertainment. In the mid-1840s he exhibited in Paris, where commentators including Charles Baudelaire took notice of the immediacy and dignity of his portraits. Through these demanding years Clara Bartlett Gregory traveled with him and helped manage practical affairs; her death in Paris in 1845 marked a profound personal loss and a turning point in his fortunes.

Finances, Patrons, and Preservation
Despite steady publicity, Catlin's finances deteriorated. Burdened by debt in Britain, he eventually lost control of the Indian Gallery. In 1852 the Philadelphia industrialist Joseph Harrison Jr. purchased the collection, stored it carefully, and thus preserved it at a moment when it could easily have been dispersed or damaged. Catlin, suddenly separated from his life's work, set about recreating it from memory and notes, producing what he called his "Cartoon Collection", a second, largely monochrome suite that echoed the original paintings.

Further Travels and Writings
Catlin's curiosity extended beyond North America. In the 1850s he traveled in Central and South America, sketching landscapes and Indigenous communities and reflecting on the kinships and differences he observed. He continued to publish, including O-Kee-Pa: A Religious Ceremony and Other Customs of the Mandans (1867), a detailed account of a rite he had witnessed years before, and Last Rambles Among the Indians of the Rocky Mountains and the Andes (1868). In parallel he wrote idiosyncratic but earnest tracts on health and ventilation, among them The Breath of Life (1861) and Shut Your Mouth and Save Your Life (1862), extending his lifelong habit of close observation into new realms.

Smithsonian Years and Loss by Fire
Catlin loaned his reconstructed works to the Smithsonian Institution, hoping again for a public home. Tragedy intervened in 1865, when a fire at the Smithsonian destroyed many of the "Cartoon Collection" canvases on display. Nevertheless, the Smithsonian's Secretary, Joseph Henry, later offered Catlin studio and exhibition space, and in the early 1870s Catlin worked in Washington, painting, lecturing, and advising visitors with the same missionary zeal that had animated his first journeys.

Final Years and Legacy
George Catlin died on December 23, 1872, in Jersey City, New Jersey. After his death, the Harrison family transferred the long-stored Indian Gallery to public custody, and today the Smithsonian holds the largest surviving group of his original paintings and related objects. Catlin's legacy is complex and enduring. He sought to honor his sitters, men and women such as Four Bears, Keokuk, Black Hawk, Osceola, and Wi-jun-jon, by presenting them as individuals of presence and agency. At the same time, his rhetoric of a "vanishing race" and the theatrical framing of some exhibitions have drawn criticism from later scholars. Yet his field portraits and notes remain an irreplaceable record of persons, places, and practices altered by removal, war, disease, and settlement. Through the efforts of allies like William Clark, Joseph Harrison Jr., and Joseph Henry, and through the steadfast labor once shared with Clara Bartlett Gregory, Catlin's vision of a gallery that would place Native people at the center of the American story survived him. His canvases continue to ask viewers to reckon with both the artistry of his hand and the histories he strove to preserve.

Our collection contains 9 quotes who is written by George, under the main topics: Nature - Native American Sayings - Human Rights - Gratitude.