Catlin, George | A fine copy of the deluxe issue George Catlin’s magnum opus, with superb original coloring

Catlin, George

Catlin's North American Indian Portfolio. Hunting Scenes and Amusements of the Rocky Mountains and Prairies of America. From Drawings and Notes of the Author, made during Eight Years' Travel amongst Forty-Eight of the Wildest and Most Remote Tribes of Savages in North America. London: Geo. Catlin, Egyptian Hall [but Henry Bohn] (C. & J. Adlard, printers of text), 1844 [or 1845]

25 handcolored lithographed plates (448 x 330 mm, or the reverse) after Catlin by Catlin and McGahey, lithographed by Day and Haghe, plates printed on heavy stock before letters, heightened with gum arabic and mounted on card (598 x 473 mm) within ink-ruled frames, plates numbered lower right in a contemporary hand, letterpress title-page and 9 leaves of text (576 x 430 mm) within plain yellow wrappers with maroon cloth spine, as issued; gutta-percha of text binding preished and leaves loose, a few marginal chips and tears to wrappers, very faint spotting to the background of plate 1, small blemish on plate 4, card mounts of first and last two plates with some marginal browning. Plates and text loose as issued in original half maroon morocco portfolio over beige moiré cloth, original large morocco label on front cover; a bit rubbed and faded.

First edition, third (first Bohn) issue, first issue with the plates handcolored and mounted on card. This is the second handcolored issue, following a few copies published on full sheets of paper, unmounted, and published by Catlin himself. Catlin initially planned to publish other thematic portfolios of reproductions of paintings from his Indian Gallery—religious rites, dances, and costumes, for example—but the set of Hunting Scenes and Amusements (the amusements here include dances, lacrosse, and a bow-and-arrow competition) was the only one he issued. The publication of the Portfolio overextended the artist's resources, and its publication and distribution were taken over by Henry Bohn.

Catlin frequently recalled (without ever quite specifying) the event that inspired his life’s mission. At some point during his artistic residence in Philadelphia as a miniaturist and portrait painter, he observed “a delegation of some ten or fifteen noble and dignified-looking Indians, from the wilds of the ‘Far West,’ suddenly arrived in the city, arrayed and equipped in all their classic beauty ... exactly for the painter's palette! In silent and stoic dignity, these lords of the forest strutted about the city for a few days, wrapped in their pictured robes, with their brows plumed with the quills of the war-eagle, attracting the gaze and admiration of all who beheld them” (Letters and Notes, 1:2). After their brief sojourn in Philadelphia, the Indians—probably a party of Pawnee and Oto that were led by Indian agent Benjamin O'Fallon on a tour of the major cities of the East during the winter of 1821–22—continued eastward to Washington, D.C., where they would have concluded treaties with the Office of Indian Affairs and, probably, been entertained by the President Monroe.

Catlin claimed that it was his sense of loss at the departure of the Indian delegation from the City of Brotherly Love that motivated his decision to make the American Indian peoples the focus of his art: “Black and blue cloth and civilization are destined, not only to veil, but to obliterate the grace and beauty of Nature. Man, in the simplicity and loftiness of his nature, unrestrained and unfettered by the disguises of art, is surely the most beautiful model for the painter,—and the country from which he hails is unquestionably the best study or school of the arts in the world: such I am sure, from the models I have seen, is the wilderness of North America. And the history and customs of such a people, preserved by pictorial illustrations, are themes worthy the life-time of one man, and nothing short of the loss of my life, shall prevent me from visiting their country, and of becoming their historian” (Letters and Notes, 1:2). Catlin repeated this story of the awakening of his muse virtually verbatim in the preface to his published masterwork offered here, Catlin’s North American Indian Portfolio.

Catlin was not alone in recognizing the importance of making a pictorial record of the North American Indian, but his great innovation was in venturing to the homelands of his sitters, instead of meeting and painting them in the foreign environs of the nation’s capital or other white settlements. The studio portraits made by Charles Bird King on behalf of the War Department (later reproduced as lithographs in Thomas McKenney and James Hall’s History of the Indian Tribes of North America, 1833–44) may have had a technical superiority to Catlin's paintings, but they were depictions of visiting diplomats. King's work simply cannot compete artistically or ethnographically with the vibrant likenesses that Catlin captured by resolving “to visit every tribe of Indians on the Continent ... for the purpose of procuring portraits of distinguished Indians, of both sexes in each tribe, painted in their native costume; accompanied with pictures of their villages, domestic habits, games, mysteries, religious ceremonies, etc.” (Letters and Notes, 1:16). Many of Catlin’s best known images are preserved in the present extraordinarily well colored copy of his Portfolio.

REFERENCES:

Wagner-Camp 105a:1; Reese, “The Production of Catlin's North American Indian Portfolio, 1844–1876” I:3; Reese, Best of the West 81; Field 258; Howes C243; McCracken 10; Sabin 11453; Abbey, Travel 653; Schwerdt 1:100

PROVENANCE:

Sotheby’s London, 24 June 1988, lot 350 (“The Property of a European Nobleman”) — A private American collection, since the 1988 auction