George Catlin

Catlin trained as a lawyer in Pennsylvania and practised for a couple of years before selling his law books to buy paint. In 1830 he went west, and kept going back for most of the decade, working among more than forty tribal nations along the Missouri and the Plains.

He painted fast, often in a single sitting, and the speed shows. These are not polished studio pictures. They are records made by someone who understood he was looking at something that was about to be destroyed, and who said so in print, loudly and unfashionably, for the rest of his life.

The resulting Indian Gallery ran to more than five hundred works. He toured it through American cities and then across Europe, hoping the government would buy it. They did not. He went bankrupt, the collection was seized against debt, and it took until long after his death for the paintings to reach the Smithsonian.

As ethnography the work is invaluable. As painting it is uneven and occasionally extraordinary.