It features the fearless pioneer dressed for the prairie in beige buckskins, posing with his palette and brush in front of a large tepee. The show actually begins with an amusing portrait of him, painted in England in 1849 by William Fisk.
The Fates chucked him in at the deep end and he swam: the unlikely hero of a riveting tale. Catlin may never have been the most fluent or trained-up of artists, his figures are wonky and his compositions skewwhiff, but the art he produced was authentically unusual and brave. This is portraiture as record and as indictment.Ī selection of Catlin’s hugely influential Indian faces - we’re looking here at the invention of the bad guys in the fable of the Wild West - has arrived at the National Portrait Gallery in a show that had me recurrently thanking the rain gods for seeking him out. They are treasured because nobody else left behind a record as evocative as this, and because the events surrounding the fate of the Native American Indian were to leave such a deep and immovable stain on American history. His portraits of Indian warriors and chiefs, painted in the 1830s and 1840s, turned out to be a witness account of a disappearing America and are now among the most prized possessions of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, cultural guardian of the American soul. For reasons known only to those Dennis the Menaces of destiny, the Fates, Catlin was catapulted into the story of American art at a particularly significant moment. You can be entirely untalented, have wrists of wood and fingers of lead, but if you happen to be around when art really needs you, then even your crummiest daubs will have a currency. You can be immensely talented, immensely passionate, your imagination can bulge like a pufferfish with big ideas, but if you are over there when you should be over here, then none of it will matter.
If I had to choose one quality that distinguishes the important artists from their opposites, it would be this: being around at the right time.
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