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George Catlin and the Old Frontier
Harold McCracken
George Catlin gave up a law practice to spend the 1830s traveling the American West, painting hundreds of portraits and scenes of Native peoples at a moment he rightly feared was passing. Harold McCracken's 1959 book is both a biography and a picture gallery of this self-appointed 'dean of Indian painters,' pairing a readable life story with dozens of full-color plates and more than a hundred black-and-white reproductions. McCracken, a Western-art authority, is admiring but not uncritical, and he concentrates on Catlin's crucial frontier years. The result is an inviting introduction to a figure whose work is now valued as much as ethnographic record as art. For anyone interested in the West before photography, or in how one obsessive man tried to preserve a world in paint, it's an absorbing place to start.
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The subject
George Catlin (1796–1872) abandoned law to document the Native nations of the Great Plains, producing his celebrated 'Indian Gallery' of more than five hundred works. Driven, self-promoting, and financially reckless, he toured the paintings in America and Europe and left an unmatched visual record of peoples on the eve of catastrophic change.
The book
Harold McCracken's George Catlin and the Old Frontier (1959) is subtitled a biography and picture gallery. It gathers 36 color and roughly 131 black-and-white reproductions and tells Catlin's story with particular attention to his formative years up to 1839, when he made the expeditions that defined him.
How it has aged
The prose is of its period and the framing occasionally romantic, but the scholarship is sound and the reproductions generous. Later writers have added nuance about Catlin's accuracy and his commercial motives, yet McCracken's account still serves as a solid, well-illustrated introduction.
For more context
Catlin's Indian Gallery is now largely held by the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and his work is read today as both art and irreplaceable ethnographic testimony.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Harold McCracken
- Publisher
- Bonanza
- Place of publication
- New York
- Year
- 1959
- ISBN
- None
- Format
- Hardcover
- Shelf
- Art
- Location
- Maine