Male

July 26, 1796

December 23, 1872

Wilkesbarre, PA

Luzerne County, PA
Philadelphia, PA
St. Louis, MO
England
Paris, France

Clara Gregory Catlin (1828)

George Catlin’s father had been born in Litchfield and trained as a lawyer at Litchfield Law School. His father later became a frontiersman and moved to Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania where George was born in 1796. George met trappers, hunters, explorers and settlers who stayed with his family on their travels west.

At age 17, Catlin was sent to Litchfield to study law which he disliked. George preferred to read about natural history, science, arts, Indians and to sketch fellow students and local scenery. After two years of study in Litchfield, George entered the Bar of Luzerne County in Pennsylvania. He practiced law for two years before he “resolved to convert my law library into paint pots and brushes.”

In 1823, Catlin studied art in Philadelphia and established himself ...as a popular portraitist in Washington, D.C. and Albany, NY. After meeting a tribal delegation of Indians from the western frontier, Catlin became eager to preserve a record of Native American customs and individuals. In 1830, George Catlin traveled to St. Louis where the explorer General William Clark helped him make contact with Native Peoples. Catlin traveled for years in North and South America, painting and sketching hundreds of portraits, scenes of villages, religious rituals, games, and Native Americans at work. He stimulated an interest in the cultures of Native Americans, and he publicly exhibited his work in Europe and the United States.

George Catlin appealed to the U.S. government to purchase his collection to create a Museum of the West in 1836. In 1847, he asked Congress to include his work as part of a bill they were considering to establish the Smithsonian Institution. However, the outbreak of the Mexican War caused Congress to deny the purchase. In 1852, Massachusetts Senator Daniel Webster supported the purchase of Catlin’s collection calling it “more important than all the other drawings and representations on the face of the earth.” The bill was defeated by one vote due to the lobbying of anti-Indian Southern Democrats. Catlin’s entire work and life was motivated by his desire to obtain recognition for the dignity and highly developed cultures of Native Peoples and his deep interest in natural history.

Instead of showing his paintings in the Smithsonian, then, Catlin created his "Indian Gallery," which he traveled with along the Eastern Seaboard and into Europe. This continued from 1837 to 1850. In 1852, he was forced to sell his personal collection of over 600 paintings, the entirety of the Indian Gallery, to pay his debts. Industrialist Joseph Harrison purchased the collection and had it stored. Catlin spent the remaining twenty yeras of his life trying to reconstruct his collection based on his sketches from the 1830s.

His work was never purchased by Congress, but it was privately donated to the Smithsonian Institution in 1871. Catlin also contributed to the knowledge of his era in 1844 by publishing Manners, Customs, and Conditions of the North American Indians, Catlin’s North American Indian Portfolio, My Life Among Indians (published in 1867), and Shut Your Mouth and Save Your Life (published in 1891).

Catlin died in 1872.
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“After having covered nearly every inch of the lawyers table with penknife, pen and ink, and pencil sketches of judges, jurors, and culprits, I very deliberately resolved to convert my law library into paint pots and brushes, and to pursue painting as my future, and apparently more agreeable profession.” -- George Catlin, 1885

"His more realistic approach [towards painting American Indians] grew out of his appreciation for a people who, he wrote, 'had been invaded, their morals corrupted, their lands wrested from them, their customs changed, and therefore lost to the world.'" -- Catlin quoted by Bruce Watson in the Smithsonian Magazine, George Catlin's Obsession, December, 2002.

1817

Lawyer; Arts

1817

Houghton, Josiah. "LLS Law Notebook 1817-1818." Litchfield Law School Collection, Series 1, Subseries 1, Litchfield Historical Society. Available online at https://archive.org/stream/35102011793091#page/n11/mode/2up.

Handwritten list by William Samuel Johnson, "Catalogue of the Students at Law in the school at Litchfield Conn. at & after Aug. 15th 1817..", Connecticut Historical Society, Johnson Family Papers, 1722-1863, Box - Johnson Papers.

Litchfield County Bar Association Records, 1819, Helga J. Ingraham Memorial Library, Litchfield Historical Society

"George Catlin Biography." George Catlin: The Complete Works, http://www.georgecatlin.org/biography.html

Patterson, Daniel, ed. Early American Nature Writers. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2008.

Smithsonian Institution Online. Catlin Virtual Exhibition. http://americanart.si.edu/catlin/highlights.html

Watson, Bruce. "Georgre Catlin's Obsession." Smithsonian Magazine, December 2002. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/george-catlins-obsession-72840046/?no-ist