The Catlin collection of Indian paintings / by Washington Matthews.

  • Washington Matthews
Date:
1892
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The Catlin collection of Indian paintings / by Washington Matthews. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    By Washington Matthews, M. D., LL. lb, Major and Surgeon, U. S. Army. The majority of my audience have, no doubt, been many times in this hall, either as attendants on the features which are delivered here, or as visitors to the Museum, and many times they have gazed on the array of paintings which cover its walls. To what extent have they observed these? What lessons have they learned from them? What •opinions have they formed, what criticisms have they made of them? What do they know of their history or of the history of the wandering artist whose busy hand painted them? These are questions to which I can frame only imperfect answers. I have asked such questions of many who have visited this Museum, and I am led to believe that not more than one in ten bestows an inquiring glance at this monument to a life of laborious and enthusiastic devotion to a chosen subject; and vastly fewer are those who inquire into the nature and scope of the collection, or stop to discover the name and something of the person- ality of the author. George Gatlin was, to use his own expression, a lion in his day. He enacted in Europe fifty years ago much the same role that “ Buffalo Bill ” has played in our time, but in a more scholarly and less lucrative way. He was the genial showman of the American Indian and the wild West. He carried his collection—the very collection we see around us now— to various European capitals. He exhibited live Indians, and he and his proteges were received and entertained at the homes of English nobility. They dined with Louis Phillippe and with the King and Queen of Belgium. The following brief autobiography is taken from his work entitled u Illustrations of the Manners, Customs, and Condi- tion of the North American Indians.” “ I was born in Wyoming, in North America,, some thirty or forty years since (i. e., in 179fi), of parents who entered that beautiful and famed valley soon after the close of the revolutionary war, and the disastrous event of the “Indian massacre.” “ The early part of my life was whiled away, apparently somewhat in vain, with books reluctantly held in one band and a rifle or fishing pole firmly and affection- ately grasped in tho other. “At tho urgent request of my father, who was a practicing lawyer, I was prevailed upon to abandon these l'i#orite themes and also my occasional dabblings with the * Reprint of a lecture delivered day, April lli, lggy. H. Mis. 1119, pt. 2 in the lecture hall of the National Museum, Satur- 693 38